I take it that the enterprise of SEED and scienceblogs, in its framing as a public conversation about science, is to argue about science. So, below, a quote from Isaiah Berlin.
But first, by way of follow-up to an earlier post by Jonah, here is the irascible historian of science Paul Forman on a late twentieth-century phenomenon relevant to the broader issue of this post (and these blogs):
"The artist has always had to contend with the hated critic. But whence comes this new thing, the science critic?"*
And now Berlin:
"[T]he bitterest clashes [between rival types of knowledge] have been concerned with the precise line which marks the frontier between their territories. Those who have made large claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favor of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses, undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to understand what they are... because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural science."
I. Berlin, 1953 (Hedgehog/Fox, 77)
* P. Forman, "In postmodernity the cultures are one--and many," Revista de Occidente, 225 (1999): 110-121, on 115.
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