Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas
William Rehg
Abstract
Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These “science wars” take place in the public arena—with current battles over evolution, and global warming—and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific claim merit our consideration? This book examines what makes scientific arguments cogent—that is, strong, convincing, and “logically compelling”—and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of argume ... More
Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These “science wars” take place in the public arena—with current battles over evolution, and global warming—and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific claim merit our consideration? This book examines what makes scientific arguments cogent—that is, strong, convincing, and “logically compelling”—and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of argumentation theory, the author proposes a multidimensional, context-sensitive framework both for understanding and for conducting cooperative interdisciplinary evaluation of the cogency of actual scientific arguments. He closely examines Jürgen Habermas’s argumentation theory and its implications for understanding cogency, applying it to a case from high-energy physics. A series of problems, however, beset Habermas’s approach. In response, the author outlines his own “critical contextualist” approach, which uses argumentation-theory categories in a new and more context-sensitive way that is inspired by the ethnography of science.
Keywords:
evolution,
global warming,
scientific objectivity,
argumentation theory,
multidimensional framework,
context-sensitive framework,
interdisciplinary evaluation,
Jürgen Habermas,
high-energy physics,
ethnography of science
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2008 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262182713 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262182713.001.0001 |
