Real Science
What it Is and What it Means

A systematic, carefully reasoned, but non-technical analysis of the nature and significance of scientific knowledge.

John Ziman (Author)

9780521772297, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 April 2000

412 pages, 20 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.9 x 3.1 cm, 0.804 kg

'I would strongly recommend this book …'. Scientists for Global Responsibility

Scientists and 'anti-scientists' alike need a more realistic image of science. The traditional mode of research, academic science, is not just a 'method': it is a distinctive culture, whose members win esteem and employment by making public their findings. Fierce competition for credibility is strictly regulated by established practices such as peer review. Highly specialized international communities of independent experts form spontaneously and generate the type of knowledge we call 'scientific' - systematic, theoretical, empirically-tested, quantitative, and so on. Ziman shows that these familiar 'philosophical' features of scientific knowledge are inseparable from the ordinary cognitive capabilities and peculiar social relationships of its producers. This wide-angled close-up of the natural and human sciences recognizes their unique value, whilst revealing the limits of their rationality, reliability, and universal applicability. It also shows how, for better or worse, the new 'post-academic' research culture of teamwork, accountability, etc. is changing these supposedly eternal philosophical characteristics.

Preface
1. A peculiar institution
2. Basically, it's purely academic
3. Academic science
4. New modes of knowledge production
5. Community and communication
6. Universalism and unification
7. Disinterestedness and objectivity
8. Originality and novelty
9. Scepticism and the growth of knowledge
10. What then, can we believe?
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Popular science [PDZ], History of science [PDX], Philosophy of science [PDA]