Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Pinker, Steven (August 6, 2013), Science Is Not Your Enemy An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians, New Republic, Retrieved on 2013-12-10Source Material [www.newrepublic.com]
Folksonomies: science culture two cultures humanities Memes
10 DEC 2013
The Scientific Worldview
The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,” “naïve,” and “vulgar.” The definitional vacuum allows me to replicate gay activists’ flaunting of “queer” and appropriate the pejorative for a posi...Steven Pinker defends the "scientism" against critics in the humanities.
10 DEC 2013
Why Science and Religion are Irreconcilable
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged fro...Steven Pinker's critique of why "non-overlapping magesteria" doesn't work.
10 DEC 2013
How Science Can Progress the Humanities
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provo...Science has many tools for looking deeper into texts and providing new perspectives and insights.
10 DEC 2013
How Science Enriches our Lives
The most obvious is the exhilarating achievement of scientific knowledge itself. We can say much about the history of the universe, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life. Better still, this understanding consists not in a mere listing of facts, but in deep and elegant principles, like the insight that life depends on a molecule that carries information, directs metabolism, and replicates i...The creation of knowledge and improving our quality of life.