Epistemic humility—the recognition that we could be wrong—is a virtue in
science as it is in daily life, but surely we have some reason for
thinking, some four centuries after the start of the scientific
revolution, that Aristotle was on the wrong track and that we are not,
or at least not yet. Our reasons for thinking this are obvious and
uncontroversial: mechanistic explanations and an abandonment of
supernatural causality proved enormously fruitful in expanding our
ability to predict and control the world around us. The fruits of the
scientific revolution, though at odds with common sense, allow us to
send probes to Mars and to understand why washing our hands prevents the
spread of disease. We may, of course, be wrong in having abandoned
teleology and the supernatural as our primary tools for understanding
and explaining the natural world, but the fact that “common sense”
conflicts with a layman’s reading of popular science writing is not a
good reason for thinking so.
- From Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg's scathing review of Thomas Nagel's book
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Concept of Nature is Almost Certainly False, published at
The Nation.
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