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Is Science Neurotic? [ book review ]
Metapsychology ^ | July 24th 2007 | Review by Donald Stanley

Posted on 07/25/2007 11:21:07 PM PDT by SunkenCiv

Nicholas Maxwell's Is Science Neurotic? contains one very big revisionist vision: Science needs to make its aims explicit in an underlying scheme or set of principles... The traditional aim of science has been standard empiricism (SE) and he accuses SE of a neurosis, a scientific misconstrual of what science ought to be doing and not just the discovery of facts based on experimental evidence... Maxwell, like his fellow authors... suggests a more comprehensive view of the aim of science: to postulate how science can better serve us. To make the world better. He wishes to humanize science so that we can act wisely in this world, and this is possible only if science is cured of its neurotic behavior: who does science serve, the funding agency or humanity? ...Chapter 2 contains Maxwell's desire for action to redefine the aim of science and is parallel to previous books urging public attention to other misdirections e.g. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle, Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, and Ronald Higgins' The Seventh Enemy. His greatest debt is to Karl Popper who tried to solve the problem of induction by his notion of refutability. Maxwell gives a nuanced enhancement of Popper's conjecture and refutation approach to scientific knowledge: "problem solving rationality."

(Excerpt) Read more at mentalhelp.net ...


TOPICS: Astronomy; Science
KEYWORDS: stringtheory

Is Science Neurotic? Is Science Neurotic?
by Nicholas Maxwell


1 posted on 07/25/2007 11:21:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
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To: AdmSmith; bvw; callisto; ckilmer; dandelion; FairOpinion; ganeshpuri89; gobucks; KevinDavis; ...

2 posted on 07/25/2007 11:21:41 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Profile updated Monday, July 23, 2007 https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: SunkenCiv
...to postulate how science can better serve us. To make the world better.

Not this crap again! He wants applied science to the exclusion of basic science.

3 posted on 07/26/2007 2:30:20 AM PDT by Rudder
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To: Rudder

I am feeling sadness and mourning for science the definition and funding of which has become the domain of judges and lawyers. It is an all encompasing term which loses its meaning the more it tries to include. In my day, historians were trying to adopt the quantitative methods of science without much success because they were not well trained in those areas. That is just one example of the bad effects of amateurs making judgments and decisions based on fuzzy notions of what science is or should be. Another is the perennial Darwin debate which bears no ressemblance to the thinking of modern biology.


4 posted on 07/26/2007 5:32:22 AM PDT by ClaireSolt (Have you have gotten mixed up in a mish-masher?)
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To: SunkenCiv
Thanks for adding me, by the way.

I once went to a lecture series at UCLA honoring Julian Schwinger's 80th birthday. Even met him afterward. Big thrill!

I was struck though by how many of these "geniuses" wore the seemingly crummiest clothes they could find, and that several of them literally stunk from body oder.

Eccentric? Definitely.

5 posted on 08/11/2007 12:44:36 AM PDT by onedoug
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To: onedoug

Well, they don’t get any exercise, so the least movement causes them to work up a sweat. :’) Just think how many stents are going be installed in human hearts just becaose of Al Gore’s invention of the internet... ;’)


6 posted on 08/11/2007 7:32:09 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Profile updated Thursday, August 9, 2007. https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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