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The growing pains of science

Jerome Ravetz has been one of the UK’s foremost philosophers of science for more than 50 years. Here, he reflects on the troubles facing contemporary science. He argues that the roots of science’s crisis have been ignored for too long. Quality control has failed to keep pace with the growth of science.

Allied to that development is a second one, the hugely increased capital-intensity of science, so that the typical context of discovery is no longer the scientist with his test-tube, but a large lab with division of labour on an industrial scale. In the complex history of ideologies of science, we can say that the turning point came as recently as the 1960’s, in the great debates where Popper and Lakatos defended the Enlightenment ideals against the corrosive critiques of Kuhn and Feyerabend. I did make this a central issue in my early work, but in spite of my book ( Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems) having an appreciative audience among scientists, it made no discernible impact among the academic philosophy of science community.

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