In Defense Of Philosophy (Of Science)
by Steven Gussman Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg admits (against my hopes) that To Explain The World isn't a philosophy of science book, but he does appear to claim that it's a history of philosophy of science book. 1 On this front, I believe it fails. To be fair, Weinberg also admits that he's being intentionally irreverent throughout the text, sometimes judging history's thinkers with the full cumulative hindsight of present knowledge to gauge progress. 2 The occasional irreverence towards a scientist may be forgiven as the author tends to nevertheless take the subject matter very seriously. But a noticeable exception to this rule is Weinberg's sometimes irreverence about philosophy of science itself (a trait not uncommon in physicists). 3 I argue that Weinberg, like many particle physicists, is too focused on particular kinds of experimentation as if it were the only tool, answering the only ...