These essays on Finalization in Science - The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress comprise a remarkable, problematic and controversial book. The authors propose a thesis about the social direction of scientific research which was the occasion of a lively and often bitter debate in Germany from 1976 to 1982. Their provocative thesis, briefly, is this: that modern science converges, historically, to the development of a number of 'closed theories', i. e. stable and relatively completed sciences, no longer to be improved by small changes but only by major changes in an entire theoretical structure. Further: that at such a stage of 'mature theory', the formerly viable norm of intra-scientific autonomy may appropriately be replaced by the social direction' of further scientific research (within such a 'mature' field) for socially relevant or, we may bluntly say, 'task-oriented' purposes. This is nothing less than a theory for the planning and social directing of science, under certain specific conditions. Understandably, it raised the sharp objections that such an approach would subordinate scientific inquiry as a free and untrammeled search for truth to the dictates of social relevance and dominant interests, even possibly to dictation and control for particularistic social and political interests.

Heretical thoughts in an orthodox series on sociology of the sciences? Devils and science between the covers of one book? Games with ambivalence to mask collective uncertainty? We anticipate similar future reactions from readers or reviewers when assessing the way in which this volume has been assembled. But writings on counter-science, like the history of colonialism, are usually written by the winners, therefore unequivocally partial and only too often lacking in social imagination. In seeking to redress the balance, we admit to having been fully receptive to the latter, of having displayed an un measured degree of sympathy with heretics and outsiders, including practising scientists, and to letting science defend itself. The antithetical relationship implied in the volume's title - Counter-movements in the Sciences - stands for what we regard as an ongoing, open-ended process. In collecting material for this volume, we have brought together voices speaking from different quarters: there are those who, although modestly claiming to speak only for them selves, have set out to question sacred assumptions of scientific faith or to cast doubt on well-known claims scientific knowledge holds over other forms of knowledge; others have undertaken to demonstrate the fragility, ifnot untenability of attempts at demarcation between science and other systems of belief or practice or shown that demarcations between different forms of rationality rest on other than methodological grounds; finally, those who wish to re-arrange, by mapping out some meta-point of surveillance, familiar territory, showing the need for rearrangement and

For Harry Redner, the phrase "beyond civilization" refers to the new and unprecedented condition the world is now entering‘specifically, the condition commonly known as globalization. Redner approaches globalization from the perspective of history and seeks to interpret it in relation to previous key stages of human development. His account begins with the Axial Age (700 300 BC) and proceeds through Modernity (after AD 1500) to the present global condition. What is globalization doing to civilization? In answering this question, Redner studies the role played by capitalism, the state, science and technology. He aims to show that they have had a catalytic impact on civilization through their reductive effect on society, culture, and individualism. However, Redner is not content to diagnose the ills of civilization; he also suggests how they might be ameliorated by cultural conservation. Above all, it is to the problem of decline in the higher forms of literacy that he addresses himself, for it is on the culture of the book that previous civilizations were founded. This study will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and social and political theorists. Its style makes it accessible also to general readers, interested in civilization past, present, and future.

In this path-breaking and controversial book, Harry Redner provides a systematic study of how the epistemologically interesting features of contemporary science are to be understood. Taking “science†to include knowledge from the social sciences and humanities as well as the physical sciences, Redner shows how the history of science, philosophical theory, and current scientific research reveal connections between scientific developments and features of the social organization of science. Redner argues that the shift from Classical science to a more complex and less orderly World science after World War II has changed the way scientific research is done and how its knowledge is organized. His aim, however, “is not merely to interpret science, but to change it.†Thus, this examination is more than a survey and critique—it is a positive program for the development of future science. Remarkable for its breadth and insight, the book is especially valuable for its discussions of authority and social organization (with the accompanying themes of academic politics, competition, power, and corruption) and for its catalog of the various contemporary critiques of science. Some of these are European in origin and will be new to many U.S. readers. A tour de force on several levels, this book is essential reading for scientists, philosophers, sociologists of science, historians of ideas, critics of contemporary culture and, indeed, for anyone who takes a serious interest in scientific research and higher learning.

This collection brings together several essays which have been written between the years 197 5 and 1983. During that period I have been occupied with the attempt to find a satisfactory explicate for the notion of tnithlike ness or verisimilitude. The technical results of this search have partly appeared elsewhere, and I am also working on a systematic presentation of them in a companion volume to this book: Truthlikeness (forthcoming hopefully in 1985). The essays collected in this book are less formal and more philos ophical: they all explore various aspects of the idea that progress in science is associated with an increase in the truthlikeness of its results. Even though they do not exhaust the problem area of scientific change, together they constitute a step in the direction which I find most promising in the defence of critical scientific realism. * Chapter 1 appeared originally in Finnish as the opening article of a new journal Tiede 2000 (no. 1 I 1980) - a Finnish counterpart to journals such as Science and Scientific American. This explains its programmatic character. It tries to give a compact answer to the question 'What is science?', and serves therefore as an introduction to the problem area of the later chapters. Chapter 2 is a revised translation of my inaugural lecture for the chair of Theoretical Philosophy in the University of Helsinki on April 8, 1981. It appeared in Finnish inParnasso 31 (1981), pp.

Gernot Böhme, a distinguished and original contributor to critical theory's philosophy of science project, sets out the main theses of this program in an important volume for science studies scholars. Stressing that science is a necessary aspect of advanced societies, Böhme explores the most fundamental questions about its social, political, and cultural roles in modern society. In light of the mixed blessings of technical society, Böhme questions whether we can continue to regard the institution of science as the top of a hierarchy of knowledge or as a neutral means of progress, let alone as a benign force for good. Science and its future are too important to be left to the scientists; society, Böhme insists, must take control of its scientific future.