The Triumph of Uncertainty: Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

Tauber's book explores how science has evolved from seeking explanatory certainty to embracing probabilistic epistemologies due to the complexity of modern systems. He argues that individual scientists' interpretive faculties and non-epistemic values shape knowledge production, highlighting the correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 404 pages
Publication date: 10 September 2022
Publisher: Central European University Press

Tauber, a prominent figure in the history and philosophy of science, provides a distinctive autobiographical account of how philosophers and historians have characterized science as a discipline of thought over the past century. He structures his narrative through his personal quest for explanatory certainty, which was displaced by the probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex systems in physics, biology, economics, and the social sciences during the 20th century. This "triumph of uncertainty" is an inevitable consequence of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality, and it extends beyond these epistemological boundaries. The interpretive faculties of individual scientists, as described by Michael Polanyi as the "personal" and the "tacit," invariably influence how data are understood.

While positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge. Tauber presents a case study of these claims by demonstrating how immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements into its theoretical development and how these, in turn, have influenced interpretive problems surrounding biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood is strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self-knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood speak.

Weight: 584g
Dimension: 155 x 229 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789633865811