Book Review: The Green Salesman: reflections on the book and film, 'An inconvenient truth' by Albert Gore Jr.
The Green Salesman: reflections on the book and film, 'An inconvenient truth', by Albert Gore Jr. Emmaus, PA, Rodale Press, 2006. ISBN: 9781594865671
Learning from Lomborg: or where do anti‐environmentalists come from?
SCIENCE GOES TO MARKET Whether we think of it as a new mode of knowledge production or as a more general condition of ‘epistemic drift’, there has been a rather significant change in the social relations of science over the past 20 years. As a neo-liberal ideology has spread around the world, infusing public policy and the public sphere itself with a kind of overarching commercial mentality, a large part of the scientific enterprise has gone to market. In almost all countries of the world, scientists are now routinely expected to sell themselves and their expertise to the highest bidder, while governments, as well as intergovernmental bodies such as the European Commission, spend much of the time and energy devoted to science policy deliberations to devising ways to bring university researchers into more intimate relations with private companies. For Michael Gibbons and his co-authors (1994), traditional forms of discipline-based knowledge production (what they term ‘mode 1’) have been more or less replaced by new forms that transcend disciplinary boundaries and are directly oriented toward ‘contexts of application’. A new mode of knowledge production—socalled ‘mode 2’—has emerged which challenges the values or norms that had previously governed the scientific enterprise. Already in the 1980s, Aant Elzinga (1985) had come to view the emerging commercialization with alarm, as he noted that established epistemic criteria, that is, the ways in which scientific truth claims are justified, were being put out of operation, as scientists increasingly found themselves in a condition of what he termed ‘epistemic drift’. More recently, the notion of a ‘triple helix’ of government, industry and
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.