The Knowledge Machine
How Irrationality Created Modern Science

This book is maddingly repetitious, but as a retired research biologist of 45 years, it captures the reality of doing science. Once upon a time, I taught a freshman seminar called “Biological Headlines: the science behind the stories”. One group of seminars was based on the idea that science is an u......more

Unlike the humanities, including philosophy—where the idea of progress is a controversial topic—it is an essentially indisputable fact that science makes considerable progress over time. Why this is the case—and how science actually works—is what Michael Strevens seeks to explain in The Knowledge Ma......more

Author Strevens is an academic philosopher of science. In this book he takes on Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn as regards our understanding of 'science', as it is actually practiced versus how such as they have conceptualized it. Here one might simplifyingly characterize Popper as tending towards ideal......more

The subject of this book is the philosophy of science, and it goes on to try to explain why it took so long for human civilization to develop the “iron rule” that made it possible. The iron rule is the requirement that all scientific arguments be settled by empirical testing. But in addition to the......more

3.5 Chock-full of truly precious insights, but at times Strevens sacrifices clarity for the sake of making bombastic-sounding claims regarding the "irrationality" of the scientific method, the (justified) "unreasonableness" of its rejection of beauty as a sound criterion of investigation, or the fact......more