The Scientific Attitude
Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An argument that what makes science distinctive is its emphasis on evidence and scientists' willingness to change theories on the basis of new evidence.
Attacks on science have become commonplace. Claims that climate change isn't settled science, that evolution is “only a theory,” and that scientists are conspiring to keep the truth about vaccines from the public are staples of some politicians' rhetorical repertoire. Defenders of science often point to its discoveries (penicillin! relativity!) without explaining exactly why scientific claims are superior. In this book, Lee McIntyre argues that what distinguishes science from its rivals is what he calls “the scientific attitude”—caring about evidence and being willing to change theories on the basis of new evidence. The history of science is littered with theories that were scientific but turned out to be wrong; the scientific attitude reveals why even a failed theory can help us to understand what is special about science.
McIntyre offers examples that illustrate both scientific success (a reduction in childbed fever in the nineteenth century) and failure (the flawed “discovery” of cold fusion in the twentieth century). He describes the transformation of medicine from a practice based largely on hunches into a science based on evidence; considers scientific fraud; examines the positions of ideology-driven denialists, pseudoscientists, and “skeptics” who reject scientific findings; and argues that social science, no less than natural science, should embrace the scientific attitude. McIntyre argues that the scientific attitude—the grounding of science in evidence—offers a uniquely powerful tool in the defense of science.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McIntyre (Dark Ages), a Research Fellow at Boston University's Center for Philosophy and History of Science, achieves his goal of laying out what makes science distinct from other intellectual pursuits in this accessible analysis. He begins by demolishing the widespread notion that following the scientific method is the distinguishing factor, noting acerbically that if "there is one thing that the majority of philosophers of science agree on, it is the idea that there is no such thing as scientific method.' " Instead, McIntyre walks readers through various ways of thinking about the scientific endeavor, including Karl Popper's falsification model, which postulates that science employs theories capable of being disproven. McIntyre's counterintuitive answer is that it is the titular "attitude" that sets science apart from other disciplines, summarizing it as resting on two basic principles a commitment to empirical evidence and a willingness to change one's mind upon receiving new evidence. He concedes that defining and measuring this attitude is not easy, but should nonetheless appeal to many lay readers with his simple and commonsensical formulation. At a time of concern over assaults to scientific authority, McIntyre's intelligent treatise articulates why the pursuit of scientific truths, even if inevitably flawed and subject to human error, matters.
