Who thinks science doesn know everything?
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.
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 scienc
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 d
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
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 on
