The Flight From Science and Reason

From SkepticWiki

Editors: Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis

ISBN 0801856760

[edit] Synopsis

This book is an edited collection of essays from a variety of anti-postmodernists, documenting and refuting their arguments in the tradition established in Gross and Levitt's Higher Superstition. Topics addressed include physics (and pseudoscience masquerading as physics), epistemology,"alternative" medicine, radical environmentalism, Afrocentrism, "feminist" science, and religion (including creationism).

[edit] Reviews

Hey, it's an edited volume. Some of the writers are better than others. Some of the articles are more tightly-wrapped than others. This should surprise no one. Published by a well-respected, but still academic, press (Johns Hopkins University Press), the writing can be somewhat dry and daunting. [This isn't bathroom reading.] But unlike many other collections, there are no articles in it that should have been rejected outright, and the overall book stays on message quite well.

The scholarship in the individual articles ranges from very good to excellent, and provides a good resource for a someone looking for a quick skeptical analysis of a variety of odd claims across many fields. One chief aspect of pseudoscience appears to be the ability of the practitioners of nonsense to cross disciplinary boundaries until they find a subject with which their audience is unfamiliar. (As a hypothetical example, a fraud offering to treat cancer with "quantum crystal vibrations" may be able to present enough oncological knowledge to fool physicicts, and enough solid-state physics to fool physicians.) By drawing on a variety of domain experts, this book is a good and reasonably accessible resource for examining some of these kinds of claims. Dr Kitten