No nonsense guide to science

The No-Nonsense Guide to Science is a book written in 2006 by Jerome Ravetz. The book is a short and readable critical account of today's techno-science. Written by the perspective of one of the fathers of Post-normal science the book argues for a deeper appreciation of uncertainty and ignorance in scientific knowledge and for a need for citizens’ participation in the appraisal of science when this is used in support or relation to policy.

Content

This book offers readable elements of history of science and of science and technology studies and puts them in the perspective of modern circumstances when science is increasingly called to provide guidance on human affairs and adjudicate policy disputes while at the same time being a major engine of change. The chapters in The No-Nonsense Guide to Science cover the following topics:

1. Science now
2. How science changed reality
3. Second thoughts from history
4. Little Science, Big Science, Mega Science
5. Scientific objectivity
6. Uncertainty
7. Science and democracy
8. People's science

This volume revisits many of the themes of Ravetz's major works such as his 1971 Scientific knowledge and its social problems and the 1990 The merger of knowledge with power: essays in critical science, as well as the tropes of Post-normal science. He repeats in this work his warnings against the "self-destructive tendencies of mega science" and the neglect of ignorance: "Curing the ignorance of ignorance is not merely a concern of enlightened educators. It is vitally important for science and survival." Like most of Ravetz's production this works takes on a new relevance in the context of the present science's crisis.

Reviews

For Jonathan Latham this book "focuses on what we can learn from the ongoing revision of this history. It argues that science was never objective or disinterested but that in the past this mattered relatively little since science was relatively powerless and less wedded to establishment interests. […] Ravetz offers the democratisation of science as a necessary and realistic antidote to the hubris and arrogance of science." ^[1]

Selected quote

"Paradoxically [...] the work of discovering the objective facts about the natural world has depended quite critically on the motivation, morale and morality of those doing the work [...]".

References

External links

• Book’s page at the Editor’s web site
• Book page at Amazon
• Book's page at Google books
• Home page of Jerome R. Ravetz
• More from J.R. Ravetz at the web page of NUSAP maintained by Jeroen van der Sluijs, Universities of Utrech (NL) and Bergen (NO).
• Miscellaneous resources including some essays of J.R. Ravetz