Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science 1st Edition by Isabelle Stengers (PDF)

Description

Like fast food, fast science is quickly prepared, not particularly good, and it clogs up the system. Efforts to tackle our most pressing issues have been stymied by conflict within the scientific community and mixed messages symptomatic of a rushed approach. What is more, scientific research is being shaped by the bubbles and crashes associated with economic speculation and the market. A focus on conformism, competitiveness, opportunism and flexibility has made it extremely difficult to present cases of failure to the public, for fear that it will lose confidence in science altogether. In this bold new book, distinguished philosopher Isabelle Stengers shows that research is deeply intertwined with broader social interests, which means that science cannot race ahead in isolation but must learn instead to slow down. Stengers offers a path to an alternative science, arguing that researchers should stop seeing themselves as the ‘thinking, rational brain of humanity’ and refuse to allow their expertise to be used to shut down the concerns of the public, or to spread the belief that scientific progress is inevitable and will resolve all of society’s problems. Rather, science must engage openly and honestly with an intelligent public and be clear about the kind of knowledge it is capable of producing. This timely and accessible book will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers in a wide range of fields, as well anyone concerned with the role of science and its future.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Today, more than ever before, we need this book. Stengers, a philosopher known internationally for her willingness to tackle the big questions of our time, insists that Another Science is Possible. Toughly and tightly argued her book spells out how ‘slow science’ could get us there. One key point she raises, missed by so many, is the disillusion and distress, Marx might well have said alienation, of the young scientists who find that the science they believed they were going to be part of, is not the science they are working within. Only crack heads can deny climate change and its threat to life itself, but flinching, and looking away from the necessity of transforming science is politically and ethically inadequate. Stengers offers the new generation that is rising up with its new political narrative, intellectual weaponry in the formidable project of turning science away from its destructive collaboration with neoliberal capital to help build – yes – a better world. And don’t we need one!”Hilary Rose, Emerita Professor of Social Policy, University of Bradford”Stengers’s slow science manifesto is timely, trenchant and thoughtful.”Nature About the Author Isabelle Stengers is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Galileo ushered in the era of reason and science. More than anything else, however, he gave science authority, undermining all other ways of interpreting reality, and ultimately mobilizing scientists in much the same way an army mobilizes its soldiers in a mission of conquest, largely ignoring the impact of the means in the interest of the desired end. It has been a deconstructive and relentless conquest that has finally resulted in today’s super-competitive knowledge economy.Following Galileo’s lead, France and the US ushered in the democratic republic that ultimately, in the US at least, led to the commercialization of society and the primacy of ruthless, individualized competition in all things, including politics, business, science, and academia. All segments of society, including science, have thus morphed from the collegial to the cutthroat, contributing greatly to the individualist revolution by legitimizing narrow economic and political interests with the stamp of science’s presumed objective authority.The result has been modern development. And in terms of its sustainability, it is a social and ecological disaster. It may, in fact, be too late to do anything about it, although the author does offer hope in the form of ‘slow science’ and a civilizing politics that she calls cosmopolitics. At the very least she makes a strong case that simply biding our time in the hope of a scientific solution is a fool’s game.Science has revealed nothing quite so completely as it has revealed that nothing exists in isolation. Reality is more complex, and its parts more interdependent, than we could have ever imagined. Just as human health cannot be left to the cardiologist and the neurologist alone, our collective reality cannot be sustained through the efforts of one or two scientific specialists working in isolation. It will take all of us working collaboratively and that, of course, will require both interest and civility.Isabelle Stengers is a professor of the philosophy of science. And while many might consider the philosophy of science to be an oxymoron, therein lies the fundamental problem. Science is not a body of knowledge, bipartitely divided into those facts which have been revealed and those which are about to be.Reality exists in a dynamic context (my term). The process of discovery, therefore, both reveals and shapes the knowledge unveiled. Scientists in all fields, although some more than others, pre-define their results, often inadvertently, by the questions they ask, both singularly and in total, and how they interpret the answers they find.Google does not calculate the answer to your search query. It hypothesizes the answer using probabilities, which are defined, in part, by what has come before. It does so through a complex series of computations that collectively approximate a discrete and objective answer, but do not guarantee its validity. The only way to evaluate the innate validity of the answer is to compare it to rational expectations.The Google engineers do that every day. And so do scientists. If scientific inquiry yields an answer that is either unanticipated (which, of course, implies the existence of a paradigm) or considered beyond “legitimate” questions of science, it will be ignored or refuted.The result is a closed information loop not unlike the self-reinforcing digital news loops that are fueling our tribal political wars. Both sides become increasingly isolated and increasingly hostile.The resulting perversion is greatly exaggerated by the reality that we have commercialized all of society, including science. Scientists, and the universities that often govern them, have become captive to the entrepreneurs and politicians who turn to science, not out of genuine interest in the acquisition of knowledge, but as a tool to promote their agenda and discredit the opposition.We, as consumers and citizens, (I am not a scientist) promote the charade to the extent we fail to grasp what science is and is not. In the area of climate change, the author notes, citizens and politicians cling to doubt citing science, when, in fact, their doubt flows from an ignorance of what science means (again, not her words exactly). Scientifically speaking, there is no doubt about climate change among scientists. The few voices you hear may be speaking with the authority of science, but that is not what ultimately defines scientific truth.She uses the science of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as an example of the reverse bias. Scientists have done the bidding of entrepreneurs and politicians who see nothing but the ability to end world hunger and the spoils that will generate. The much larger questions of the science’s impact on society, the environment, and the future of our organic world are essentially dismissed as naïve vestiges of pre-scientific opinions, values, and superstition.Stengers’ proposed solution, in part, is a ‘slowing’ of science, although the term is not meant to calibrate speed per se. What it means is that we take the time, collectively, to understand scientific discovery in the larger context of its value to human development. Conquest become adventure. Truth becomes a value.An aside: As a subset of the issue, albeit an extremely important one, the author provides the most insightful portrayal of gender bias I have yet to read. She applies it to science but it could be readily applied to business, politics, or whatever. In essence, the ‘fraternity’ of science was designed by men and it is constructed to reward, and conversely punish in the negative, those qualities historically associated with male virility (e.g., blind obsession, the sacrifice of social responsibilities, urgency at any cost, etc.) To read that argument alone is well worth the effort and investment to read the book.I only offer one caution, but it is not meant to deter you in any way. The book is translated from the French. And while I think it’s a very good translation, translation is a much more nuanced process than people who do not normally communicate in a second language always appreciate. This isn’t typically obvious in a general conversation on the street corner, but often becomes more obvious in an academic and more complex text such as this. The English is perfectly understandable, to be sure, but it does progress to a slightly different cadence than you might be accustomed to.All told, I think this is a fabulous book and the timing couldn’t be more appropriate. One of the fallacies to have grown out of the belief in the authority of science and the power of democracy is the belief that rugged individualism conquers all. While that conviction served us well until now, it is implosive in the smaller, wired, and technologically integrated world we now live in. We must start to measure success in what Robert Reich has insightfully defined in his latest book as ‘the common good.’We must further recognize that life and the planet on which we live it are not built on a foundation of discrete binary options. Reality is less a function of either/or and more a function of and/but.Scientifically and academically we can’t turn back the clock and we don’t want to. We must, however, redefine our science, our academics, our economics, and our politics, in ways that recognize our common humanity and our common ecology. And Professor Stengers, thankfully, gives us a way forward.What we can’t forget is that progress is meaningless if it fails to recognize the reality that we are truly all in this together.

⭐Demasiado vago. Da la sensación de que ha reciclado un texto sobre otro tema para adaptarlo al tema del slow science y aprovechar el tiron. No muestra una propuesta alternativa.

⭐Muito útil. Todas as descrições correpondem a realidade

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