Scientific Irrationalism

By: David Stove

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Hardcover | 15 January 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
181 Pages

Age
18+

Dimensions(cm)
23.6 x 16.0 x 2.3

Hardcover

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In fewer than two hundred pages, David Stove renders the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins.

This dazzling gem walks through Hume's inductive skepticism and how that became Popper's denial of induction, which both freed and inspired his successors' (Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend) increasingly irrational and absurd views on science. Popper untethered science from induction and soon after watched in horror as the ineluctable consequences of this departure gave birth to a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating, perhaps, in Paul Feyerabend's summation that "anything goes' when it comes to defining or describing science.

With undeniable logic, a strikingly deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand essential to making things patently absurd seem otherwise, and regular displays of wit that border hilarity, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought.

Stove's views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove's insider-outsider perspective, the train-wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and "science studies" is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study.

Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is--and what it is not.

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