Muddling Through : Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century

By Michael Fortun

Book Overview

Messy. Clumsy. Volatile. Exciting. These words are not often associated with the sciences, which for most people still connote exactitude, elegance, reliability, and a rather plodding certainty. But the real story is something quite different. The sciences are less about the ability to know and to control than they are about the unleashing of new forces, new capacities for changing the world. The sciences as practiced exist not in some pristine world of "objectivity," but in what Mike Fortun and Herb Bernstein call "the muddled middle." This book explores the way science makes sense of the world and how the world makes sense of science. It is also about politics and culture--how these forces shape the sciences and are shaped by it in turn. Think of Muddling Through as the basic text for a new kind of literacy project, a project to re-imagine the sciences as complex operations of language, action, and thought--as attempts, trials, limited experiments. The sciences provide us with the images and metaphors we apply to myriad situations and phenomena, and create the blueprints we use to make and legitimate crucial social decisions. If democracies are to meet the challenge of the ever more critical world-making role of the sciences, they must fundamentally shift their attention and their attitudes. The quest for social or political mastery of the sciences will have to end; the new journey will begin with a trip to the muddled middle. Travel then, with historian Fortun and physicist Bernstein from the workshops of fifteenth-century England to a present-day quantum physics laboratory. Stop at a military toxic waste dump, a courtroom, a colony of baboons. Along the way you might shed your faith in pure inquiry, see the limits of value-free rationality, and breath the fresh air of change.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1887178481
• ISBN13: 9781887178488
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Catapult
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Science a messy, but great business!

The March 2000 Physics World reviewer said it better than I EVER could: " Mike Fortun and Herbert Bernstein's book is a masterpiece -- a particularly intelligent, useful and unusual book. It will constitute, I strongly believe, a solid mooring point to help us face the challenges and questions -- scientific, philosophical and political -- that the new century is forcing on us. The book is also refined and subtle enough to help us to avoid (and hopefully to forget) the crude, sterile and empty confrontation, known as the "science wars", that have raged over the last few years. This book must be read, reread and reflected on by everybody -- for by arguing that science is a complex and messy business, the authors could have a major effect on how we think about science, about science as knowledge, and about science and politics. Muddling Through is divided into two main parts. The first deals with the question that has so agitated and divided academia recently -- namely, what is science and how does it work? The second part describes the authors' own experiences of various social debates about science. In academic terms -- I mean for scientists and also for historians and philosophers -- this is a good and reliable book. Mike Fortun is a historian who is pretty familiar with today's science, while Herbert Bernstein is a quantum physicist who has taken seriously the task of studying what has been published by historians, philosophers and sociologists about scientific knowledge and its place in contemporary society. However, the book is important not only because it is so deeply informed and of the highest quality, but also because it is so decisive in political and social matters. More to the point: it is decisive because it is both a "theoretical" book -- dealing with ideas and words -- and a book that relies on field work, particularly on militant action through the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies. The institute, which is led by the two authors, tries to act as a mediator when conflicts or tensions arise in society around science and technology. Fortun and Bernstein view their ideas, concepts and ways of describing science not as mere words to throw back and forth in debate, but as tools to help them (and society) cope pragmatically with technology, and vice versa. They view their intellectual work as part and parcel of a larger enterprise of helping scientists to interact with society, and so try hard to be precise and to pay attention to everybody's wordings, claims and motivations. Every word and nuance matters tremendously. In the first part of the book, the authors illustrate through different approaches -- and without believing that there can be a unique, definitive and authoritarian answer -- what it means when scientists practise "rationality", and what "experimenting" and "articulating" a proof imply. Using a series of metaphors to help the rea

Great book, don't miss it if you love (or hate) science!

This book was GREAT! One of the BEST books about science ever written. I found this book to be terrific!!! It may be the best book that I have ever read.