Science and the Self

by Bruce E. Fleming

"Science and the Self offers a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between science, a specific type of knowledge, and the other types of knowledge which are part of life. Those who practice science typically insist that it is objective; opposing them, emphasizing science's subjective qualities, are philosophers such as Kuhn, Feyerabend, and Foucault. In his new book, Bruce Fleming seeks to explain how a person may reasonably hold to either view." "Offering an alternative to Robert Nozick's relativism, Fleming argues that the world is indeed objective. However, it is so only because - and to the extent that - we subjective humans banish from scientific language the vast quantity of things which cannot be expressed in its terms. That is to say, most of daily life is composed of situational knowledge, which, unlike the scientific knowledge we may distill from it, is tied to the specific moment and place it arises in. Science and the Self offers a view of self in the world, the natu