Abstract
AbstractIt will be argued that the dominant form of current academic science is based on ideas and concepts about science and research that date back to philosophy and sociology that was developed since the 1930s. It will be discussed how this philosophy and sociology of science has informed the ideas, myths and ideology about science held by the scientific community and still determines the popular view of science. It is even more amazing when we realize that these ideas are philosophically and sociologically untenable and since the 1970s were declared obsolete by major scholars in these same disciplines. To demonstrate this, I delve deep to discuss the distinct stages that scholars in philosophy, sociology and history of science since 1945 to 2000 have gone through to leave the analytical-positivistic philosophy behind. I will be focusing on developments of their thinking about major topics such as: how scientific knowledge is produced, the scientific method; the status of scientific knowledge and the development of our ideas about ‘truth’ and the relation of our claims to reality. It will appear that the positivistic ideas about science producing absolute truth, about ‘the unique scientific method’, its formal logical approach and its timeless foundation as a guarantee for our value-free, objective knowledge were not untenable. This is to show how thoroughly the myth has been demystified in philosophy and sociology of science. You think after these fifty pages I am kicking a dead horse? Not at all! This scientific demystification has unfortunately still not reached active scientists. In fact, the popular image of science and research is still largely based on a that Legend. This is not without consequence as will be shown in Chap. 3. These images of science have shaped and in fact distorted the organisational structures of academia and the interaction between its institutes and disciplines. It also affects the relationship of science with its stakeholders in society, its funders, the many publics private and public, and policy makers in government. In short, it determines to a large degree the growth of knowledge with major effects on society.
Highlights
Unlike most natural scientists writing about science that are not philosophers or amateur philosophers like me, I am convinced that I need to discuss the origins of the philosophical ideas and concepts that are the basis of the dominant image of modern science that in 1981 still was ‘the widespread popular conception of science’ (p2) according to Ian Hacking in his influential book Representing and Intervening. (Hacking, 1983) I experienced time and again during my professional career that it are these obsolete and incongruous ideas about science and research that even determine and distort to a large extent our views, attitudes, policies and politics, discourse, professional and collegial interactions in academia
At the end of this book he critiques the idea of value-free inquiry and with Dewey and the pragmatists firmly states that scientists, here used as including scholars in sciences and the humanities (SSH), don’t need to complement their work with ‘diepzinnige’ theories about ‘reality’
In natural science theories are artificial constructions or models, yielding explanation in the sense of logic of hypothetic-deduction: if external nature were of such a kind, data and experience would be as we find them
Summary
But throughout the book, I will present a narrative in which I will take my own intellectual and scientific journey from 1971 as a chemistry student who did a minor in the philosophy of science in academic year 1975–1976. I followed the classical career path of a professional biochemist/immunologist, as PhD student, post-doc, group leader, department head, director of a small research institute, to become dean and board member of a large University Medical Centre. Going through this professional sequence, I kept a persistent and ever stronger interest in the science of science. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. We stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being’. (p109) (Popper, 1959)
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