Why It's OK to Trust Science

This book provides a defense of science and addresses its detractors, offering readers a well-researched defense of science and a polemic addressed to its detractors. It critically examines the recent history of critiques of science and presents case studies from recent advances in dinosaur paleontology and climate science. It is highly readable and accessible, exposing the flaws of the undertermination thesis and exploring whether moral and other value-laden questions can be answered by science.

Format: Hardback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 27 July 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Why should science have more authority than other ways of knowing? Is science merely a social construct? Or even worse: a tool of oppression? This book boldly takes on these and other explosive questions—lodged by ideologues on the left and the right—and offers readers a well-researched defense of science and a polemic addressed to its detractors.

Why Its OK to Trust Science critically examines the recent history of critiques of science, including those in academia from scholars like Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Kuhn. It then presents case studies drawn from recent advances in the field of dinosaur paleontology, showing how science generates objective knowledge, even during revolutionary episodes. The book next looks at how that same objective knowledge can be gained even when researching extremely complex issues, using climate science to distinguish between genuine skepticism – upon which science depends – from dogmatic denial.

The book is for anyone who needs thoughtful, razor-sharp responses to the detractors of science – whether they be anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, profit-seeking businessmen, or published relativists in the knowledge-making industries.

Key Features:

Highly readable and accessible without oversimplifying the complexities of scientific research.

Exposes the many flaws of the undertermination thesis – the argument that indefinitely many hypotheses are compatible with any body of evidence.

Explores whether moral and other value-laden questions can be answered by science.

Includes three appendixes online: (1) Summary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; (2) Rorty on Losing the World; (3) 21 Facts in Support of Human-Caused Climate Change

Dimension: 198 x 129 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367616403