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By James Robert Brown

Realism is an enlightening tale, a story which enriches our event and makes it extra intelligible. but this glorious photo of humanity's most sensible efforts at wisdom has been badly bruised through quite a few critics. James Robert Brown in Smoke and Mirrors fights again opposed to figures equivalent to Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Michael Ruse and Hilary Putnam who've attacked realist money owed of technology. yet this quantity isn't entirely dedicated to battling Rorty and others who blow smoke in our eyes; the second one part is anxious with arguing that there are a few awesome ways that technology mirrors the area. The function of abstraction, summary items and a priori methods of having at truth are all explored in exhibiting how technology displays fact. Smoke and Mirrors is a defence of technology and data commonly in addition to a defence of a selected approach of knowing technology. it truly is of curiosity to all those that want or want to know how technology works.

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Extra resources for Smoke and Mirrors. How Science Reflects Reality

Sample text

It is hard to say why realist accounts of the success of science have gone wrong. Of course, one answer is that realism itself is wrong. But this is an answer we should be loath to accept; so before we do, let’s explore at least one different kind of approach to the problem. What realists need, I suggest, is a different style of explanation entirely. I shall now try to spell this out, if only briefly. I stress the tentative, exploratory and sketchy nature of the proposal to follow; it is intended merely as a beginning.

In this way the explanandum is said to be rendered ‘intelligible’; from the story we see how the events in question are possible. It is often claimed that Darwinian evolution, for instance, is unable to satisfy the Hempelian form, but that it is explanatory nevertheless. It provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions, but it succeeds in some sense or other in explaining things. Consider some examples: Why does the giraffe have a long neck? Explanation: The ancestors of the modern giraffe fed on trees, and those with long necks were able to reach more when food was scarce (such as in the occasional drought).

This prosaic analysis of science gives new meaning to ‘publish or perish’. Of course, our anthropologist’s caution is entirely correct in not taking the scientists’ self-description at face value; any other attitude would simply beg the question. But we may err in the other direction. While we needn’t a priori take their pronouncements at face value, scientist’s self-descriptions may nevertheless be correct, and we should allow the possibility of discovering that this is so. Latour, in the field, writes of himself: The anthropologist feels vindicated in having retained his anthropological perspective in the face of the beguiling charms of his informants: they claim merely to be scientists discovering facts; he doggedly argued that they were writers and readers in the business of being convinced and convincing others.

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