Description
Book SynopsisCan we rely on the discoveries that scientists make about one or another part, or aspect, of the world as a basis for drawing conclusions abou the Universe as a Whole? Thirty years ago, the separateness of different intellectual disciplines was an unquestioned axiom of intellectual procedure. By the mid-nineteen-seventies, however, even within the natural sciences proper, a shift from narrowly disciplinary preoccupations to more interdisciplinary issues had made it possible to reopen questions about he cosmological significance of the scientific world picture and scarcely possible any longer to rule out all religious cosmology and unscientific. This book, the product of both a professional and personal quest, follow the debate about cosmology--the theory of the universe--as it has changed from 1945 to 1982. The open essay, Scientific Mythology reflects the influence of Stephen Toulmin's postwar study with Ludwig Wittgenstein in its skepticism about the naive extrapolation of scientific
