The Struggle for the Soul of Science

This book is incoherent fluff. I do not have the patience to give more than one illustration of this very plain fact, so let us consider for example Chapter 8, which is called "So, why are philosophers of science pro-science?" According to Fuller, "At work here is ... a relatively unnoticed legacy of Cold War science policy ... [which] encouraged the scientist to function less as a free agent who aims to transcend boundaries than a cognitive module who operates within strict parameters ... This ... was epitomised in Kuhn's valorisation of 'normal science'" (pp. 86-87). Thus Fuller's answer to the title question is apparently that philosophers are pro-science because they aim to underwrite (or even "epitomise") certain societal values. But this is soon contradicted: "From a psychiatric standpoint, the accounts of science put forward by the logical positivists and Kuhn ... were 'reaction formations' in response to traumas that had dealt severe blows to their normative ideal of science. The traumas were, respectively, the 20th century's two world wars. In response, they promoted excessively idealised visions of science that were the opposite of the tendencies they rejected in the science of their day. ... Kuhn responded to this situation much as the logical positivists had, namely, by never formally acknowledging the technological dimension of modern science" (p. 89). So apparently philosophers were "traumatised" by the attitude that they themselves "epitomised." And not only did they epitomise it, they also "responded" to it by "promoting the opposite." Furthermore, they completely ignored the entire issue, as had every other philosopher of science before them for thousands of years. The natural way to explain this adherence to a millennia-old status quo is of course to postulate dramatic and unprecedented "traumas."