Why philosophy is largely ignored by science
dcscience.net
dcscience.net
I haven't left philosophy because everyone in it is stupid, as this article seems to suggest. I left philosophy because after all my reading, note-taking, class-discussioning, and debate tournamenting, I never felt like I'd made any progress, and that mattered to me personally. At the end of the day, the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, and the gray ethical areas were still gray. This is why I don't do philosophy, and I why I found the science bug. Not because philosophy lacks rigor or reasonable investigators.
In philosophy, real answers are difficult to find and prove, but in math and science, even though every answer brings 10 new questions, you can look back and say: I proved that theorem, I empirically verified the acceleration of the earth.
To quote my favorite xkcd T-shirt "Science, it works, bitches!". Most scientists I know that disregard philosophy do so because science gives them a feeling of getting somewhere, while philosophy, even at its most rigorous, just seems to leave them more confused than when they started. It's more of a personal preference for that kind of investigation than any rejection of the intelligence of a large group of people.
Another area where there have arguably been successes (even through failure), is in the attempts to formalise natural languages into logic (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein). This is the tradition that informed Chomsky, whose theories of grammar inform modern compiler design.
There are philosophers alive that I believe have advanced the frontier of knowledge, but as with some areas of pure mathematics it's hard to say practically what that means. I have in mind Kripke.
That's math, though, not philosophy.
The difference: Math is a symbol game that occasionally produces useful tools for other fields, whereas philosophy is a discussion of human problems.
> Math is a symbol game
So is logic.
> philosophy is a discussion of human problems.
No. It's not.
so there was a point when foundational issues in maths and logic were philosophy. the importance of frege, and then later peano, russel, etc, is that they were the ones that found a way to attack that set of problems, letting us isolate a chunk of knowledge as logic, set theory, etc.
a similar process is probably happening now with consciousness - we're starting to develop the tools to answer questions that are currently "philosophical".
I'm increasingly under the impression that philosophy is "about" whatever the individual philosopher or reader or writer wants it to be about, and that a lot of philosophers really like arguing about what philosophy is about. Granted, this comes mostly from sporadic reading in the field and from listening to Philosophy Bites, but the combination has still made me increasingly skeptical of explanations about what philosophy is about.
The things you dislike about philosophy are exactly the things that make it so useful, and the things you like about science are the reasons why most (if not all) of it is ultimately illusory.
How is science illusory?
Modern science as it exists today is basically a quasi-religious system that is more or less the next version of alchemy in terms of its intellectual heritage. It's clear to me that in a couple hundred years we'll probably look back on the science of today the same way that most people today look at alchemy. Already research investigating the truth of the spiritual underpinnings of science is one of the hottest areas of research, and you can't go more than a couple weeks without seeing some new finding or treatise. It's only going to be so long before all of these disparate parts get organized into a cohesive whole that's convincing enough to undermine the current establishment.
No. This is simply wrong on a factual level. Science doesn't have dogma. It isn't religion. See? Your ideas fail because you don't have the facts you need to form good ideas.
> It's clear to me that in a couple hundred years we'll probably look back on the science of today the same way that most people today look at alchemy.
To the extent we do, it will be because of advances in science. Science replaces its own ideas (that is, in fact, the exact opposite of dogma) using evidence and sound mathematical logic, which is why that happens. Trying to use science to prove the weakness of science is a wonderful indication that you haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about.
That's simply false. If you don't believe that science has dogma, open up the first chapter of nearly every biology textbook. Most of them start out by discussing the dogma of science, which is roughly as follows:
- We live in a materialist universe.
- There exists nothing magical or supernatural.
- All phenomena are in principle understandable by humans.
- The scientific method is how we can understand the universe.
There are many other assumptions behind science as well, but these are the ones that most textbooks usually enumerate explicitly. Being assumptions, none of them are provable. And in fact there is good reason to believe that many (or all) of them are wrong, which would essentially make all of scientific knowledge wrong as well. And while specific scientific results are at least in theory subject to being replaced, these general principles are considered sacred and unchallengable.
Science is a religion just like any other. And if you actually look at the principles I listed, they actually look a lot like the four noble truths of buddhism. Different content, but still religious just the same.
They aren't dogma. They can be refuted with sufficient evidence. The failure of the religious to provide such evidence means they haven't yet been refuted. (It also says nasty things about the religious, but propriety forbids me from being more specific.)
> there is good reason to believe that many (or all) of them are wrong
What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.
> they actually look a lot like the four noble truths of buddhism
Only to someone who totally misunderstands both science and Buddhism.
Except for that they can't, because everyone who believes in science just says that the reason they believe that science will be able to explain everything is that it has explained everything so far. This is just begging the question, and it's clear that no matter how much evidence there is that there are some things that science can't explain these will just be written off by those who have 'faith' in science. You can go over to r/science or r/atheism and find literally thousands of examples of this.
>What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.
The obvious one would be that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature. But again, the true believers refute this by listing all the other things that we didn't understand until science came up with some explanation, and saying that therefor science will most likely also be able to explain consciousness one day.
You don't have any examples of this in this post, though.
> there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature
Wrong. The existence of psychoactive drugs and the effectiveness of fMRI scans disproves this statement.
EDITED TO ADD: What evidence would make you change your mind about this statement in particular?
For example, how is it that the electrical signals in our brains produce "us" while electrical signals in other things don't produce conscious things? How are they different? What would it take to make a circuit "conscious"?
I can't give you good definitions for consciousness or experience and I can't even say that the question(s) make(s) sense. I'm just trying to give you give you a picture of what some people think.
If you really think about it, the situation in science, that the questions that were hard to answer were still unsolved, is very similar to the situation in philosophy. Ask anyone what an electric field really is. No one knows.
Any field that is actually advancing builds on itself. That doesn't make future progress easy in an absolute sense; it merely makes it possible.
I get your point, but for all intents and purposes that's one of the things that makes philosophy great, i.e. the fact that Heraclitus's sayings are as actual today as they were 2,500 years ago. You'll also have to agree that deciding once and for all (or "proving" by scientific means) what makes as taking "moral" decisions, or if "morals" even exist at all, or what makes us not kill each other once we've stopped believing in gods etc., is better left "unresolved", because this "philosophical quest" is what makes us humans.
I also think philosophy can help science in areas that do affect us but are probably untestable. I remember reading some work in primitivism that speculates that the introduction of the clock, and its conception of time, to humanity fundamentally changed the nature of consciousness. People literally thought differently before the clock became common. If this is true, it has ramifications for how we understand the past and things that people did in it that affect us today. So maybe philosophy helps us with questions of history in a way that science (at least currently, at least in my conception) cannot.
He seems to be attacking something called "philosophy", first of all, but the targets are some kind of randomly thrown set of darts. Some analytic philosophers discussing probability in a way he doesn't like. The famous Sokal hoax, which trolled a French-influenced American social-theory journal (which incidentally lived in literature departments more than philosophy departments, and was intensely disliked by American philosophers). Just some general rambling. Why is this interesting? It feels like something an undergrad would cobble together off Wikipedia, an "understand and then denounce philosophy in 90 minutes" essay.
Does he realize that Alan Sokal, who he seems to like, is actually in favor of philosophy, but is against one particular current in philosophy, which his intervention is intended to diminish? He seems to group Sokal in with both the people Sokal opposes, and the people he supports! How does this make any sense at all? Heck, Sokal likes more philosophers, too: Marx, for example, is on his good list (Sokal is a leftist, fighting something of a civil war in favor of 'Old Left' economics/materialist-focused leftism, against cultural-theory/identity leftism).
Because it's an opportunity to explain, in accessible terms in an accessible forum (that is, as opposed to an article that costs five figures per year and uses words like "hermeneutics" without defining them), what value philosophy brings to science and understanding the real world.
I wouldn't expect philosophy of science to be of much practical value to working scientists. Non-scientists, on the other hand, can benefit a great deal from rigorous analysis of the tools, methods and procedures of the sciences, if for no other reason than to dissolve some of the film of invincibility that attaches to them.
Of course there are as many quacks doing philosophy of science as there are doing science proper, so choice of texts is important. You can't condemn all philosophy of science based on a handful of publications (note the selection bias in the article) any more than you can condemn all science based on, say, the MMR vaccine controversy[1].
1. And while we're on the subject of hoaxes, let's just put the whole Sokal affair to bed, shall we? Social Text was an insignificant and unrefereed journal, but even if Sokal had managed to place something in The Philosophical Review, that wouldn't have, as the author put it, "exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud if [sic] postmodernism." Unless the significant number of even more damaging hoaxes perpetrated on science journals have exposed the astonishing intellectual fraud of science?
> philosophy gave birth to all intellectual forms of knowledge
I think this is an utterly unsupportable claim unless you're willing to simply define philosophy as encompassing all other forms of intellectual pursuit. Intellectual knowledge (whatever that means) existed long before the Rig Veda and Socrates.
Above and beyond specific examples, it's important to note that world affairs are influenced considerably by people in positions of power. Such people tend to be well educated, which often means they've been exposed to and influenced by contemporary philosophy. For instance there is a large body of work on international politics. I don't think it's too much to assume that policy-makers at that level have some knowledge of current discourse in the field. For instance the debate about whether a world government would be a good thing.
It's my opinion that if scientists today had a better grasp of philosophy, then the string theorists and researchers studying dark matter would have come up with tangible results already, either by changing their models to actually make predictions, or dumping their models altogether and study alternatives. They would have tangible results instead of always being surprised that we can't find dark matter or surprised that new particles weren't produced at a given collider. Instead of demanding that larger and larger colliders be built, they would reflect on the models they have and attack the weaknesses. Instead of making increasingly sensitive instruments to find interactions between detectors and dark matter that might not even be there, they would give more serious considerations to alternate theories of gravity.
I do think far more scientists would benefit from a bit more of a look at some of the more established philosophers of the last century. It seems that most gained some knowledge of Popper but nowhere near enough people are really familiar with Kuhn's work(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/). Taking the time to think critically about what you're doing and what it would really take to change your views is critical to actually being open to broad possibilities.
Theoretical physicists are particularly prone to lapsing, in later career, into armchair philosophy without bothering to actually read anything in philosophy of the past 100 years. That tends, unfortunately, to result in them producing philosophy that has flashes of insight mixed with stuff that could be a lot better if only they had read some of the existing literature, and addressed the obvious problems with some of the standard positions (which too often they reinvent).
Of course, philosophers could understand more science too, but I actually think there is more effort being made in that direction: philosophy of science programs are increasingly requiring substantial amounts of technical coursework, and it's a huge plus, for advancement, if you publish at least a few articles in technical journals, too. But in the other direction, there might actually be less philosophy instruction in science programs than there was 100 years ago now (surface-level understandings of Popperian falsificationism seem to be about as far as anyone gets, including my own formal education it must be said). This seems like a recent affliction, too: the early-20th-c scientists (Einstein, Bohr, etc.) were actually quite well-read in the relevant parts of philosophy. Heck, folks like Alan Turing published in peer-reviewed philosophy journals.
Philosophy is near the bottom of this hierarchy, though some of the products of philosophy are deemed to be valuable. (Basically it's an evaluation of Signal to Noise ratios, more than a declaration of absolute worth across the discipline.)
Instead, it seems more common to establish the "ground rules" of science by some other means, such as arguments about the pros/cons of various scientific methodologies, or even what counts as "scientific methodology" at all (and at this point, you're doing philosophy of science).
This is just so ignorant and backward that I have a hard time taking the author of this article seriously. There is no "postmodernist movement". The term refers to a hopelessly large field of practices. Most great so-called "postmodernist" theorists typically have not referred to themselves as such.
If you want to discredit theorists who have been critical of scientific practices, you need to put down the Sokal and actually engage with specific works. You might be surprised to find that many of these "postmodernists" are either trained scientists or actually know what they're talking about. Just a few suggestions if you want to dip your toes in the water:
– Gilles Deleuze wrote powerfully on metaphysics, integrating many incites from mathematics in the 60's and 70's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze#Metaphysics Check out "Difference and Repetition".
– Alain Badiou uses set theory in his ontology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou#Mathematics_as_ont... – I find his ontology lacking though; he should learn something from the failings of set theory in the early 20th century.
– Bruno Latour in a the domain of Science and Technology Studies has written voluminously about scientific and technological practices from a more anthropological point of view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour#Biography
– Isabelle Stengers has written something more along the lines of what's critiqued in this article, a critique of the authority of science in society: http://www.amazon.com/Cosmopolitics-I-Posthumanities-Isabell... – works like this question whether the privileging of science over all other forms of knowledge is good for society. This particular work argues that it is not.
– Mike Cooley argues powerfully that the deskilling of the engineering industry caused by computer-aided design and manufacturing is a travesty: http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Bee-Human-Technology-Relatio...
A general note about so-called "postmodernism". The Wikipedia definition includes the following:
"Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. In essence, it is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality."
It's important to understand that "postmodernism" isn't critiquing the effectiveness of science. It is merely claiming that, as it says, reality is not mirrored in human understanding. The models we create to explain observed phenomena are not direct reflections of reality, they are simply characteristically human, linguistic models that correspond to our observations. As Niels Bohr wrote:
"There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature..."
The question is whether our habit of elevating scientific explanation to the 'one true truth' is (1) right and (2) a good thing. Most "postmodernists" argue that other forms of knowledge are perfectly legitimate (for instance, indigenous people who still live tribally lead perfectly happy lives without science) and that the privileging of science over other forms of knowledge is not a unilaterally good thing (for instance, it is reasonable to say there's a decent change that we will extinguish ourselves as a species in the next hundred years thanks to the exploits of scientifically advanced societies).
You may notice that both of those examples are anthropological. This hints at something very important about "postmodernism". When people talk about "postmodernism", they're often talking about "post-structuralism", which is another hopelessly broad category referring to theory that in some way extends "structuralism", which is in turn closely connected to the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the "father of modern anthropology". "Postmodernism" can be seen in this sense to be a kind of anthropologically informed philosophy. Rather than creating theoretically sound abstract models, they look at how those models actually play out "in the field" and draw conclusions. Hence the critique of science: despite the power of scientific explanation, it may not necessarily result in a better society and indeed the evidence shows that it does not.
And one final point, the author is totally wrong to claim that scientists have not been concerned with the philosophy of science. Many early twentieth century scientists – the ones who create the theory of relatively and quantum physics especially – even wrote books on the philosophy of science as well as its role in society. Some examples:
– Schrödinger - "What is Life": http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Life-Autobiographical-Sketches...
– Herman Weyl ("His overall approach in physics was based on the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, specifically Husserl's 1913 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Weyl
– Heisenberg - "Physics and Philosophy": http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Philosophy-Revolution-Modern-S...
– David Bohm - "Wholeness and the Implicate Order": http://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Implicate-Order-David-Bohm/d...
Here's a more modern book from an economist that references Deleuze and other "post-structuralists":
– "The Blank Swan": http://www.amazon.com/The-Blank-Swan-End-Probability/dp/0470...
NB: I'm completely ignorant in this realm.
I thought one of the key points of "Impostures Intellectuelles" was that it defined the group of criticized "postmodernists" and referenced specific essays and papers?
"A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History" looks at the past thousand years in terms of the kinds of material processes that occurred (at all levels from geological to political) with reference to theories from dynamics. DeLanda generally continues the project that Deleuze started of taking insight from modern science and applying it to philosophical problems.
This is a complete strawman and nobody who understands science could take this idea seriously. In fact, I dare you to ask a working scientist whether they're after 'Truth'.
Edit: and I should add that most non-scientists also believe the same thing. In fact, I often catch myself depending on that hypothesis, even though I thoroughly believe it is wrong.
I find that actually quite sad. From a man who actually died for his "scientific" convictions (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno#On_the_Infinite_...):
> It is then unnecessary to investigate whether there be beyond the heaven Space, Void or Time. For there is a single general space, a single vast immensity which we may freely call Void; in it are innumerable globes like this one on which we live and grow. This space we declare to be infinite, since neither reason, convenience, possibility, sense-perception nor nature assign to it a limit. In it are an infinity of worlds of the same kind as our own.
I think we can easily extrapolate an "infinity of worlds" to an "infinity of Universes/realities", or at least we can think about extrapolating, that's what philosophy was the first to do. Actually, I think Giordano Bruno would be seen as a lunatic by most of today's scientists, which I find it even more sad.
Do you actually know any scientists, as you so pointedly asked someone else?
The Niels Bohr quote drives this point home. Physics (and science in general) concerns itself with descriptions of nature. When scientists start to ask why, start to make interpretations of quantum mechanics, start to ask what came before the big bang, start to ask why there is something rather than nothing, that is when philosophy becomes central.
That's not to say you should assume every mathematician who communicates their ideas as though the objects 'exist' in some objective sense is a platonist, or that any scientist who talks implicitly about truth when communicating about their work, is committed to a strong philosophical stance on the matter. It can be just a habit one gets into when trying to communicate.
No doubt some philosophical remarks could be made about this too, not that I'm qualified...
I don't get the mistrust of philosophy from many scientifically-inclined people. I find it especially sad that most people stopped at the falsifiability concept and don't go beyond.
Unfortunately, science needs a rational philosophy now more than ever. Under the influence of Kant and his derivatives like Popper that dominate the modern universities, the fundamentals of science such as identity, causality, knowledge, logic and proof are being undercut and destroyed by the very sciences that use and need these concepts. Tragically, the scientists are distainful of modern philosophy (for good reason) but make the mistake of reject all philosophy, and are thus throwing the baby out with the bath water.
For anyone with a serious interest in these issues I recommend that you read Ayn Rand's "Philosophy: Who Needs It" and her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". In the former book, her answer is that everyone needs a philosophy because it is the science of fundamentals that apply to everyone and all sciences.
Your exposition is also quite right that positivism suggested relativity theory, without requiring it. Also you have correctly seen that this line of thought was of great influence on my efforts and indeed E. Mach and still much more Hume, whose treatise on understanding I studied with eagerness and admiration shortly before finding relativity theory.
Actually, that seems like a logical critique in any field. If someone who clearly had read only a handful of things about quantum physics holds forth on why quantum physics is bullshit, it would be a good heuristic to assume that they probably don't know enough to make that judgment, and maybe they should learn some quantum physics first.
If somebody says they hate vegetables but their experience is limited to one attempt to eat creamed spinach in 1985, it's not a fallacy to say they don't know what they're talking about.
Similarly, this guy is welcome to hate his impoverished notion of philosophy, but it shouldn't be mistaken for somebody actually hating philosophy.
Put it this way: I can hate that which I have never experienced. I've never been raped, but I definitely hate it!
The may be speaking the truth when they say "I hate vegetables", but the implication that they won't like eating them doesn't logically follow because they don't actually know.
Spend time around small children and you see this pattern all the time. "I hate it!" "You haven't tried it. Here, try this." "That's good! Can I have more?"
If I say I hate you and your lying ways, the hate is real whether or not you've lied. But if you've never lied, then I'm not actually hating anything real, just my false idea of a real thing. I literally don't know what I'm talking about.
And now I think we've demonstrated why people hate philosophers.
But your bungled attempt at word games leads me to believe you have been trained in philosophy.
Incidentally, I neither bungled anything, nor am I playing word games, nor have I been "trained in philosophy". I thought most people knew that hatred is an emotion, that emotions can be based on subjective perception and that perceptions can change over time.
The point being, is that hate is a subjective emotion, often based on perceptions that are not fully informed. To hate something you don't need to fully understand or know everything about the subject of the hatred. Witness Hitler and the Jews (I feel that this is an appropriate metaphor to allow someone to invoke Godwin's law so I can stop talking hatred towards innocent vegetables!)
Incidentally, apology accepted :-)
This is because "I hate vegetables" doesn't mean I'm feeling something in the same way "I hate my boss" does. Again, what it really means is "if I eat a vegetable, I will not enjoy it."
Also, I invoke Godwin's law.
I majored in Computer Science and have a minor in Philosophy. I consider philosophy the most important element of my life, and the lives of everyone else, often unknowingly. I see philosophy all the time on Hacker News and elsewhere. What do you call debates over law, for instance? Are those scientific? No, those are philosophy. So much of what humans do is philosophy that to suggest they do not participate in it because they aren't talking in "academic" terms is simply inaccurate.
Having it or arguing about it?
> Logic?
Depends on what kind of logic you mean. There are multiple different entities covered by that word, some of which are not philosophy.
And for the rest: Arguments that never end produce what?
Maybe most scientists ignore Popper's philosophy of science (the only worthwhile one) because they are ignorant and judge which philosophy to read by inaccurate reputation rather than merit.
Though bear in mind, quite a few scientists, big and small, did not ignore Popper and actually liked his ideas and found them helpful. E.g. Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, and Albert Einstein.
http://beginningofinfinity.com/discussion
I'm aware of that Feynman quote. But he apparently had in mind typical philosophers as he did read and understand Popper.
Here's a quote from David Deutsch (correcting someone who claimed that Feynman had never heard of Popper):
> For what it's worth, I happened to mention Popper in the one conversation I had with Feynman, sometime in the 80s, and he did not say "who's that?" but replied meaningfully to the point.
I know Deutsch and have heard the full story. Feynman showed substantial understanding of Popper. Plus avoided all the usual epistemological errors.
Feynman may have been introduced to Popper by Wheeler. Here is Deutsch on Wheeler:
> Wheeler ... (my boss and Feynman's thesis advisor and subsequently his collaborator), knew a lot about Popper and was honoured and delighted when Popper quoted one of Wheeler's aphorisms as a chapter epigraph. Wheeler and I discussed Popper in detail on several occasions and I tried to persuade him to become a Popperian -- ultimately without success, because he preferred Polanyi (!). Nevertheless there were specific aspects of Popperian philosophy of science that he very much agreed with, especially that scientific theories are not derived from anywhere, that they are conjectural and full of errors, and that science makes progress by correcting these errors.
Secondly, it sounds like several commenters have studied little or no philosophy in an academic setting, and as a result are posting garbage comments based on straw men of their own creation.
Is it hard to take on modern philosophers on their own ground? Is the language they use sometimes confusing to the layman? Is that sometimes frustrating? Sure it is. But that's because they have to shortcut a few thousand years of philosophical reasoning to make the points so that we don't end up in the weeds with every discussion. It's no different (as a trained Physicist myself) to the manner modern Physicists talk about our discipline in ways which are confusing to the layman, because we use cutting edge math to short cut a few thousand years of philosophical reasoning to make their point.
Study any subject to the edge of current thinking and you get to incredible levels of specialism because we've been at academia, as a global civilization, for an awfully long time. Not everything can be boiled down to an elevator pitch.
It may be hot to say people don't need to go to university, and further education is meaningless in the context of startups, but it's not meaningless if you actually want to understand the most advanced thought in areas of academic interest. It might not be the best avenue for most people for most career paths, but if you want to discuss philosophy and science (or as it used to be called Natural Philosophy) then it's probably best done with some kind of solid education in those fields.
As I think about it, it comes to me that whether philosophy is or isn't necessary isn't relevant. Empirical necessity doesn't sums up human aspirations, and music or poetry play in the same field. Philosophy is a way or structuring certain angles of thinking, and that's pretty cool. As a developer I have absolutely no use of Heidegger or saint Thomas in my activity, but I'm glad they exist.
I certainly didn't want to offend philosophers. I was merely pointing out that most scientists don't find their ideas very useful in practice. The piece arose as a postscript to a piece "In praise of randomisation". It was in the course of writing that that I discovered the a small (I hope) number of philosophers denied this idea. That does active harm. . A twitter user, @shanemuk, sent this today. Sums it up nicely.
"What you need to know about #Science, #Philosophy and #Sausages @david_colquhoun - answersingenes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/show-m…
As a person with a generally skeptical/pro science bent it truly shocked me.
It highlights the need for understanding the sociology of science, which has huge impacts on its effectiveness.