Name: The Triumph of Uncertainty
Author: Alfred I. Tauber

Front matter

ALFRED I. TAUBER

The Triumph of Uncertainty

Foreword by Scott F. Gilbert | xi

Preface | XV

Foreword

Western metaphysics.” And Tauber is saying to us, “Deal with it!” We live in a world where context determines function and identity, where parts become defined by their positions in wholes, and where complexity rules. Hume, Levinas, Wittgenstein, Quine, Whitehead, James, Nietzsche, and Polanyi each has a role to play in this synthesis. So do biologists Irun Cohen, Antonio Coutinho, and Lynn Margulis.

Triumph of Uncertainty is a rich tapestry, in which science plays several roles, but is not the totality. Two of its tasks involve critical paring away of falsehoods and its ability to serve as a model of communal activity. Its findings are provisional, but what it gives the human world is a model of consensual thinking, even among rivals. Moreover, through immunology (which both Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour claim is our first “postmodern science”), we get an embodied notion of how a cognitive system is able to establish identity through a dialectic of past and present experiences.

The question of identity becomes Triumph’s key theme and Tauber derives a crucial humanistic lesson from the science. The uncertainty (and potential) found in biology is correspondingly experienced in terms of personal identity as well. The self can no more be objectified through self-knowledge than is biological identity that exhibits constant adjustment to the challenges of interactions with the envronment. Extending the dialectical structure of organisms responding and adjusting to “the other,” Tauber utilizes Levinas’ ethical notions of self-formation through the recognition of the other as a cornerstone of his philosophy. Indeed, the key role of caring comes from Tauber’s ideas about medical ethics, the mutualistic learning from the patient-physician relationship and the moral centrality of recognizing the other. Thus the biological epistemology so carefully charted correspondingly grounds his view of the universe—both natural and human. Here we find the bridge between the science and the humanities that originally propelled Tauber’s journey. The lessons learned have wide relevance for humanizing a world supposedly “disenchanted” by objectification run amok.

Triumph of Uncertainty can be seen as a modern “Guide for the Perplexed,” for most of us are indeed perplexed and confused. Beyond recognizing the constitutive nature of uncertainty, both natural and personal, Tauber suggests that an internal moral compass must guide us. In the end, we are responsible for finding meaning in a world characterized by irresolvable complexity. Thus, parallels are drawn from science’s epistemology with a vision of persons responding to others. In each domain, identity is dynamically established and dialectically enacted. In terms of biology, the individual is deconstructed in terms of xiii xiv

Foreword ecological relationships; in the social sphere, a moral sense of the self in response to the other orders and signifies the social universe we know and experience. Note, Tauber is not applying a scientific description to a human characterization, but rather he is describing a resonance between different ways of knowing, in which a shared metaphysics of uncertainty undergirds both the natural and psycho-social domains. This expansive philosophical dialogue offers insights about the reality science has bestowed and ways in which the objectified world might be humanized. It is a message well heeded.

Scott F. Gilbert

Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology, emeritus, Swarthmore College

Preface

“The principle of causality...is as much an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.”

he Triumph of Uncertainty offers a commentary on ways of knowing

that have pitted objective and subjective orientations as opposed and

exclusionary. I argue that such a division not only denies porous boundaries but represents discarded philosophical positions. My discussion originates, in large part, in a dispute between central European and American scholars that roughly spanned the half century beginning in the 1920s. This account explains how I joined that dialogue towards its denouement when a flurry of vitriol announced its furious ending. I am referring to the Science Wars of the 1990s, when defenders of Truth and Objectivity made their stand against Thomas Kuhn and his cadre, who had reformed the positivist ideals of the so-called Standard View of science. The Kuhnians had countered the logical positivists (also known as “logical empiricists” or collectively as the Vienna Circle), who sought to establish a philosophy of science that would be rid of metaphysical claims and place true knowledge on a strict empirical basis.

1 The title, The Triumph of Uncertainty, plays on John Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty ([1929] 1984), his Gifford Lectures that dealt with the relationship of science to social needs and human values. My study is an extended commentary on Dewey’s problematic, i.e., the challenge of integrating different ways of knowing. I am not engaging a dialogue framed by Wittgenstein’s own concerns in On Certainty (1969) that are about epistemological skepticism and why radical doubt is philosophically inconsistent within a system of beliefs. For general overview of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, see Moyal-Sharrock 2004 and Hamilton 2014. Fora more technical explanation of why certainty is categorically different than knowledge, see Brice 2014.

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Preface

All else was jettisoned and with that discharge, the “soft” interpretive elements that the American critics had identified as not only present but constitutive to the scientific endeavor generated heated argument. I grew up guided by a positivist standard, both in my early education and then as a laboratory investigator. That position, a standard in the basic research community, I extrapolated to deal with both personal social and existential dilemmas, namely, how to deal with uncertainty. The positivists claimed a degree of certitude I could find nowhere else. Eventually, I recognized their failed promises and sought a different way of understanding the scientific enterprise.

This tale begins in America, where I was born to Hungarian immigrant survivors of the Holocaust. They brought sensibilities and culture that would not find an easy home in America. But more importantly, their traumatic experience carried an aura of insecurity that pervaded our home and was transmitted to their children. The ways in which I dealt with my own perplexities centered on conflicted identifications in which science was contrasted in stark opposition to art and literary hermeneutics. This became a pressing matter during my university years. When confronted with making a career choice, I translated my emotional conflicts into intellectual terms that swept me into the historical debates about the unity of science; the legitimate jurisdiction of subjective elements in the objective pursuit of knowledge; the positivist ideals pitted against what the Hungarian émigré, Michael Polanyi called, “tacit” or “personal knowledge” (Polanyi 1962a; 1966); and finally the American pragmatist dislodgment and ultimate rejection of the philosophical formalisms of the Old World that had dominated philosophy of science during the inter-War period (Richardson 2002; 2007; Hardcastle and Richardson 2003; Misak 2013, 155 ff.; Mladenovic 2017, pp. 167-195).

For me, the fate of the Vienna Circle was not solely of intellectual interest. My story directly intersects with these Europeans through the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science that I directed from 1993 to 2010. This interdisciplinary lecture series is a direct descendant of the discussions that had begun in Austria among these innovative thinkers. After World War II, those assembled in Boston met (under the leadership of Philip Frank) several times a year to discuss papers about science that would be delivered by scholars, principally those working at various local universities but also included visiting academics. In 1960, asmall fund was transferred to Boston University, and under the guidance of Marx Wartovsky and Bob Cohen (my predecessor as Director of the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science), the “Vienna meetings” continued. Gerald Holton, as “secretary,” kept records of the earlier proceedings (Holton

Preface

1995a). I took pride in the minor role I played in this notable chapter of twentieth century philosophy of science.

How and why I assumed this role in my transition to the halls of philosophy after twenty years of basic biomedical research is explained in the opening chapters, so suffice it to note here that I found my scholarship oriented by those early Euro-American philosophical discussions. The positivist ideals that I thought governed my own investigations had, in fact, been effectively challenged by Polanyi’s understanding of the scientific enterprise. His views about the interpretive aspects of scientific inquiry and their place in the universe of human ideas found residence in my own post-positivist understanding of the scientific endeavor. This story then is a comment on the fate of those central European ideas in America, where the search for true knowledge—certainty in the broadest sense—developed as an epistemological ideal was radically transformed. Accordingly, publication of this essay by the Central European University Press closes a circle comprised of both intellectual and personal elements; clearly, a most welcomed homecoming for a man who has so self-consciously sought to integrate diverse ways of thinking exemplified by the oppositions of “Two Cultures” (scientific/hermeneutical, American/European) and the identifications associated with each.

“Thinking too hasa time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980, 28e)

have an unusual philosophical tale to tell, for I did not train as a philoso-

pher, but rather as a scientist. However, I became a scientist for philosoph-

ical reasons and the questions provoking my interest seem to me to be the questions of our era. Specifically, I searched for certainty in a world that I increasingly recognized as anything but certain. I grew up with a sense of assurance that a prescribed way of thinking—rational and methodical—conferred the best strategy of achieving the best outcome, if followed faithfully, whatever the issue and whatever the circumstance (albeit acknowledging the contingencies of circumstance and the fallibility of judgment). Faith in an ordered universe—natural and social—underpinned this attitude. Drawing from a religious wellspring of divine providence, a variant of such beliefinformed science’s own aspirations. As Alfred North Whitehead observed a century ago, this basic metaphysical position justifies the assumption that because we believe the universe is ordered, we are justified to proceed with a reasoned-based approach to query nature and, by extrapolation, organize human affairs (Whitehead 1925). Adjoining empiricism with rationality, science would minimize, if not eliminate, uncertainty. More, having the potential of achieving clarity, Truth would be found, not by revelation, but by the tools of objectivity and neutrality obtained by the confident work of the autonomous ego.

This quest launched modern philosophy, when René Descartes pondered how to escape the skepticism about fundamental categories of being: How could he know anything for certain? The existence of God was a central concern, but even more fundamentally, who, indeed, was this self-conscious ego that might ask such a question? And as he followed the logic of inquiry, Descartes decided that his only basis for building a world—a universe in which he could know the world, himself, and the divine—rested upon the certainty of his own self-conscious thought: “I think, therefore I am” thus became the countervailing motto to Montaigne’s skepticism, “there is no other certainty, but uncertainty” (Montaigne 1976, 392).' Based on the (putative) certainty of Descartes’s own self-consciousness, his assurance of himself as a thinking thing, he built an epistemology. This construct became the basis of modernity—a knowing agent, whose mind, independent of the material world, could confidently examine nature’s workings. The ensuing four centuries debated this schema and by the early twentieth century the “thinking thing” underlying modernity has been disassembled, deconstructed, and discarded. And with Cartesian conviction dismissed, the very foundations of modern philosophy cracked and crumbled. The ramifications have seeped into every crevice of our millennial culture.

When viewing the Cartesian project as the history of modernity, the primary “actor” of this drama is the scientist. Her original goals and prospects have been discounted, and in some cases abandoned, in recognition of science’s epistemological conceits. That is the story of deciphering the philosophical infrastructure of experimentation and interpretation, a chapter of intellectual history that forms the backbone of this narrative. But a deeper theme pertains to how science itself has revealed the limits of prediction while measuring the uncertainty at the core of reality. Indeed, uncertainty has attained a novel standing not only because of a massive cultural shift governing social principles, but also due to the probabilistic character of knowledge. From physics to systems biology, from economics to psychology, stochastic descriptions approximate, with varying degrees of certitude, the dynamics of complex systems. As a result, we live with renewed respect for the embedded limits of even the most methodical scientific conclusions. That modesty in turn has generated a deeper skepticism about critical analysis lacking the epistemic power of the laboratory.

Obviously, the continuum stretching between certainty and uncertainty is a cultural meter that has fluctuated throughout history. In our era, the needle is pushing towards the region of doubt. The ambiguities of the future are not the

1 Similar wording is found in other essay by Montaigne, e.g., “How our mind hinders itself,” (Montaigne 1976, 463), and parallel comments scattered throughout his writings, e.g., in “Of Presumption” (ibid., 481). For the intellectual and historical relation of Montaigne and Descartes, see Toulmin 1990, chapters 1 and 2.

issue, for unpredictable change is constitutive of human life. However, a novel kind of caution has appeared in recognizing a new paradox: With increasing scientific insight, the borders of knowledge appear more clearly. In other words, with scientific advances, uncertainty is better defined. And, despite the sophistication of our collective reliance on critical analysis, we have come to more modest expectations about our tools of thought—Reason and Objectivity— that grounded Enlightenment ideals and guided notions of progress. And with the reassessment of those values and methods, modernity has been challenged.

During my formative years, the values of science and its accompanying ideals were the prevalent cultural markers that guided my aspirations and framed my own sense of who I might become. Deliberate decisions had to be made as I planned my future. Coming of age in the 1960s proved challenging as the social winds of uncertainty were sweeping across the cultural landscape. Who could ignore the political turbulence of cities burning, political assassinations, disputed wars, and disruptive assaults on “establishment” authority and mores?* During this unrest, my assumed values and motivations were challenged. I had expected that my own good sense would orient me, and a new order would steady the rocking boat of my psyche. However, without a compass I was tossed about on churning seas. Confusion did not abate, and then the most obvious default position took hold, an assumption of sorts: The world was an ordered universe, so I must be the problem. Of course, I suffered adolescent perplexities, but that bewilderment was aggravated by the tempest of the times.

Little did I comprehend that my own disorientation was but a miniature mirror of vast historical forces at work. Only later did descriptions emerge that assigned conceptual categories to the shifts I witnessed. Following the Paris protests of 1968, the French postmodernists sang a refrain I would eventually understand: Reason imperiled, bequeathed relativism; social structures deconstructed, revealed society as a force field of vying power; the contingencies of language left a system of shifting signifiers; the ego defrocked, placed moral

2 The common reading of the 1950s as a period of convalescence and social ennui is belied by the turbulence and innovation in the literary, musical, and visual arts following World War II. Although barely making a ripple in the common discourse, the artistic innovations of this period threw off the remaining strictures of structure and representation that foreshadowed the radical political re-evaluations of the 1960s. For a global overview of the mid-1940s to early 1960s artistic culture, see Menand 2021. The literature addressing this period in terms of social change, political upheavals, and cultural experimentation is immense, but well chronicled by Gitlin 1987. And for a startling review of the momentous political and social disruptions of 1968, specifically, see Kurlansky 2005.

agency in limbo.? At the time, I did not appreciate the implications of these descriptions of a world turned up-side down. Indeed, I doubt they had even penetrated my consciousness. Instead, I understood the vast cultural storm in which I was living in political terms. Those were apparent; philosophical discernment followed much later.

The year I graduated from high school (1965) Bob Dylan sang, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”), or for that matter that a gale was raging. The second half of the 60s confirmed his prediction. The disassembly of values and standards profoundly altered expectations. Indeed, most of my cohort walked unsteadily into the future as existential uncertainty enveloped us. I appreciated the relativism of “reality,” both as lived socially and politically; the values governing behaviors were hardly universal. If a country could go mad, as did Nazi Germany, what conferred rationality? In the middle of the Vietnam War, what were the “right” choices? With whom would I stand? These questions, and a host of others, formed around an irritant that would pester me wherever I went: Who am I? One didn’t need a philosophy course in ethics to understand that identity emerged at the point where one stood on the moral landscape. And that was determined by how one sees reality. Choices were required, and passivity was not an option.

I failed to perceive the deeper currents at work that were later defined in terms of the profound re-orientations that had emerged with postmodernism. After all, with the attack on modernity’s foundations, “all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid.”* The intellectual framework only appeared later. So, as explained below, during college, I made a fledgling attempt at sorting out the perplexities as best I could. That effort took the form of defining my own identifications: Would I remain attached to the hermeneutical ways of thinking characterizing the arts, literature, and history, or, alternatively, would I seek the apparent steadiness of a career in science, based on an austere objectivity? Sorting out the apparent conflicted relationship of these ways of knowing ended in frustration. When I renewed that project twenty years later as an academic, I discovered how my original search for such a synthesis had a long, unresolved history. How I understood this apparent conflict

3 The literature on this bevy of issues is seemingly endless. Useful introductions include Best and Kellner 1991; Jacoby 1999; Thorne 2009; Rodgers 2011. In terms of the larger context of the emergence of postmodernism, see DeKoven 2004.

4 Charles Darwin, describing the earthquake in Concepcion, Chile. February 20, 1835 (Darwin 2010, 124).

is the narrative backbone of this story, a tale that exposes the tension between Two Cultures (science and the arts/humanities) and the fault lines within modernity. I witnessed the surface of a crisis in the standing order, but my confusions originated in this much larger contest about the legitimacy of the subjective in a world seemingly dominated by the stark objectivity of the sciences.

I was hardly unusual in regarding scientific thinking as the ideal modality by which to deal with the indeterminate. This had become an enduring tenet of the Enlightenment in which the cognitive ideals of certainty, completeness, and necessity were instantiated through association with the scientific enterprise.’ Later critical assessments left such promises as ideals, essentially unattainable. However, such revisionary understanding lay well beyond my horizon as I was about to choose a profession. I saw the question of certainty in the social terms of the times and as a personal psychological matter. To the extent that I placed my confusions in an intellectual context, I put science, the arts, and the interpretive disciplines in opposing corners and then allowed the combatants to battle for my soul. With whom would I identify? Eventually, after many ambivalent deliberations, I pursued a career in biomedicine as an academic physician. I did so, at least in the early stages of adapting to that choice, with an eye attuned to how science might be understood philosophically. It was a way of holding both ends of the stick—biology at one end and epistemology at the other.

ON CERTAINTY

This essay is not a historical study of the birth of science and its development, a topic garnering a vast literature, but rather a reflection on one ofits prominent underlying aspirations, namely, the search for certainty. Of course, science may be characterized in many ways, but as already mentioned, looking for certainty captures much of my own early motivations for entering the laboratory. Indeed, an irony underlies this tale, for my initial assumption that science would provide me with a way of achieving certainty proved innocent of complexities beyond my naive experience. What emerged instead was a better understanding of how science defines and measures uncertainty.

My youthful ideas about achieving order and predictability originated (at least in my socio-educational stratum) with a narrow idea of science that had

5 These epistemological ideals may be traced back to the ancients, but Kant encoded (some would say, enshrined) them in his Critique of Pure Reason (1787; see Kaufmann 1980, 186-87).

percolated throughout advanced Western cultures. The success of this form of applied Reason to conquer nature and enrich human industry seemed self-evident. Society’s contract with the scientific establishment had reaped huge rewards: nuclear physics had terminated World War II; laboratory-based medicine enjoyed spectacular advances; space travel was no longer a fantasy; megaagriculture had begun. Moreover, irrespective of achievements as assessed by the benefits of derivative technologies, a more fundamental ethos penetrated cultural norms. Science, in its positivist modality—its logic and empirical basis—had become the paragon of knowledge and its acquisition.

I had not anticipated revisions of these core ideals, for I did not appreciate the profound metaphysical shift that science itself brought to these assumptions. Complex systems (physical, biological, and social) are governed by non-linear dynamics and thus chance leads to a spectrum of outcomes and even to irreducible indeterminacies. My appreciation of the larger philosophical consequences of this general scientific characterization of systems qua systems began with my own laboratory research. As explained below, my studies of the biochemistry of inflammation revealed a cascade of interactions that defied simple mechanics and designated outcomes. The wider the cast of immune actors, the more complex their roles appeared. Remedy was sought in delving to smaller and more restricted inspections. But in going more microscopic, the “big picture” receded ever further from clear definition. Within my own research community, the theoretical issues underlying this general matter did not command much interest, so I looked elsewhere for guidance.

Two tributaries of thought coalesced around the question of certainty. Both pertained to science, one regarding a new awareness about complexity and the embedded probabilities that characterize studies of biological systems. The second concerned the very nature of how reality is depicted by the scientific enterprise.

1) When I began to think about these matters in the late 1980s, the science of complexity enjoyed a resurgence of interest. At the time, many entry points might have been chosen to learn about chaos theory and self-organization (Gleick 1987; Bonner 1988; Yates et al 1987; Langton 1989; Welch and Clegg 1985; Welch 1985; Keleti and Ovadi 1988), but I chose to re-acquaint myself with new theories of evolutionary biology that highlighted the probabilistic character of biological phenomena. This diversion into an utterly new discipline proved to be the inflection point of my career. I had no conscious intention of leaving the laboratory, but I soon became absorbed in the philosophical implications of studying modalities of causation radically different than the simple linear sequences invoked to model my own investigations. An awakening occurred when attending a symposium on neo-Darwinism organized by my Boston University colleague, Sahotra Sarkar.° There I was introduced to the underlying concepts of population dynamics and new views of evolutionary genetics, where probabilistic thinking was prominent. I soon became a sightseer in this territory, and while I never contributed to the field, viewing biology from that vantage fundamentally challenged many of my own unacknowledged philosophical commitments. And here, at the apparent conceptual chasm between the biochemistry of immune reactions and the vast play of evolutionary forces, philosophy of science beckoned. As explained in later chapters, soon thereafter I embarked on an entirely new intellectual venture, one that led to a radically revised understanding of the scientific enterprise, one at odds with my underlying assumptions about the quest for certainty.

2) The second line of inquiry began with studies of the ways scientific knowledge is accrued. The entry into philosophy built upon my own experience as a practicing biochemist and cell biologist. I found that my experimental research defied a simplistic positivist philosophy. For positivists, “genuine” knowledge (knowledge of anything that is not true by definition) is exclusively derived from experience of natural phenomena and their properties and relations as derived from objective and neutral data. These findings in turn are assembled in models and theories putatively free of subjective contaminants. This philosophy holds that the observer must become a “subject-less subject” to produce a universal “view from nowhere” (Fox Keller 1994; Nagel 1996). Strict positivism never seemed quite right to me. My own laboratory experience showed that the so-called Standard View not only distorted the way science is conducted, but it set standards that were simply wrong. Fortuitously, a compelling literature challenging that depiction had established an alternate understanding. Led by Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Michael Polanyi, Paul Feyerabend, and many others, positivist ideas were critiqued and then shed.

Thus, a second aspect of the certainty/uncertainty axis concerned the very nature of scientific discovery and the views of reality derived from its methods. A confluence of historical, sociological, and philosophical characterizations of science converged on a singular conclusion: The rationality underpinning scientific discovery and theory failed any prescribed methods. Instead, scientific investigation was a pragmatic process without formal order and drew from var-

6 “Founders of Evolutionary Genetics, March 6, 1990.” Those lectures were later expanded and published (Sarkar 1992).

ious human cognitive and social resources. When the study of nature and the study of society were perceived as inexorably linked—not only interwoven in a trivial social sense but locked together at their deepest roots—a novel picture of science emerged.

In arare display of arcane philosophy spilling into the public sphere, debate over the truth claims of science ignited a far-flung battle over the extent scientific facts are “constructed,” as opposed to “discovered.” Indeed, when radical constructivists extended their positions to the point of relativizing scientific findings, polite philosophical disagreement grew into wide-spread polemics of the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s. After all, Truth and Reality had been placed in jeopardy, at least as assessed by those holding a positivist view of the world. Fortunately, my arrival to the halls of philosophy coincided with this controversy. An auspicious setting for my initiation, these were the issues that had originally caught my adolescent attention and pestered me throughout my scientific career.

I aligned with the revisionists by which my assessment of the scientific enterprise shifted from the positivists’ Standard View (research governed by strict neutrality of the observer; logical progression set by Objectivity to arrive at some idealized Truth) to a very different understanding: Science is constructed through negotiation of its practitioners at various levels of discourse and pragmatic concerns, and rather than holding to a rigid fact/value distinction, a set of varying epistemic and non-epistemic values determine what is chosen as evidence and how it is interpreted.” Some would regard this “fluid” characterization of science as “postmodern,” but it hardly appeared as a new development. After all, the antecedents of this revision originated in the romantic reaction to the positivist conceits of the late nineteenth century. That story, a faintly disguised self-revelation of my own romantic affinities, proved to be the “hinge” of my own scholarship (further explained in chapter 10).§

7 Epistemic values pertain to cognitive success, i.e., true knowledge or justified belief (e.g., parsimony, coherence, predictability); non-epistemic values, so-called “contextual values,” are derived from social, historical, linguistic, ideological, and philosophical determinants. Grossly, epistemic values are “internal” to scientific knowledge, while non-epistemic values are regarded as “external” or secondary.

8 Note, Romantic and Romanticism capitalized refers to the various movements in the arts, literature, philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century, which also includes that period of science (biology, in particular) in which the irreducible character of organic processes supported notions of vitalism. Romanticism with a small “r” refers to the sensibilities akin to those of that period. As discussed in chapter 8, despite the taint of such views, I embraced certain aspects of romantic biology, albeit drastically refined to accommodate contemporary theory. My early publications reveal this orientation (e.g., Tauber 1993).

My intellectual inquiry began with a historical-philosophical examination of my own scientific experience that set the stage for a broader interpretation of post-Kuhnian science studies. As a practicing laboratory investigator, I had confidence in the truth claims I published. And precisely because I was an experienced researcher, I sided with those who argued for a more circumspect view of scientific method, theory construction, and interpretation. So, when I launched my own examination of immunology’s theoretical development, I drew from both camps.

SCHOLARSHIP AS SELE-KNOWLEDGE

This essay narrates the sources of my interpretations and thus situates my analysis both as a scientific practitioner and as a critic. I have been able to fulfill my early aspirations to link the science-humanities divide by exercising an interpretive evaluation of the research enterprise. Instead of science insulated from other forms of knowledge, I have come to appreciate how the disciplines of philosophy, history, and sociology offer a powerful means for understanding the scientific endeavor in its broadest intellectual and social contexts. On this basis I recognized that the Two Culture separation imposes a false division, when, in fact, a rich crosstalk is not only possible, but important both to understand science and to enrich the disciplines that are charged to study Western history and the institutions that constitute our culture. I would contribute to that dialogue and thus found the pathway to pursue my neglected interests.

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The Triumph of Uncertainty

About this book

Front matter

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

The end

The Triumph of Uncertainty

About this book

Front matter

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

The end

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