Search results

The ongoing efforts to explain the disease COVID-19 and the parallel efforts to devise and implement public health measures that mitigate it, are an opportunity to reconsider the values of science as identified to Merton. What is revealed is that science is always partial and always tentative. This leaves much scope for magical thinking and for flat science denial.

Three main conflicts between Popper and Agassi are discussed. Over the ethics of hard work which in reality turns out to be over perfectionism and optimism. Over the role of metaphysics in science. Over methodological individualism where is it argued that Popper's views are contradictory and that Agassi' Institutionalism prevails.

This response to Shankman's 2018 concedes some points, corrects others, and emphasizes the importance of error to the progress of science.

Peter Mandler's Return from the Natives examines Margaret Mead mid-career when she devoted much energy to promoting anthropology and anthropologists to government and industry and positioned herself as a prominent social commentator. By the time she returned to the field after an interlude of 14 years, something had happened to her professionally: she was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, no longer a scientific heavyweight, and much of this stems from the rather hare-brained "culture cracking" she engaged in during the war. So while honors and kudos enhanced her official image, behind the scenes, she complained of being neglected and shunted aside. Her discipline became radicalized, and her balanced and accommodating approach was rejected.

A book in which analytic philosophers examine the portrayal of sex in art and the possible artistic value of pornography proves a disappointment. Although a transcendental objection to pornographic art is rebutted, the papers employ barren philosophical methods that divert energy away from significant problems and into scholastic quibbles.

Chagnon narrates the ups and downs of his career, how he managed to document the basic ethnography of the Yanomamö of Amazonia, and the loss of scientific compass in American anthropology that brought a good deal of personal villification and the end of his research. The reviewer endorses the view that organized American anthropology is in an intellectually sorry state but argues that Chagnon's anthropology of anthropology is lacking.

Shankman holds that Derek Freeman "trashed" Margaret Mead's reputation as a public intellectual by portraying her as a naïve and gullible anthropologist who perpetrated a serious error about adolescence in American Samoa. Shankman concedes that Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa was factually in error but argues that her reputation in anthropology did not rest on it but rather on her extensive works on other societies. Ostensibly about Samoa, her book was rather a critique of American society and should be judged as such. It is unjust that its factual errors undermine her status as a public intellectual. Fieldwork method and the lingering influence of inductivism are shown to underlie the controversy.

Pace Fuller, religion is neither necessary nor sufficient a condition for the development of evolutionary biology. Their historical connection notwithstanding, they are better considered as separate systems of ideas, in parallel to the manner in which they separated themselves as systems of institutions. As to schooling, enriched teaching of the real history of biology should be sufficient.

Raymond Boudon is the doyen of French sociology. His 2004 book The Poverty of Relativism counters the relativist plague with philosophical, historical, and comparative deconstruction and proposes an alternative: a cognitive notion of values that rehabilitates the notions of reason, correctness, and progress. More surprising is his rehabilitation of moral evolutionism that restores to it a human face. Will his efforts staunch relativism? Some considerations pro and con are offered.