The Iconoclast

Philosophy of science is headed towards an impasse. The way of thinking about science that has been passed down to us is woefully inadequate for our present purposes. Given the questions that now interest us, this legacy creates more problems than it solves. Further, it tends to alienate us from science, rather than make science seem actually or potentially connected to our lives. At best, it renders science strange, and at worst, it renders it dangerous and frightening. Rather than a set of practices with a human face, striving after goals comprehensible to mere mortals, science has been treated as some or another abstract system of ideas and technocratic processes of measurement. I think it likely that the promotion of thinking about science in this way lies behind the reaction to science within the humanities that culminated in the so-called "science wars." Philosophy of science has never been given to a global orthodoxy (talk about "the received view" notwithstanding), so any talk about what the tradition has handed down will necessarily proceed in terms of family resemblances, common trends and shared styles of thinking, rather than a coherent body of doctrine, a single method, or a unified research program. The way in which I attempt to lay bare the common assumptions within the tradition-the source of the mistakes-is by providing a comprehensive alternative, very different from the approaches that have been the main life of philosophy of science. This is my main aim, to provide such an alternative, which I have discovered in the work of the great American philosopher John Dewey.