This book collects some texts that are representative of my philosophical understanding of science. It starts with the programmatic manifesto entitled ‘Positivism is a Humanism’, in which I defend the ‘liberal positivism’ that impregnates the rest of the chapters. This view of knowledge is ‘positivist’ in the good-old-fashioned sense that having passed severe empirical tests is the only way for something to count as knowledge about the world, but is ‘liberal’ in a triple sense: first, the idea that empirical tests and their severity are not an algorithmic question, but something more or less open to contextual considerations; second, the view of science as a social process much more similar to a ‘market’ than what is usually assumed (a view I discuss with big detail in the chapter that closes the book and that gives it its title); and third, the idea that establishing something as scientific knowledge is primarily a kind of social coercion (it consists in telling what the experts in a field of research are not legitimize to deny), and, since liberalism suggests that it is better to minimize social coercions, then a considerable amassment of reasons must be put on the table before deciding that accepting something as an ‘established fact’ is compulsory.
The rest of the chapters are devoted to some of the topics for which I feel a higher intellectual excitement, but that, till now, I have not had the chance of discussing with much detail in my more ‘serious’ academic writings. Most of these topics are usually on the verge of what can be called ‘metaphysics of science’... in general to conclude that we have no grounds for accepting anything that is properly speaking ‘metaphysic’ about all that stuff. Ideas like an ‘ultimate explanation of everything’, or like the possible kinship between scientific truth and beauty, or like the very idea of truth, or like irreducible ‘free will’ and ‘consciousness’, or like that of theological explanation of natural laws and living beings... all of these ideas fall like a house of cards when examined from the point of view of a liberal, deflationary positivism.I have also included a series of chapters devoted to the history of ideas: one about the origins of Islam, and another one on the history of scepticism from the Greeks to Spinoza and Hume. These are fields on which my scholarship is more than dim, but for which my passion is considerable, as in the case of archaeology, a topic on which I have also included a brief chapter on the (possibly Basque) first human population of the Americas.
I hope all type of readers can enjoy the texts included in this book. The language and the use of technicalities have been kept at a level that almost anybody with a normal education and a sound appetite for learning and understanding can easily grasp. Of course, the main message of the book is that we can have a judicious, non blind trust on scientific knowledge, and be utterly sceptical about almost any other supposed form of ‘knowledge’. Perhaps many readers are not attracted by these conclusions as much as I am, but I’m offering the following texts as the start of a critical conversation.
The rest of the chapters are devoted to some of the topics for which I feel a higher intellectual excitement, but that, till now, I have not had the chance of discussing with much detail in my more ‘serious’ academic writings. Most of these topics are usually on the verge of what can be called ‘metaphysics of science’... in general to conclude that we have no grounds for accepting anything that is properly speaking ‘metaphysic’ about all that stuff. Ideas like an ‘ultimate explanation of everything’, or like the possible kinship between scientific truth and beauty, or like the very idea of truth, or like irreducible ‘free will’ and ‘consciousness’, or like that of theological explanation of natural laws and living beings... all of these ideas fall like a house of cards when examined from the point of view of a liberal, deflationary positivism.I have also included a series of chapters devoted to the history of ideas: one about the origins of Islam, and another one on the history of scepticism from the Greeks to Spinoza and Hume. These are fields on which my scholarship is more than dim, but for which my passion is considerable, as in the case of archaeology, a topic on which I have also included a brief chapter on the (possibly Basque) first human population of the Americas.
I hope all type of readers can enjoy the texts included in this book. The language and the use of technicalities have been kept at a level that almost anybody with a normal education and a sound appetite for learning and understanding can easily grasp. Of course, the main message of the book is that we can have a judicious, non blind trust on scientific knowledge, and be utterly sceptical about almost any other supposed form of ‘knowledge’. Perhaps many readers are not attracted by these conclusions as much as I am, but I’m offering the following texts as the start of a critical conversation.
