100 Books Like The Politics of Pure Science

In this classic book, Kuhn introduces the idea of a "paradigm" and shows that real progress comes through paradigm shifts.

That hit me like a rock when I first read it. I love how in the second edition, Kuhn talks about the difficulties of deep change: "the problem is that the new paradigm is always worse than the old one." 

The new paradigm may be better in some way, but it is also sketchy, unformed, and it creates lots of new uncertainties. So, for somebody to shift to a new paradigm always requires a leap of faith!

I regard this book as perhaps the greatest book about the nature of science ever published. In it, Popper spells out his dramatic view that science proceeds by putting forward bold, imaginative guesses, which are then subjected to ferocious attempts at empirical refutation. When these conjectured theories are refuted, scientists are forced to think up a better conjectural theory–and that is how science makes progress.

In this book, Popper shows how this dramatic account of how science proceeds by a process of conjecture and refutation has implications for fields beyond science, such as philosophy, in that it implies that, whatever we are doing, our best hope of success in solving our problems is to consider possible solutions and subject them to ferocious criticism.

I found this book just about the most dazzling and gripping book I had ever come across about science. It kept on opening up new vistas as I read on. Full of surprises and unexpected dramas, it cast a vivid light on a wide range of issues. I finished it breathless with admiration.

It is about photosynthesis, the process whereby plants “eat” sunlight to form oxygen and sugar from carbon dioxide and water. This process is basic to almost all life on Earth. The book is about the development of photosynthesis on Earth and also about the development of our scientific knowledge about it.

What I love about this book is its clarity and honesty. It is a work of philosophy that has nothing to do with the fashionable task of analyzing concepts at the time of its publication. It sets out a clear view about the nature of the world–what it is that science is telling us about the nature of the world–and discusses problems that this view gives rise to with admirable clarity and honesty. 

And the author makes a vital contribution in connection with his discussion of the nature of sensations and consciousness. Above all, I admire the patent honesty of this book so much, the capacity of the author to pursue his basic idea wherever it may lead, to the ends of the earth, with scrupulous honesty and integrity.

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.

Well before Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fleck coined the term “thought collective” to explain how conformity and “group think” produce “truth” in a given social and political milieu.

In Fleck's account, what Kuhn would later term “paradigm shifts” were the result of the gradual change in agreement on what scientists consider to be true rather than some eureka moment where fact is suddenly revealed.

Psillos defends a view called scientific realism.

Scientific realists generally assume that the growth of scientific knowledge is continuous and cumulative, with no significant setbacks. Discoveries in science generally add on to our current understanding of the world. Scientific realists generally regard scientific revolutions or paradigm changes as a threat to the rationality of science as such changes seem to imply that scientists have had a fundamentally flawed understanding of the world.

Psillos presents one of the most comprehensive and strongest cases for realism. Anyone who is serious about defending a view of the development of science that involves periodic revolutionary changes of theory, as I do, has to take Psillos’ arguments very seriously.

To properly understand where women fit in to the history of science, we need to have a fair grasp of what science and the history of science is, and this book offers a perfect introduction. It is the antidote to many linear “progress” driven narratives that insist that the history of western science is simply a straight line from the Greeks with each generation building and improving on the one before. This book attempts to tell the whole story of science, science from across the world, the internationalism of it, the politics, the interrelation between ideas and culture. Although not strictly about historical women in science, I’ve included it here as a kind of foundation to understanding the rest.

What an eye-opening biography! Mary Sears never left the United States, but she was a key reason the World War II Pacific invasions were successful. This book does not take away from the sacrifices of the fighters or the hard strategic decisions and leadership of the commanders. It does show what science, combined with traditional fieldwork and creative library research, can do to design maps and provide information about tides, ocean depths, and coral reefs, thus enabling men, ships, and equipment to attack Japanese-held islands effectively.

This book is also an homage to teamwork by people, especially women and academics in the 1940s, who didn’t always receive a lot of respect from the military at the start of the war yet found themselves relied upon repeatedly for their top-secret work.  

Sometimes you don’t want an intensely detailed exploration of a topic, but rather a series of interesting articles—and these 50 ‘wonders that reveal an extraordinary universe’ are an ideal way of dipping into some of the strangest and most wonderful aspects of modern science. Although each topic only lasts a few pages, it’s enough to get you interested and is bound to make you tell someone nearby about it. When you’ve read one, it’s hard not to go on and read a few more.