Not the Best Thing since Sliced Bread

This is a nice little interesting book, but I can't agree with the effusive praise it's garnered. Brown does have some useful things to say, and his analysis is more balanced than that of many commentators on the science wars, but in places that analysis is rather shallow. It seems to me, for example, that the philosophical difficulties of naturalism would be something worth addressing by Brown, but he gives those difficulties short shrift.

Brown is just as capable as the extremists at dismissing those he disagrees with as "mushy-minded", "bad scientists" whose views are "laughable" and whose sanity should be doubted. All those who think moral norms might have divine origin? According to Brown, they're "naively religious". All those who disagree with Brown about capital punishment? According to Brown, they just must not have studied the matter as much as he has. (For Brown, this is apparently an issue on which it is impossible for there to be an honest, informed difference of opinion.) As someone who sympathizes with both Brown and Norman Levitt on many issues but disagrees with them each on others, I have to say that it's a lot more fun to be insulted by Levitt because he does it with such style! (Incidentally, Brown's analysis of Gross and Levitt's book only seems to make sense if Levitt is on the political Right. My reading of Levitt's _Prometheus Bedeviled_ leads me to believe that that is far from the case.)

One last item: Brown writes: "Most people could achieve a high-level understanding of any branch of science, but only if several years have been devoted to its intense study." I'm not sure whether Brown classifies mathematics as a branch of science, but I see no more evidence that sufficient training could provide most people with a high-level understanding of mathematics than that sufficient training could provide most people with the ability to high jump 7 feet. I used to tell my students that intense study would undoubtedly make them successful; after seeing several hard-workers earn D's, I stopped saying that. ( )

What is knowledge? How do we know what we know? How is knowledge connected to truth? To what extent do social and nonrational factors affect what we know and how we come to know it? Is science a privileged enterprise? Can it understand and define the structure of physical and biological reality untainted by values? Or is knowledge necessarily a social and ideological construct? These are some of the questions posed in this slim book and Brown’s overview of key epistemological debates makes for a good, if limited, introduction to the controversies engendered by competing schools of thought.

As its subtitle makes clear, Who Rules in Science is decidedly opinionated---this not being the author’s first foray into the titular “wars.” As a self-described “card-carrying rationalist” and defender of scientific realism, Brown is clearly at odds with the anti-realist views associated with postmodernism and social constructivism (although the brunt of his criticism is directed against proponents of the ‘strong programme’ in general and David Bloor’s sociology of scientific knowledge in particular). But to his credit, he provides a fairly balanced if sometimes shallow reading of rival theories instead of resorting to polemic (cf. Gross and Levitt’s Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science). He should also be commended for bringing the political aspects into focus, reminding us that constructivists are not always aligned with the political left (e.g., anti-Darwinism, “intelligent design”) nor objectivists with the political right (e.g., Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould). Scientific knowledge is not just an end unto itself. Arguably, it can also be utilized as a liberatory tool. But as these debates highlight, the means of achieving this remains contested ground.

Those familiar with the works of the key theorists may find that Brown glosses over some subtle but critical points in, for example, the section on the notion of reasons as causes, or the inexplicably brief discussion of feminist critiques. And while quick to expose his opponents’ weaknesses, he is less willing to acknowledge the decidedly real difficulties inherent in the metaphysical and methodological naturalism he prefers.

I would have preferred a more historiographical account with a greater focus on the connective thread among the various theories (e.g., Popper’s falsification as a response to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle; Lakatos’ attempt to reconcile Popper with Kuhn; Feyarabend taking Kuhn’s theory-dependence of observation to its radical extreme; Rorty’s neopragmatism in opposition to traditional analytic philosophy; etc.), but that may have led to a different book altogether. Overall, Brown does an admirable job of condensing the central tenets of both 20th century philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge and setting out their respective impact on our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. ( )

The author is good at history of philosophy of science, such as Hempel's theory of explanation and prediction and Einstein on Russell's theory of knowledge.

But at times he oversimplifies so much that it is hard to tell what he is talking about. Sloppy writing leads to bizarre results. Sometimes he writes of Bloor et al as the only form of sociology. ( )