Who thinks science doesn't know everything?

July 27, 2006 8:47 PM

I am interested in reading books that contain philosophical / intellectual critiques of science or scientism. I'm particularly interested in people whose critiques are based on exploring or defining the limits of science. I'm not at all interested in partisan / political critiques of science (i.e. George Bush - please skip this question). Can anyone recommend any books?

I would also be interested in authors whose critiques are based on science going to far in terms of means (i.e. cruel animal research) or science that proceeds while ignoring possible long term negative consequences (i.e. genetically engineered crops).

posted by extrabox to Science & Nature (35 answers total)

Karl Popper is one of the leading minds of the 20th C. on the philosophy of science, on what the act of doing science means in terms of indirectly going after Truth.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:53 PM on July 27, 2006

Paul Feyerabend's Against Method is a classic critique of the Popperian view of science.

You might not agree with Feyerabend but his writing style is fantastic, and he knows his shit inside out.
posted by unSane at 8:56 PM on July 27, 2006 [1 favorite]

PS Feyerabend's SCIENCE IN A FREE SOCIETY is also riveting.
posted by unSane at 8:58 PM on July 27, 2006

I'll second Feyerabend. You can find in an in-depth review of his Farewell to Reason at Chris Crawford's blog.
posted by Iridic at 9:05 PM on July 27, 2006

Wait--Chris Crawford? Good lord, no, I mean Chris Bateman.

Bateman is, among many other things, a relativist who often critiques the monolithic position of science, rational materialism, and empiricism in our culture. He posts on a lot of diverse topics, but something in the vein of what you're looking for might be found here.
posted by Iridic at 9:12 PM on July 27, 2006

How about Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway?
posted by billtron at 9:16 PM on July 27, 2006

John Sundman and his friends at Wetmachine have their doubts about modern science, and have written some interesting novels and non-fiction about the problems scientific progress creates for society.

Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems has some widely quoted views on the subject you might not expect a technologist to hold.
posted by paulsc at 9:53 PM on July 27, 2006

I second billtron's recommendations. Look at this to start:

Latour, Bruno / Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society.
posted by umbú at 9:55 PM on July 27, 2006

Check out Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's attempt to reconcile rational and irrational thought. Maybe it doesn't have quite the pedigree of the above mentioned writings, but it's a personal favorite and the entire text is available online for free.
posted by Clay201 at 10:45 PM on July 27, 2006 [1 favorite]

I can strongly recommend Tower of Babel by Robert Pennock. It specifically addresses intelligent design, but I found it to be a great, easy to digest presentation of some of the philosophical issues in science.

Actually, I read a lot of other things by Pennock, especially in a book he edited about intelligent design, and he was always interesting, intelligent, and accessible.
posted by diocletian at 11:07 PM on July 27, 2006

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn is a very interesting look at how science actually works, as opposed to the views held by scientists and the public at large. He's somewhat of a predecessor to Feyerabend. The book is almost good enough to excuse the fact that Kuhn introduced the phase "paradigm shift"
posted by JZig at 12:00 AM on July 28, 2006

Ten years ago John Horgan published a book called The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, which title somewhat overstates the case he tries to make in the book. Here he summarizes his argument at edge.org. His end notes point toward a lot of work with similar concerns and anxieties, like Sir Peter Medawar's The Limits of Science (from 1984). Medawar is especially interesting, since he was a scientist, while Horgan is a science journalist, a different animal.

Edge.org is a good place to find eminent living scientists disagreeing with each other about what is fundamental in their fields. Here's their about page. I find scientists' disagreements to be among the most encouraging processes in the world, as they remind me how far from a monolithic entity science is in practice, how human and present it all is. It's as if Wikipedia really mattered; heck, sometimes I think Wikipedia does really matter. Sometimes I think it's a mild science on its own.

Some other writers who touch on science's limits include Peter Singer (on the bioethics questions you talk about, he's the go-to guy) and George Steiner (more philosophical and literary than hard-science, but unwilling to turn away from the power and human quality science represents). Steiner can go on a bit and can feel too heady for me, but he's got a critique about the humanities as a discipline and about liberal arts and how they fail to match the grandeur science has acquired in its rise over the past few centuries, which I find compelling and hard to argue with.

I'd also recommend Cosma Shalizi as a way to get a sense of what counts, what's important. I use him as a filter and as a way to measure my interests. "Would Cosma read this?"

Here's Cosma's review of In Bluebeard's Castle by George Steiner.
posted by cgc373 at 12:05 AM on July 28, 2006

You might want to look at Edmund Husserl's 'The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.' This multi-faceted, seminal work considers the limits of science from the perspective of the sorts of truth-claims that both 'harder' sciences, like physics or chemistry, and 'softer' sciences, like psychology or sociology, are able to make. Also under question is science's (in)ability to prioritize its aims, that is, to ascribe greater or lesser value to what it would research and explain. Especially this last issue is also picked up in Martin Heidegger's 'The Question Concerning Technology.'

In a related though more historical vein, you might want to check out Alexandre Koyré's 'From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe,' which deals with the transition from the Medieval understanding and approach to science to the meaning and mandate of science that is now predominant.
posted by rudster at 12:23 AM on July 28, 2006

I am interested in reading books that contain philosophical / intellectual critiques of science or scientism.

Does anybody other than nutjobs (e.g. Creationists, PostModernists) actually use the term scientism?
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 1:45 AM on July 28, 2006

+1 for Kuhn. His book was and is very important. I doubt much of the other discourse on this subject would even make sense to someone who didn't have at least a passing familiarity with Kuhn. Rightly or wrongly, it was probably one of the top 5 most important books of the 20th C or at least of the last half of the 20th C.

Beyond that I would reach backwards towards Descartes' Discourse on Method. Find a good annotated version that will direct your reading a bit, but in it you'll find pretty much the birth of the distinction between science and other studies such as philosophy.

While not critiques, per se, both Kuhn and Descartes are among a large canon that is a prerequisite for understanding this stuff in any depth at all.
posted by mikel at 4:58 AM on July 28, 2006

Your headline question is a little loaded in my view, as I don't remember anyone telling me that science knows everything. Surely science is based more on not knowing -- hence the rigourous testing and experiments to determine what can be verified at any point in time as a scientific truth, until such a truth can be disproved by further testing/experiments.

On the other hand, there are areas of the field that explore concepts that cannot currently be proven or disproven -- such as in quantum physics, string theory and the like -- that take a much more philosophical approach. It shows that science hasn't moved too far from its origins as a rational discipline under the umbrella of philisophy, and that scientists haven't lost their imaginations. I'd suggest any of the philosophical readings already noted here for a broader understanding.

And another note: the thread has been tagged with 'luddite' but I don't see the relevance. 'Luddite' doesn't mean 'anti-science'; it's a specific term derived from the reaction of skilled workers to labour-saving (and therefore job eliminating) technology developed during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Sorry for being a pedant, but if a term is being misused...
posted by macdara at 5:01 AM on July 28, 2006

Richard Rorty has quite a lot to say on the subject. You might check out his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. I, especially the essays "Solidarity and Objectivity?" "Science as Solidarity," and "Texts and Lumps."
posted by wheat at 5:17 AM on July 28, 2006

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a lot about the histor of science, and I believe about the limits of science as well, in Natural History magazine. Compilations of his articles can be found in his many books.

I believe Martin Gardiner and Douglas Hoffstadter may also be good resources.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:51 AM on July 28, 2006

History.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:51 AM on July 28, 2006

Scientism? I wasn't aware science was an "ism".
posted by Thorzdad at 6:21 AM on July 28, 2006

In my mind there is only one thinker who has the issue of science and its limits dead on the money--William James. It is a recurring theme in his work so you could start just about anywhere.

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/j#a325

has a bunch of his stuff online. His textbook on Psychology written around 1900 is amazingly up to date.
posted by bukvich at 7:07 AM on July 28, 2006

I second the suggestion for Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a very insightful essay on how science works in the sense of discussing what drives scientists to study what they study.
posted by bluesky43 at 7:23 AM on July 28, 2006

A few books by John McPhee come to mind. Particularly the Curve of Binding Energy
posted by iurodivii at 7:29 AM on July 28, 2006

In response to Thorzdad, scientism, as I understand the term, is used to describe things written with the veneer of science, science-like terms, etc. To me, scientism brings up, for example, 19th century racist theories justified with scientific language (skull-measuring, eugenics and the like). I can't speak for extrabox, but it doesn't seem that he was stating flat-out that science is an "ism."
posted by umbú at 8:13 AM on July 28, 2006

More recently, John Dupré wrote Human Nature and the Limits of Science and The Unity of Science. I'm not a fan, but his books are worth reading to see what is wrong with them.

You might also want to look at the Mary the Color Scientist thought experiment.
posted by painquale at 8:41 AM on July 28, 2006

The Wikipedia article on scientism puts out about nine different and often clashing definitions. Let's face it: "Scientism" is a crappy term, inconsistent and fuzzy. And what would you call someone who agrees with or espouses scientism? You sure as hell can't call them a scientist. A scientismist?

Anyway, in this context, the most appropriate and useful definition would seem to be:

"A form of dogma: 'In essence, scientism sees science as the absolute and only justifiable access to the truth.'

The essential scientismist, then, would probably be Richard Dawkins.
posted by Iridic at 8:58 AM on July 28, 2006

I found Thomas Gieryn's sociological study Cultural Boundaries of Science thought-provoking.
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 9:02 AM on July 28, 2006

More a critique of engineering and top-down planning, but still good: Seeing Like A State.

Critique of pesticides wrapped up with critique of 1950s-style science: Our Children's Toxic Legacy.

Two from the blow-my-mind category (that is, they blow my mind when I manage to actually understand them):

Some good critiques of science came out of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Sorry, can't remember a few good key essays. It's much broader than what you're asking for, but they do critique positivism, the mechanistic worldview, etc. They say it takes things previously thought to be alive and now thinks of them as automatons, and they say it does bad things to the human spirit to live in a world like that (they also blame this on capitalism).

The phenomenologists ^ suggest a different way to see things. (Someone mentioned Husserl and Heidegger already -- also Merleau Ponty.) My super-basic understanding is that they think you should just be in your own experience and not attempt to separate yourself from something to describe it from a detached third person perspective.
posted by beatrice at 10:18 AM on July 28, 2006

Saving the Appearences by Owen Barfield.
posted by alms at 10:45 AM on July 28, 2006

Your headline question is a little loaded in my view, as I don't remember anyone telling me that science knows everything.

Not to mention that it's a serious category mistake -- only people can know things. The more appropriately phrased question (which also seems less loaded) is "who thinks that there is something humans following the scientific method can't know (or discover), given sufficient time and resources."
posted by advil at 12:10 PM on July 28, 2006

There has been some analysis of science from feminist theory (e.g., Sandra Harding), which, the last time I checked (sorry, my graduate studies were over 10 years ago and I haven't really kept up with the field), were mainly influenced by postmodernist epistemology (conditioned knowledge and all that). IMHO a lot of the authors don't really know that much about the philosophy of science or how science is actually carried out, and it devolves into sort of a "white males don't know everything" critique, which is not academically rigorous. On the other hand, Donna Haraway, previously mentioned, also comes from a feminist background but knows a heck of a lot about actual science, and has some quite thought-provoking ideas.

I'm not ragging on feminism as a whole here. I studied feminist theory quite extensively at an academic level and was quite committed to it. It's just that since I left academia, my fascination with science has only increased and I've become much more critical of academic theory's capacity to create its own echo chamber.
posted by matildaben at 12:26 PM on July 28, 2006

Here are some books that tackle the subject from the viewpoint of epistemology / philosophy of language:

As far as I understand it, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason tries to delimit the empirical knowledge we can achieve from the theoretical knowledge we can achieve from the things we can't know at all.

Also, there's Wittgenstein's famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus where he tries to set forth that (in a nutshell) only the propositions of science can be true at all, while all other propositions ("God exists", "Being in love is great") are meaningless. This could be taken as a critique of everything but science, which might prove an interesting contrast. This is the sense also in which his famous quote "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" should be understood.
posted by Herr Fahrstuhl at 1:40 PM on July 28, 2006

Wittgenstein is all about thinking through the limits of reason. I don't think he takes on science per se (though I've no doubt he would pick a fight with many cosmologists and quantum physicists if he were still around), but he does make scathing remarks about mathematicians such as Cantor. Check out "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics" and maybe also "On Certainty". These are much easier to read, BTW, than the Tractatus.
posted by treepour at 4:59 PM on July 28, 2006

Response by poster: I'm truly grateful for the wealth of thoughtful and diverse responses to my question. Your answers have given me a wonderful booklist to explore.

I came to ask this question from reading Ray Monk's fascinating biography of Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius which I highly recommend. In this biography Monk explores some of Wittgenstein's feeling that there was something of a trap to mankind's seemingly insatiable desire for scientific knowledge.

In terms of this word "scientism" I think I did come across it in a book of "postmodern" essays. I feel no need to come to the defense of this word, and was amused by the criticisms of it.

I do think, though, that "luddite" tag is fair for the books I am seeking, and that the criticism of the tag ignores common usage of the word.

I agree that my headline was careless.

Thanks one and all for the interesting responses!
posted by extrabox at 8:37 PM on July 28, 2006

Feyerabend's work is pretty much predicated on Wittgenstein so I'd start there.
posted by unSane at 1:33 PM on July 31, 2006