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Scientific Irrationalism: Origins of a Postmodern Cult
"With a combination of dazzling philosophical acumen and scarifying wit, Stove does for irrationalism in the philosophy of science what the Romans did for Carthage in the Third Punic War. He assaults and destroys it utterly. It has been a long time since I have read a book of philosophy as entertaining and illuminating." -Roger Kimball, The New Criterion
Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philosophical essayists of his era. A fearless attacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Darwinian theories of human behavior, and philosophical idealism.
Since its inception in the 1940s, the firld of science studies, originally intended to bridge the gap between science and the humanities, has been the center of controversy and debate. The most notable figures in this debate are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. In Scientific Origins of a Postmodern Cult, David Stove demonstrates how extravagant has been the verbiage wasted on this issue and how irrational the combatants. He shows that Kuhn and Popper share considerable common ground. Stove argues that the problems all reside in the reasoning of the critics. He identifies the logical mistakes by and conceptual elisions made by Kuhn and Popper and their supporters, as well as their collective dependency on a single argument made by the philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. He then demonstrates how little potency that argument actually has for the claims of science.
In his foreword, Keith Windschuttle explains the history of the debate surrounding the field of science studies and explores David Stove's contribution and his lack of recognition for that contribution. In an afterword, James Franklin discusses reactions to Stove's work. This book will be of interest to scientists, philosophers, and general readers.
David Charles Stove (1927-1994) taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and, until his retirement in 1988, at the University of Sydney. He was the author of numerous essays, articles, and many books including Against the Idols of the Age, The Plato Cult and Other Intellectual Follies, and two posthumously published volumes, Darwinian Fairytales, and Cricket versus Republicanism.
"...this book certainly broaches current topics in the philosophy of science with provocative arguments. It also contains a clear introduction by Keith Windschuttle and an interesting summary by James Franklin..."- Choice
Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philosophical essayists of his era. A fearless attacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Darwinian theories of human behavior, and philosophical idealism.
Since its inception in the 1940s, the firld of science studies, originally intended to bridge the gap between science and the humanities, has been the center of controversy and debate. The most notable figures in this debate are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. In Scientific Origins of a Postmodern Cult, David Stove demonstrates how extravagant has been the verbiage wasted on this issue and how irrational the combatants. He shows that Kuhn and Popper share considerable common ground. Stove argues that the problems all reside in the reasoning of the critics. He identifies the logical mistakes by and conceptual elisions made by Kuhn and Popper and their supporters, as well as their collective dependency on a single argument made by the philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. He then demonstrates how little potency that argument actually has for the claims of science.
In his foreword, Keith Windschuttle explains the history of the debate surrounding the field of science studies and explores David Stove's contribution and his lack of recognition for that contribution. In an afterword, James Franklin discusses reactions to Stove's work. This book will be of interest to scientists, philosophers, and general readers.
David Charles Stove (1927-1994) taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and, until his retirement in 1988, at the University of Sydney. He was the author of numerous essays, articles, and many books including Against the Idols of the Age, The Plato Cult and Other Intellectual Follies, and two posthumously published volumes, Darwinian Fairytales, and Cricket versus Republicanism.
"...this book certainly broaches current topics in the philosophy of science with provocative arguments. It also contains a clear introduction by Keith Windschuttle and an interesting summary by James Franklin..."- Choice
- GenresPhilosophyScience
218 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2001
6 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
David Stove
13 books22 followersDavid Charles Stove was Australian philosopher and a widely published polemical journalist. His work in philosophy of science included criticisms of David Hume's inductive skepticism, as well as what he regarded as the irrationalism of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend. Stove was also a critic of Idealism and sociobiology, describing the latter as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 25, 2019
A postmodern's nightmare
Stove dismantles liberal anti-West postmodernists crowding our university humanities with unrelenting sense, humor and insult. Berkley's Feyerabend, MIT's Kuhn, U of London's Popper and Lakatos take a whipping so stinging, their institutions of "higher learning" should be smoldering (and ashamed) for the length of their existence.
Chapter 1 reveals their overused technique of quoting success-words like "knowledge," "truth," "proof," implying the opposite of what these words mean just as done above with "higher learning." Chapter 2 is so dry it reads like a math text but does give examples of word games played. Reminiscent of art historians trying to explain art by telling us who the artists were, Stove reveals postmodern philosophers and sociologists expressing a similar inability to separate what science is from what scientists do. Appendices following chapter 1 & 2 summarize how funny and farcical postmodernism ("cultural studies" or whatever they call themselves this afternoon) really is.
So ends the first two, occasionally laborious chapters with chapter 3 (and little of the text is a cruise), showing us not how irrationalists ply their trade but how such silliness got started and why it's sustained. In a riveting passage we find Einstein doing psychological damage to Newton (as far as the public and philosophers are concerned) and what was believed to be his concrete truths. (With no mention of non-intuitive quantum mechanics around the same time.) There seems some embarrassment from the philosophers of science with an enduring determination not to be bitten by certainty again, adopting the easy and now popular method of avoiding certainty rather than striving to be correct. Thus Hume, forgotten for 150 years, is resurrected to service in the 20th century for a movement "of retreat from confidence in science which was so high, and constantly rising, in the two preceding centuries," writes Stove. Oddly, Stove fails to note overreaction to Einstein by the likes of Kuhn who claim one theory completely replaces another. Newton has been used never more than today by every aircraft, missile, satellite, automobile and tricycle maker in the world. Apparently Newton is doing just fine on earth, though he has a perilous time near stars, black holes and quasars.
If, as postmoderns promote, there is no accumulation of knowledge and generalizations of specifics through inductive reasoning are wrong, Stove's reader is provided simpler questions outside labyrinthine logic arguments. e.g. Given these postmodern rules, has the knowledge of say, driving a car, always been known to humanity - since Homo erectus perhaps? Or was it later acquired adding to our overall knowledge? Each time Feyerabend bought a new car, assuming he did, did he have to learn to drive all over again, since experience of one specific case cannot be generalized to other cases? Or maybe, as Stove notes, Feyerabend didn't drive, but simply turned himself into a bird. To Feyerabend that is just as likely, and as reasonable to believe as our ability to justifiably and accurately apply induction. Stoves example that "all fires are hot" further clarifies the obvious. Postmodern designs try desperately to convince us that we can never know if fires "will be hot," or if fires we never saw or experienced were hot. Despite clear violations of physics - which philosophers don't grasp - this kind of mental acrobatics is what makes the whole movement so inane, and incomprehensibly dominant in academia. But if we remember it doesn't have to make reasoned sense to serve political extremes - discounting all certainty and Western-style knowledge for insertion of other preferences - then what Stove has done is reveal the transparent nature of the Emperors elaborate clothes.
Stove dismantles liberal anti-West postmodernists crowding our university humanities with unrelenting sense, humor and insult. Berkley's Feyerabend, MIT's Kuhn, U of London's Popper and Lakatos take a whipping so stinging, their institutions of "higher learning" should be smoldering (and ashamed) for the length of their existence.
Chapter 1 reveals their overused technique of quoting success-words like "knowledge," "truth," "proof," implying the opposite of what these words mean just as done above with "higher learning." Chapter 2 is so dry it reads like a math text but does give examples of word games played. Reminiscent of art historians trying to explain art by telling us who the artists were, Stove reveals postmodern philosophers and sociologists expressing a similar inability to separate what science is from what scientists do. Appendices following chapter 1 & 2 summarize how funny and farcical postmodernism ("cultural studies" or whatever they call themselves this afternoon) really is.
So ends the first two, occasionally laborious chapters with chapter 3 (and little of the text is a cruise), showing us not how irrationalists ply their trade but how such silliness got started and why it's sustained. In a riveting passage we find Einstein doing psychological damage to Newton (as far as the public and philosophers are concerned) and what was believed to be his concrete truths. (With no mention of non-intuitive quantum mechanics around the same time.) There seems some embarrassment from the philosophers of science with an enduring determination not to be bitten by certainty again, adopting the easy and now popular method of avoiding certainty rather than striving to be correct. Thus Hume, forgotten for 150 years, is resurrected to service in the 20th century for a movement "of retreat from confidence in science which was so high, and constantly rising, in the two preceding centuries," writes Stove. Oddly, Stove fails to note overreaction to Einstein by the likes of Kuhn who claim one theory completely replaces another. Newton has been used never more than today by every aircraft, missile, satellite, automobile and tricycle maker in the world. Apparently Newton is doing just fine on earth, though he has a perilous time near stars, black holes and quasars.
If, as postmoderns promote, there is no accumulation of knowledge and generalizations of specifics through inductive reasoning are wrong, Stove's reader is provided simpler questions outside labyrinthine logic arguments. e.g. Given these postmodern rules, has the knowledge of say, driving a car, always been known to humanity - since Homo erectus perhaps? Or was it later acquired adding to our overall knowledge? Each time Feyerabend bought a new car, assuming he did, did he have to learn to drive all over again, since experience of one specific case cannot be generalized to other cases? Or maybe, as Stove notes, Feyerabend didn't drive, but simply turned himself into a bird. To Feyerabend that is just as likely, and as reasonable to believe as our ability to justifiably and accurately apply induction. Stoves example that "all fires are hot" further clarifies the obvious. Postmodern designs try desperately to convince us that we can never know if fires "will be hot," or if fires we never saw or experienced were hot. Despite clear violations of physics - which philosophers don't grasp - this kind of mental acrobatics is what makes the whole movement so inane, and incomprehensibly dominant in academia. But if we remember it doesn't have to make reasoned sense to serve political extremes - discounting all certainty and Western-style knowledge for insertion of other preferences - then what Stove has done is reveal the transparent nature of the Emperors elaborate clothes.
February 26, 2014
All right, Stove is clever and witty. I don't often guffaw aloud while reading dense, symbolic logic-infused analytic-philosophical prose. Ultimately as a sociology grad student with a philosophy BA, interested in education, epistemology, science, and religion who is also a fan of Hume and might have been 'bewitched' by Popper as well if not for works like this, I appreciate Stove's insight into both the logical underpinnings of science (particularly relevant as inductive probabilism seems in the social sciences regarding statistical analysis) and the reason that many disciplines (including, perhaps notoriously, my own) are shot through with varying formulations of irrationalism, of which some postmodern species are but the more recent exemplars.
June 26, 2023
Not impressed. It did make me laugh a couple of times, and learned some new stuff- however he strains to support his thesis (and frivolously represents Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, & Lakatos) and it reads mostly like chaff. As an ignorant Star Trek afficiando and aspiring smell detective myself, I liked how he used the expression "a rash of Spocks" and mentioned tincture at the end. It's a short book, a slog to read, and may have been better half as long.
November 10, 2020
One of my favorite books of philosophy, it's clear, witty and logical. Debunks
the sacred cows of the philosophy of science (Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn &
Feyerbend). Positivism (which just means evidence-based) and Bayesian
epistemology (which is basically the mathematical way of describing "common
sense") are the way to go. Not Popperism.
I also recommend people also read "when reason goes on holiday" by the
philosopher of science Nevan Sesardic who goes into the historical detail of the
origin of philosophy of science and on Lakatos. The highest prize in the
philosophy of science is the Lakatos prize, and their is a vested interest to
keep Lakato's biography to be squeaky clean. Lakatos however is probably the
most psychopathic philosopher of all time.
the sacred cows of the philosophy of science (Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn &
Feyerbend). Positivism (which just means evidence-based) and Bayesian
epistemology (which is basically the mathematical way of describing "common
sense") are the way to go. Not Popperism.
I also recommend people also read "when reason goes on holiday" by the
philosopher of science Nevan Sesardic who goes into the historical detail of the
origin of philosophy of science and on Lakatos. The highest prize in the
philosophy of science is the Lakatos prize, and their is a vested interest to
keep Lakato's biography to be squeaky clean. Lakatos however is probably the
most psychopathic philosopher of all time.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews