Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science, offers a
unique autobiographical overview of how science as a discipline of
thought has been characterized by philosophers and historians over the
past century. He frames his account through science's - and his own
personal - quest for explanatory certainty.
During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the probabilistic
epistemologies required to characterize complex systems, whether in
physics, biology, economics, or the social sciences. This "triumph of
uncertainty" is the inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and
indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the
interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael
Polanyi called the "personal" and the "tacit") invariably affects how
data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity,
post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and
social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge.
Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how immunology
has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its theoretical
development and how these in turn have influenced interpretive problems
swirling around biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The
correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of
selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so
too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self
knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science
and selfhood speak.
