The rise and fall of the historian of British India -- A classical education -- History, philosophy, and history -- Induction and deduction -- Rational persuasion -- Good government.

This edited book explores the relationship between political expertise, which is defined as scientific statesmanship or governance, and political leadership throughout the history of ideas. An outstanding group of experts study and analyze the ideas of significant philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Burke, Comte, and Weber, among others. The contributors aim to interpret these thinkers' approaches to scientific statesmanship, deepening our understanding of the idea itself and decoding its theoretical complexities.

This book examines these questions not in the abstract but shows their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies ...

Defending the role that science must play in democratic society--science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world. In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy. The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart (...) of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge." While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny. Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship. (shrink)

Since at least the mid-2000s, political commentators, environmental advocates, and scientists have raised concerns about an “anti-science” approach to environmental policymaking in conservative governments in the US and Canada. This paper explores and resolves a paradox surrounding at least some uses of the “anti-science” epithet. I examine two cases of such “anti-science” environmental policy, both of which involve appeals to epistemic values that are widely endorsed by both scientists and philosophers of science. It (...) seems paradoxical to call an appeal to epistemic values “anti-science.” I develop an analysis that, I argue, can resolve this paradox. This analysis is a version of the “aims approach” to science and values, drawing on ideas from axiology and virtue ethics. I characterize the paradox in terms of conflicts or tensions between epistemic and pragmatic aims, and argue that there is a key asymmetry between them: epistemic aims are valuable, in part, because they are useful for pursuing pragmatic aims. Thus, when epistemic and pragmatic aims conflict, epistemic aims need to be reconceptualized in order to reconcile them to pragmatic aims. When this is done, in the “anti-science” cases, the epistemic values are scientific vices rather than virtues. Thus the “anti-science” epithet is apt. (shrink)

There has never been a time in history that we have been bombarded with so much information in the media and on the internet, especially information that may inhibit thoughtful reflection. In conte...

Paul Thompson’s From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone is a wonderful book, indeed accessible to a wide audience—to “everyone”—informative, provocative, wide-ranging, and infused by the author’s engaging, knowledgeable, and fair voice. After summarizing what I take to be a few of the appealing general features of the book I will attempt to articulate a genuine puzzle that the book raises for me. The puzzle derives primarily from my personal response to reading chapter 5, “Livestock Welfare and the Ethics (...) of Producing Meat,” and from working through what are, for me, the two most intriguing chapters in the book: chapter 7, “Green Revolution Food Production and Its Discontents,” and the final chapter, “Once More, This Time with Feeling: Ethics, Risk, and the Future of Food.” The puzzle concerns a cluster of issues: the limits of liberal tolerance, the suspicion of (any or all) authority, the risks of ignoring science, and what I will call, inspired by Linda Zagzebski, a desire for epistemic self-respect. The puzzle, I must insist, is a genuine puzzle for me and is not a criticism of Thompson’s book. Indeed, the book has helped me to become clear about the components of the puzzle. (shrink)

Naturalism is still facing a strong opposition in the philosophy of social science from influential scholars who argue that philosophical analysis must be autonomous from scientific investigation. The opposition exploits philosophers’ traditional diffidence toward social science and fuels the ambition to provide new foundations for social research. A classic anti-naturalist strategy is to identify a feature of social reality that prevents scientific explanation and prediction. An all-time favorite is the dependence of social phenomena on human representation. This (...) article examines two prominent versions of the dependence thesis and concludes that they both fail. Contemporary social science is capable of accounting for the causal dependence of social reality on representation, and there is no reason to believe that social entities are ontologically dependent on the collective acceptance of a constitutive rule. (shrink)

In Ancient Greece, when philosophy began, it included all the theoretical knowledge. But later, in the time of Aristotle, specialized sciences started to emerge and the scope of philosophy grew smaller and smaller. The question is what to do when philosophy has lost its competence to deal with any relevant topic. The paper discusses three possible views of the relation between philosophy and science: anti-scientism, conceptual analysis and naturalism. All these approaches deal with various disadvantages. For anti-scientism (...) it is mainly the inability to explain the unprecedented success of modern science. Proponents of conceptual analysis are confronted with Quine’s attack on analytic statements and its consequences for a priori truths. Finally, naturalistic philosophers might be threatened by hegemony of science and its universal application of hypothetico-deductive method. The worst scenario for naturalistic philosophers is not as bad as some worry. Philosophers can solve their traditional problems using the knowledge of well-established special sciences, even though they might play the role of high-end science journalists. (shrink)

This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the use or non-use of expert-based information in policy-making. Special attention is paid to the Narrative Policy Framework introduced by Jones & McBeth in 2010. This theory of the policy process adopts a quantitative, structuralist and positivist approach to the study of policy narratives. The Narrative Policy Framework is useful for the analysis of the use of expert-based information to resolve so-called wicked problems, which are characterized by intense (...) value-based conflict between policy coalitions. The methodological approach of the Narrative Policy Framework is illustrated using the policy issue of mandatory vaccination. (shrink)

This article argues that while Charles Taylor's commitment to anti-naturalism in the human sciences has been constant, the grounds for that commitment have changed significantly over time. What began as his critique of naturalism on empirical grounds was refashioned into a commitment on moral grounds, or more accurately, on the basis of there being no distinctly separable grounds between the scientific and the moral. Taylor shifted his descriptive phenomenological defence of anti-naturalism to cast a much broader critique against (...) an empiricist epistemology he saw underpinning all naturalist approaches in the human sciences. He calls attention to the speciousness of the ontological commitments of an empiricist epistemological outlook that tries to separate human agency from moral ontology, which he argues is itself a moral position. Whether we want to go along with Taylor's specific moral outlook or not, what his arguments about the human sciences teach us is twofold: (1) Taylor's descriptive phenomenology shows how the scientific language of the natural sciences often cannot explain human phenomena without contradiction; (2) Taylor's hermeneutic realism teaches us the extent to which defending an anti-naturalist philosophy of human sciences today necessitates moral argument. (shrink)

Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

In this book Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely set out to make the most comprehensive case yet for an 'interpretive' or hermeneutic approach to the social sciences. Interpretive approaches are a major growth area in the social sciences today. This is because they offer a full-blown alternative to the behavioralism, institutionalism, rational choice, and other quasi-scientific approaches that dominate the study of human behavior. In addition to presenting a systematic case for interpretivism and a critique of scientism, Bevir and Blakely (...) also propose their own uniquely 'anti-naturalist 'notion of an interpretive approach. This anti-naturalist framework encompasses the insights of philosophers ranging from Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Charles Taylor and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while also resolving dilemmas that have plagued rival philosophical defenses of interpretivism. In addition, working social scientists are given detailed discussions of a distinctly interpretive approach to methods and empirical research. The book draws on the latest social science to cover everything from concept formation and empirical inquiry to ethics, democratic theory, and public policy. An anti-naturalist approach to interpretive social science offers nothing short of a sweeping paradigm shift in the study of human beings and society. This book will be of interest to all who seek a humanistic alternative to the scientism that overwhelms the study of human beings today. (shrink)

This is an unpublished talk written for a meeting of French philosophers. The paper describes the evolution versus creationism/intelligent design controversy in the U.S. A number of philosophers and scientists try to resolve this issue by sharply distinguishing the realm of science versus any talk of the supernatural. These pro-evolutionists often appeal to science's essential commitment to "methodological naturalism," the view that scientific methodology is essentially committed to naturalism and cannot meaningfully entertain hypotheses concerning the supernatural. I criticize (...) methodological naturalism, suggesting that such an appeal is misguided and counterproductive. I suggest an alternative view of the supernatural consistent with scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied (...) social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates some arguments against metaphysics recently formulated by Bas Van Fraassen. A more positive view of the relationship between science and metaphysics is outlined.

Intellectual history still quite commonly distinguishes between the episode we know as the Scientific Revolution, and its successor era, the Enlightenment, in terms of the calculatory and quantifying zeal of the former—the age of mechanics—and the rather scientifically lackadaisical mood of the latter, more concerned with freedom, public space and aesthetics. It is possible to challenge this distinction in a variety of ways, but the approach I examine here, in which the focus on an emerging scientific field or cluster of (...) disciplines—the ‘life sciences’, particularly natural history, medicine, and physiology —is, not Romantically anti-scientific, but resolutely anti-mathematical. Diderot bluntly states, in his Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, that “We are on the verge of a great revolution in the sciences. Given the taste people seem to have for morals, belles-lettres, the history of nature and experimental physics, I dare say that before a hundred years, there will not be more than three great geometricians remaining in Europe. The science will stop short where the Bernoullis, the Eulers, the Maupertuis, the Clairauts, the Fontaines and the D’Alemberts will have left it.... We will not go beyond.” Similarly, Buffon in the first discourse of his Histoire naturelle speaks of the “over-reliance on mathematical sciences,” given that mathematical truths are merely “definitional” and “demonstrative,” and thereby “abstract, intellectual and arbitrary.” Earlier in the Thoughts, Diderot judges “the thing of the mathematician” to have “as little existence in nature as that of the gambler.” Significantly, this attitude—taken by great scientists who also translated Newton or wrote careful papers on probability theory, as well as by others such as Mandeville—participates in the effort to conceptualize what we might call a new ontology for the emerging life sciences, very different from both the ‘iatromechanism’ and the ‘animism’ of earlier generations, which either failed to account for specifically living, goal-directed features of organisms, or accounted for them in supernaturalistic terms by appealing to an ‘anima’ as explanatory principle. Anti-mathematicism here is then a key component of a naturalistic, open-ended project to give a successful reductionist model of explanation in ‘natural history’, a model which is no more vitalist than it is materialist—but which is fairly far removed from early modern mechanism. (shrink)

Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing, counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of (...) “energy citizenship,” a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues. This paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the co-production of counter-expertise and energy citizenship in the two European countries endowed with the largest shale gas reserves: Poland and France. In my analysis, concerns over the disruption of the food-water-energy nexus due to possible pollution emerge as particularly important. I argue that the exchange of information between activist groups and NGOs, as well as between activist groups from distant European locations, allowed for the creation of a genuinely transnational and science-based anti-fracking movement.ZuammenfassungZwischen der zweiten Hälfte der 2000er und der ersten Hälfte der 2010er Jahre, löste die Aussicht auf die Förderung von Schiefergas in Europa zuerst weitreichende politische Begeisterung aus, dann Gegeninitiativen auf der lokalen und nationalen Ebene, und schließlich Resignation, als ein weltweiter Einbruch des Ölpreises die Gewinnannahmen des Unternehmens in Frage stellte. Im Erfolg der europäischen Proteste gegen Schiefergas und „hydraulic fracturing“ war die Rolle der Gegenexpertise entscheidend. Diese Art von Expertise ist eines der Hauptelemente von „energy citizenship“, ein Konzept das kürzlich im Bereich der „Energy Humanities“ entwickelt wurde und für die Befähigung des Bürgers zur Entscheidungsfindung in energiebezogenen Fragen steht. Die vorliegende Studie analysiert die kooperative Produktion von Gegenexpertise und die Schaffung von „energy citizenship“ in den beiden europäischen Ländern, die mutmaßlich über die größten Schiefergasvorkommen verfügen: Polen und Frankreich. Aus dieser Analyse geht hervor, dass Besorgnis über die Störung des Nahrungsmittel-Wasser-Energie-Nexus aufgrund einer möglichen Verschmutzung durch industrielle Aktivitäten im Vordergrund stand. Der Informationsaustausch zwischen Aktivistengruppen und spezialisierten NGOs sowie zwischen Aktivistengruppen in verschiedenen europäischen Orten ermöglichte die Entstehung einer transnationalen, wissenschaftsbasierten Anti-Fracking-Bewegung. (shrink)

Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing, counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of (...) “energy citizenship,” a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues. This paper provides a socio-historical analysis of the co-production of counter-expertise and energy citizenship in the two European countries endowed with the largest shale gas reserves: Poland and France. In my analysis, concerns over the disruption of the food-water-energy nexus due to possible pollution emerge as particularly important. I argue that the exchange of information between activist groups and NGOs, as well as between activist groups from distant European locations, allowed for the creation of a genuinely transnational and science-based anti-fracking movement. (shrink)

“Interpretive social science” includes a variety of differing epistemological, methodological, and political commitments. It is to the credit of Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely’s Interpretive Social S...

In this interview, Christopher Norris discusses a wide range of issues having to do with postmodernism, deconstruction and other controversial topics of debate within present–day philosophy and critical theory. More specifically he challenges the view of deconstruction as just another offshoot of the broader postmodernist trend in cultural studies and the social sciences. Norris puts the case for deconstruction as continuing the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ and—in particular—for Derrida’s work as sustaining the values of enlightened critical reason in various spheres (...) of thought from epistemology to ethics, sociology and politics. Along the way he addresses a number of questions that have lately been raised with particular urgency for teachers and educationalists, among them the revival of creationist doctrine and the idea of scientific knowledge as a social, cultural, or discursive construct. In this context he addresses the ‘science wars’ or the debate between those who uphold the values of scientific reason, progress and truth, and those (like the ‘strong’ sociologists of knowledge) who would reject such values as merely the expression of a dominant ideological consensus. Norris also discusses the emergence of anti–realism as a strongly marked trend within recent analytic philosophy, one that denies the existence of objective (‘recognition–transcendent’) truths in mathematics, the physical sciences, history and other disciplines. Thus statements are thought of as possessing a truth–value just insofar as we possess some adequate proof–procedure or some means of finding them out through empirical or other methods of enquiry. Norris offers a range of arguments against this anti–realist position and brings out its convergence with various postmodernist lines of thought. Through a running commentary on Derrida’s work in relation to these developments he shows how deconstruction has been misconstrued by sociologists, cultural critics and educational theorists whose understanding has often been based on a limited acquaintance with the primary texts. Above all Norris calls for a renewed engagement with the philosophic discourse of modernity and a willingness to challenge postmodern scepticism and value–relativism in a spirit of open–minded critical debate. (shrink)

I discuss the nature of visual perception from an interdisciplinary perspective. The target of investigation is Tyler Burge’s theory of perceptual anti-individualism, according to which perceptual states constitutively depend on relations between perceivers and the external world. Burge argues that this theory is presupposed by vision science. My goal is to argue that perceptual anti-individualism is not the only theoretical choice. First, I consider the notion of homeostasis and suggest how it may cast doubt on the perceptual (...) norms in Burge’s theory. Second, I argue that many phenomena studied by vision science can be explained without positing Burge’s notions of veridicality and singular representation. Third, I consider some empirical theories and argue that vision science does not uniquely favor Burge’s theory. I conclude that perceptual anti-individualism is not the only framework for understanding visual perception. (shrink)

In this interview, Christopher Norris discusses a wide range of issues having to do with postmodernism, deconstruction and other controversial topics of debate within present-day philosophy and critical theory. More specifically he challenges the view of deconstruction as just another offshoot of the broader postmodernist trend in cultural studies and the social sciences. Norris puts the case for deconstruction as continuing the 'unfinished project of modernity' and—in particular—for Derrida's work as sustaining the values of enlightened critical reason in various spheres (...) of thought from epistemology to ethics, sociology and politics. Along the way he addresses a number of questions that have lately been raised with particular urgency for teachers and educationalists, among them the revival of creationist doctrine and the idea of scientific knowledge as a social, cultural, or discursive construct. In this context he addresses the 'science wars' or the debate between those who uphold t. (shrink)

Philosophical hermeneutics claims that human understanding, while being contingent and historical, is likewise universal and bears within itself some pervasive features detectable via hermeneutical analyses of historically imparted tradition and language. Similarly, hermeneutical philosophy of science is confident that hermeneutical methods are the only proper tool to adequately assess, reconstruct, explain or give a meaning to historical but universal scientific knowledge and its various forms. I point out two versions of hermeneutical philosophy of science and argue that whenever (...) philosophical hermeneutics pursues rescuing "scientificity", human rationality, human rights, common values, and so forth under the pretence of its universality and competence, it necessarily transcends and violates the tenets of its own. I conclude in the favour of moderate interpretation of practical hermeneutics, perhaps in the very essence of it rest postmodern concepts of historicality, transparency and tolerance, without which there is no possibility of extricating oneself from hermeneuticism. (shrink)

An increasing number of moral realists and anti-realists have recently attempted to support their views by appeal to science. Arguments of this kind are typically criticized on the object-level. In addition, however, one occasionally also comes across a more sweeping metatheoretical skepticism. Scientific contributions to the question of the existence of objective moral truths, it is claimed, are impossible in principle; most prominently, because such arguments impermissibly derive normative from descriptive propositions, such arguments beg the question against non-naturalist (...) moral realism, science cannot inform conceptual accounts of moral judgements, and the conceptual is logically prior to the empirical. My main aim in this paper is to clarify and critically assess these four objections. Moreover, based on this assessment, I will formulate four general requirements that science-based arguments in favor of moral realism and anti-realism should meet. It will turn out that these arguments are limited in several ways, and that some existing arguments have been unsound. Yet it is still possible in principle for the empirical sciences to contribute to the moral realism/anti-realism debate. (shrink)

Roughly, instrumentalism is the view that science is primarily, and should primarily be, an instrument for furthering our practical ends. It has fallen out of favour because historically influential variants of the view, such as logical positivism, suffered from serious defects. -/- In this book, however, Darrell P. Rowbottom develops a new form of instrumentalism, which is more sophisticated and resilient than its predecessors. This position—‘cognitive instrumentalism’—involves three core theses. First, science makes theoretical progress primarily when it furnishes (...) us with more predictive power or understanding concerning observable things. Second, scientific discourse concerning unobservable things should only be taken literally in so far as it involves observable properties or analogies with observable things. Third, scientific claims about unobservable things are probably neither approximately true nor liable to change in such a way as to increase in truthlikeness. -/- There are examples from science throughout the book, and Rowbottom demonstrates at length how cognitive instrumentalism fits with the development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century chemistry and physics, and especially atomic theory. Drawing upon this history, Rowbottom also argues that there is a kind of understanding, empirical understanding, which we can achieve without having true, or even approximately true, representations of unobservable things. In closing the book, he sets forth his view on how the distinction between the observable and unobservable may be drawn, and compares cognitive instrumentalism with key contemporary alternatives such as structural realism, constructive empiricism, and semirealism. -/- Overall, this book offers a strong defence of instrumentalism that will be of interest to scholars and students working on the debate about realism in philosophy of science. (shrink)

: This paper investigates the way in which Rudolf Carnap drew on Gestalt psychological notions when defining the basic elements of his constitutional system. I argue that while Carnap's conceptualization of basic experience was compatible with ideas articulated by members of the Berlin/Frankfurt school of Gestalt psychology, his formal analysis of the relationship between two basic experiences ("recollection of similarity") was not. This is consistent, given that Carnap's aim was to provide a unified reconstruction of scientific knowledge, as opposed to (...) the mental processes by which we gain knowledge about the world. It is this last point that put him in marked contrast to some of the older epistemological literature, which he cited when pointing to the complex character of basic experience. While this literature had the explicit goal of overcoming metaphysical presuppositions by means of an analysis of consciousness, Carnap viewed these attempts as still carrying metaphysical baggage. By choosing the autopsychological basis, he expressed his intellectual depth to their antimetaphysical impetus. By insisting on the metaphysical neutrality of his system, he emphasized that he was carrying out a project in which they had not succeeded. (shrink)

The term “science” is a common noun that is used to designate a whole range of activities. If Reeves is right—and I think he is—that there is no essence to these activities that allows them to be objectively identified and demarcated from nonscience, then what qualifies as science is determined by communities. It becomes much more difficult on this antiessentialism position to identify and dismiss pseudo‐science. I suggest we might find a way forward, though, by engaging a (...) philosophical tradition that has largely been neglected in English‐speaking science and religion studies, and by articulating a theory of consensus along the lines of Oreskes (2019). (shrink)

An innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind at the turn of the twenty-first century via the texts of philosopher and psychologist William James.