Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant defense of the scientific worldview, 1 Jul 1999
By A Customer
Norman Levitt's name will be familiar to anyone following the so-called "Science Wars." It was, after all, his (and coauthor Paul Gross') earlier book, "Higher Superstition," that sparked the most recent slew of battles in this war, and inspired Alan Sokal to write his notorious hoax article for Social Text. For those who appreciated Sokal's own recent book, "Fashionable Nonsense," but found the pacing a bit sluggish, rest assured: Levitt is a better writer than Sokal, and even wittier. Also, with only a single author, this book is more focused than other recent volumes on the topic, such as Koertge's "A House Built on Sand." Levitt is not afraid to tread on sensitive toes: already in the Introduction, he's put forward his compelling case that nonscientists are almost humorously unqualified to pass judgment on the validity and veracity of the conclusions drawn by mainstream, traditional, objective scientific programs. If you still think, despite all you've heard and read, that all scientific conclusions are socially conditioned, why not give this volume a spin and try to rebut Levitt's arguments.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant defense of the scientific worldview, 1 Jul 1999
By A Customer
Norman Levitt's name will be familiar to anyone following the so-called "Science Wars." It was, after all, his (and coauthor Paul Gross') earlier book, "Higher Superstition," that sparked the most recent slew of battles in this war, and inspired Alan Sokal to write his notorious hoax article for Social Text. For those who appreciated Sokal's own recent book, "Fashionable Nonsense," but found the pacing a bit sluggish, rest assured: Levitt is a better writer than Sokal, and even wittier. Also, with only a single author, this book is more focused than other recent volumes on the topic, such as Koertge's "A House Built on Sand." Levitt is not afraid to tread on sensitive toes: already in the Introduction, he's put forward his compelling case that nonscientists are almost humorously unqualified to pass judgment on the validity and veracity of the conclusions drawn by mainstream, traditional, objective scientific programs. If you still think, despite all you've heard and read, that all scientific conclusions are socially conditioned, why not give this volume a spin and try to rebut Levitt's arguments.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A deeply felt defence of science - or, Ya boo sucks to you, Zeus!, 7 Jan 2009
It's the New Year. Detox products are flying off the shelves. Both BBC radio and television have on their news and magazine programmes items about whether detox is a good idea, with equal time politely given to the person selling the product and the scientist putting the sceptical argument. The news anchor is, of course, not a scientist and guidelines anyway militate against the broadcaster adjudicating. It's up to us to decide who is right, according to our own fancy. Given that our "appetite for delusion is vast" this is not good. It is Norman Levitt's belief that "our culture has become more ambivalent toward science" and, throughout this marvellous book, he argues "that science must automatically be declared the outright winner whenever it comes into conflict with contradictory belief systems." This is a no-holds-barred defence of science against all other pretenders to knowledge, from the relatively harmless hokum of detox regimes for the middle classes with more money than sense, through the bright and shiny "postmodernist epistemological skepticism that has made a comfortable home for itself among academic humanists", to that old wrangling chestnut, religion. It also happens to contain some of the finest writing that I've read. For example, after making the reasonable point "that verbal clutter and the interminable jangle of empty neologisms" do not "signify intellectual exactitude and authentic insight", he offers the following observation: "Beneath what is usually described as the frisky postmodern celebration of diversity, multiplicity, and the effacing of boundaries in all matters cultural and artistic, there lurks a besetting sadness."
Each of the fourteen chapters takes a major subject - including culture, teleology, credulity, journalism, democracy - and explores how science fits in - or doesn't. I could write a whole review on each chapter, so rich is the material. A few scattered nuggets illustrate recurring themes: "claims of competence are not self-validating"; science "is an elitist calling"; "while most people vaguely and casually approve of science, their admiration is fogged by incomprehension"; "scientists know how to form opinions that are set up in advance for revision or self-correction"; science "finds small virtue in blind appeal to authority"; "polysyllabic fatuity".
Underpinning everything is an unashamed celebration of science as "our only unambiguously encouraging model of how evidence is to be garnered and weighed, how theories are to be formulated, tested, and, where necessary, modified or even rejected." The work of scientists "provides a standard of accuracy, reliability, and stability to which other branches of knowledge must ideally aspire." Levitt quotes Miroslav Holub approvingly: "Definitions of wisdom that exclude science, at this stage in the planet's history, are just lazy, persistent metaphors."
So why is there such hostility toward science? How does the image of scientific culture as cold and inhumane find purchase? Levitt shows how two key terms provide crannies for these misgivings: "monism" and "reductionism". Most scientists are monists (they hold that there is essentially only one kind of reality, "governed by its unique and invariable set of laws") and reductionists (they hold that "the most complex objects and processes exist... as concatenations of simpler objects and processes"). Combined together as "materialism" this bogey man is enough to send some delicate souls rushing into the arms of the nearest priest and the "great dead end" that is Descartes's dualism. The problem is that, for anyone wanting to open their eyes to the universe, this scientific viewpoint, "with its methodological and ontological restrictions, has worked splendidly". For many people, however, there "is a highly distressing implication". Science "has no room for human values, purposes, ethics, or hopes". Science "cannot sustain moral judgments".
On this final point, I think Levitt uncharacteristically both misstates the true position and misses a polemical opportunity. While science cannot originate moral principles, surely it can and must sustain moral judgments, in the sense that these require a clear-eyed and rational appraisal of the evidence and not a blinkered appeal to authority? The polemical point is that while science cannot originate moral principles, neither can religion, and the great lie that it can, reiterated ad nauseam by a self-serving priesthood, must be combated with reason.
As quibbles go, this is nugatory, and does not detract from Levitt's main point, which is that science is a matter of "is" rather than "ought". However, even its own territory is squeezed by the pincer movement of the demotic (in all matters, not just at the ballot box, "one person's opinion is as good as another's") and the academic (postmodernism claims "objectivity" to be a spurious ideal). While busy repulsing these invaders, scientists can be forgiven for regarding religion as a spent force, at least the variety that keeps its hands to itself. Although few in the West today live "in terror of thunder from the local pulpit" we are still saddled with the "predisposition to think teleologically" - which religion continues to exploit. The essence of religion "is to assume that a purpose lurks behind the way things are". Levitt recognizes both the wishfulness and the danger of such thinking, and calls on all of us, scientists and nonscientists alike, to "create and sustain a society and a culture that is mature enough and brave enough to handle the gifts - and the uncomfortable truths - that science affords." He rightly rejects the charge of scientism: scientists are "too knowing and too skeptical to make good worshipers, even at a shrine that they themselves have created." In the end this is much more than a devastating critique of fashionable nonsense. It is an inspiring affirmation of the "Whig" view of history: there has been progress, and science should be proud of the role it has played.
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by Ben Goldacre
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
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