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The Triumph of Uncertainty - Science and Self in the Postmodern Age (Hardcover)
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The Triumph of Uncertainty - Science and Self in the Postmodern Age (Hardcover)
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Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science,
offers a unique autobiographical overview of how science as a
discipline of thought has been characterized by philosophers and
historians over the past century. He frames his account through
science's - and his own personal - quest for explanatory certainty.
During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the
probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex
systems, whether in physics, biology, economics, or the social
sciences. This "triumph of uncertainty" is the inevitable outcome
of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these
epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the
individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the "personal"
and the "tacit") invariably affects how data are understood.
Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity,
post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values
and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge.
Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how
immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its
theoretical development and how these in turn have influenced
interpretive problems swirling around biological identity,
individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between
contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong
and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it
hover over current constructions of personal identity, self
knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty,
science and selfhood speak.
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