100 Books Like Scientific Realism

Shapin makes the audacious claim that there never really was a scientific revolution in Early Modern Europe, despite the fact that “the scientific revolution” has been a central organizing idea in the history of science and the history of Western culture more generally.

His provocative book provides a useful and engaging assessment of the utility of the concept of “the scientific revolution” for making sense of developments in the history of science.  He challenges us to think about the place of radical changes in the history of science, and whether the claims scientists make about such changes are merely rhetorical constructions.

Despite Shapin’s arguments, I am inclined to think something very significant happened in the sciences in the 16th and 17th Centuries, something that deserves to be called “revolutionary”. But Shapin’s book will certainly make readers reflect on what they mean by scientific revolution.

This is a collection of essays by Kuhn, written later in his life, as he tried to clarify and develop the view he initially presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Kuhn reflects on developments in the sociology of science that were influenced by his work, as the Strong Programme sociologists of science identified as Kuhnians and relativists.  Kuhn tries to clarify what he meant by “paradigm change”, motivated by a concern to address his critics and to distance his own view from certain types of relativist views.

The autobiographical interview is very engaging, as Kuhn takes this opportunity to reflect on the impact of his book, as well as on the effects the book has had on his life and career. I think much of what Kuhn had to say in these later papers provides important insight into understanding science, especially his remarks on scientific specialization.

Zuckerman provides a comprehensive study of the American scientists who won Nobel prizes between 1907 and 1972.

The book provides a window into the personalities of the people doing Nobel prize-winning research, as well as the sort of environments in which they were socialized and educated. Nobel laureates have tended to study and work with other Laureates or future Laureates. She also discusses the impact that winning a Nobel prize has on scientists, and the effects of the prize are not wholly positive.

The book also demonstrates the potential power of sociological analyses. Zuckerman creatively combines interview data with quantitative analyses. I think Zuckerman’s books are a fantastic example of how to conduct empirical research in sociology and the social sciences more generally.

Gingerich discusses both the reception of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory, as well as his own extensive research on Copernicus’ book, De Revolutionibus.

Over the course of several decades, Gingerich studied hundreds of copies of the first and second editions of Copernicus’ famous book in an effort to constructive a comprehensive census of the existing copies. These books can now sell for millions of dollars.

Gingerich was motivated in part by earlier studies of the annotations in various copies of the first edition of De Revolutionibus. Some of these contain many detailed annotations, indicating that the book was often studied with great care, contrary to a popular view that the book was seldom read. Further, he was able to reconstruct social networks by noting which copies contained the exact same annotations as other copies.

Gingerich makes the reader feel the excitement of archival research, as his book reads like a… show more.

Collins is a brilliant and lucid exponent of the (mainly British) “strong programme” in the sociology of science. He is one of the numerous “children of Kuhn,” in the sense that like Kuhn he understands scientists to be (usually) honest and serious human beings, not machines implementing an alleged Scientific Method.

The amazing results achieved with energy healing raise profound questions concerning the nature of consciousness and the human energy anatomy and how these suggest the existence of a much broader conception of reality than consensual thought allows for, and it is with respect to this broader conception that Rupert Sheldrake proves such an informative guide. His central concept - that of the existence of ‘morphic fields’ connecting all sentient life-forms and the influence that they exert on our emotional and physical lives through the phenomena of ‘morphic resonance’ - provides the ‘missing link’ in our understanding of consciousness and as well as the root causes of much of the mental, emotional and physical ill-health that we encounter as healers. 

There are many short, accessible introductions to what current philosophers of science spend their time arguing about; this is one of the best. It wisely doesn’t cover everything, but instead uses Francis Bacon’s crucial break with the authority of Aristotle as a point of entry into current debates on half a dozen core issues such as inductive inference, progress, and realism.

I spend a lot of my time trying to clarify the bilge poured out by the merchants of fake science: the flat-earthers, creationists, and climate deniers mainly, but also medical quacks and other fruitloops who throw out alternative science, stuff which is like normal science, with one small exception. I was already fighting these fights when Wolpert came to Sydney, and I chaired a lecture he gave. He showed us where the problem lay in combatting idiocy: the idiots depend on naïve and naked intuition.

Invariably, these unhinged pseudo-realities rely on a simple misreading of scientific lore, and Lewis explained that this is because a great deal of science is counter-intuitive. We can’t see evolution happening, the world looks flat, the sun appears to go around us, and common sense says that kinetic energy must be proportional to velocity, not it's square. Enter the simpleton who slept through a key… show more.

This book is a collection of essays, letters, and lectures about the intrinsic value, importance, and beauty of science by one of its most talented and passionate communicators. Dawkins’s clear and often witty treatment of complex scientific issues is a breath of fresh air in this time of misinformation and ‘fake news.’ He writes primarily about biology, his own specialty, but ranges widely from ecology to evolution to genetics and even life beyond planet earth. Throughout, his incisive prose conveys the thrill and wonder of scientific discovery.

Polanyi, an eminent Hungarian Jewish chemist who spent his career at the University of Manchester, was the smarter brother of the more famous Karl Polanyi, the socialist economic historian. Michael (Mihály) shows in the book how science depends on ordinary, “personal” knowledge, as for example in riding a bicycle. He was a “liberal” in the European sense, unlike his brother, and saw the scientific community as analogous to a free market, and the free market as analogous to a scientific community.