The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
Author :
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
Total Pages : 368
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781631491382
ISBN-13 : 1631491385
Rating : 4/5 (82 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by : Michael Strevens

Download or read book The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science written by Michael Strevens and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science Related Books

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
Language: en
Pages: 368
Authors: Michael Strevens
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-10-13 - Publisher: Liveright Publishing

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca N
The Knowledge Machine
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Michael Strevens
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2022-02-03 - Publisher: Penguin Group

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A groundbreaking and timely analysis of how science works and how we can preserve its power to grow our knowledge Over the last three centuries, huge leaps in o
The Knowledge Machine
Language: en
Pages: 368
Authors: Michael Strevens
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2020-10-01 - Publisher: Penguin UK

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Rich with tales of discovery from Galileo to general relativity, a stimulating and timely analysis of how science works and why we need it. 'The best introducti
Science and Values
Language: en
Pages: 176
Authors: Larry Laudan
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 1984 - Publisher: Univ of California Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Laudan constructs a fresh approach to a longtime problem for the philosopher of science: how to explain the simultaneous and widespread presence of both agreeme
Depth
Language: en
Pages: 537
Authors: Michael Strevens
Categories: Philosophy
Type: BOOK - Published: 2011-09-30 - Publisher: Harvard University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What does it mean for scientists to truly understand, rather than to merely describe, how the world works? Michael Strevens proposes a novel theory of scientifi