The Restless Philosophy of Science: Changing Theories, Contested Evidence, and the Search for Truth - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Science is supposed to be the reliable one. It observes the facts, tests its theories, corrects its errors, and moves steadily toward the truth—at least according to the version found in school textbooks, institutional press releases, and speeches delivered shortly before the evidence becomes complicated.

The Restless Philosophy of Science explores what really happens when theories change, experiments fail, experts disagree, and evidence supports more than one explanation. Through famous disputes and scientific revolutions—from phlogiston and planetary motion to evolution, medical evidence, continental drift, replication, and manufactured doubt—the book examines how scientific knowledge is actually made.

Why do scientists preserve theories that appear to have been falsified? Can observations ever be neutral? What makes one explanation better than another? Is scientific consensus trustworthy? Do social values corrupt objectivity, or help make it possible? And if successful theories have repeatedly been replaced, why should we believe the theories accepted today?

Written with clarity and without unnecessary ceremony, the book introduces the central ideas of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and other major thinkers without turning the discussion into a procession of important surnames. Abstract questions are grounded in historical cases, contemporary controversies, and the inconvenient details that simplified accounts of “the scientific method” tend to misplace.

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