Fashionable Nonsense

This is, first, a jeremiad against the cheerful scientific ignorance on display in so much postmodernist philosophy. I admit to having enjoyed the critique—it’s razor sharp and often funny. But you don’t have to be interested in postmodernism to enjoy what emerges from this: a wonderfully clear, readable, undogmatic discussion of what characterizes good (and bad) scientific practice in a wide variety of disciplines. The authors usefully compare science to a criminal investigation. Science, they say, is simply “a rational response to investigation under complex uncertainty”—but detective work is an art, and (a jab at Karl Popper here) “no one… show more.