In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins.
This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume’s inductive skepticism to Karl Popper’s outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend’s summation that “anything goes” when it comes to defining or describing science.
With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought.
Stove’s views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove’s insider-outsider perspective, the train wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and “science studies” is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study.
Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is—and what it is not.
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David Charles Stove (1927-1994) was an Australian philosopher, best known for his criticisms of 20th-century philosophy and the philosophy of science. Stove held academic positions at the University of Sydney and was a prolific writer whose work often targeted what he saw as the irrationalism of modern philosophy and the misuse of statistical methods in science. Stove was particularly critical of Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion and the use of probabilistic reasoning in scientific theory. He argued that Popper’s framework, which emphasized the constant potential for theories to be falsified, led to an overly skeptical view of scientific knowledge. Instead, Stove championed a more straightforward, commonsense approach to understanding science, focusing on the practical successes of scientific theories rather than their philosophical underpinnings. Stove’s major works include Scientific Irrationalism, The Rationality of Induction, and Darwinian Fairytales, in which he critiques Darwinian evolutionary theory. His writing style was known for its clarity, wit, and uncompromising stance against what he viewed as the absurdities of contemporary philosophical trends.
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