Scandalous Knowledge

Abstract

This book contextualizes, explains and defends the radically new ways of understanding science, truth and knowledge associated with constructivist epistemology and contemporary science studies and offers related perspectives on a set of significant current intellectual issues. Early chapters present an overview of the conceptual and empirical problems that led to twentieth-century critiques of traditional realist-rationalist epistemology and logical-empiricist philosophy of science and provide detailed discussions of the alternative accounts of knowledge and science offered by such influential figures as Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, David Bloor and Bruno Latour. Succeeding chapters illuminate the scandals-perplexities, equivocations, hoaxes and overheated controversies--that have attended these developments, including the misplaced fears and empty charges of “relativism” directed at proponents of these new views and the related misunderstandings and misrepresentations involved in the so-called science wars. Later chapters present informed, non-polemical perspectives on the contentious institutional and intellectual relations between the natural sciences and the humanities, the claims of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior, cognition and culture and contemporary debates over how to conceive the ontological and ethical relations between humans and animals.

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