TY - JOUR
T1 - A Mystery Still
AU - Shanahan, Timothy
N1 - Shanahan, T. (1999). A mystery still: Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? by Michael Ruse. Trends in Ecology Evolution, 14(10), 411. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(99)01707-3
PY - 1999/10/10
Y1 - 1999/10/10
N2 - Is scientific ‘knowledge’ merely culture masquerading as objective truth? Is it a creation rather than a discovery, an artifact of a particular society that would not necessarily be the same in different places and at different times, and thus has no special claim to ‘truth’? Was Einstein’s theory of relativity merely part of a ‘general social and cultural transformation which expressed itself in a variety of “modern” movements’1? Is the ‘individualistic view of the biological world’ characteristic of Darwinism ‘simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century’2? Or, does scientific knowledge describe a real world that exists independently of human cognizance and that would be the same even if we had never been? Should we say with Max Planck, ‘there is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced upon him by that natural world. They are the expression of a rational world order’?
AB - Is scientific ‘knowledge’ merely culture masquerading as objective truth? Is it a creation rather than a discovery, an artifact of a particular society that would not necessarily be the same in different places and at different times, and thus has no special claim to ‘truth’? Was Einstein’s theory of relativity merely part of a ‘general social and cultural transformation which expressed itself in a variety of “modern” movements’1? Is the ‘individualistic view of the biological world’ characteristic of Darwinism ‘simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century’2? Or, does scientific knowledge describe a real world that exists independently of human cognizance and that would be the same even if we had never been? Should we say with Max Planck, ‘there is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced upon him by that natural world. They are the expression of a rational world order’?
UR - https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/phil_fac/269
M3 - Book/Film/Article review
VL - 14
SP - 411
EP - 411
JO - Trends in Ecology and Evolution
JF - Trends in Ecology and Evolution
IS - 10
ER -