Steven L. Goldman, Ph.D.
Departments of Philosophy and History, Lehigh University
Steven Goldman has degrees in physics (B.Sc., Polytechnic University of New York) and philosophy (M.A., Ph.D.,
Boston University) and, since 1977, has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at
Lehigh University. He has a joint appointment in the departments of philosophy and history because his teaching
and research focus on the history, philosophy, and social relations of modern science and technology. Professor
Goldman came to Lehigh from the philosophy department at the State College campus of Pennsylvania State
University, where he was a co-founder of one of the first U.S. academic programs in science, technology, and
society (STS) studies. For 11 years (1977–1988), he served as director of Lehigh’s STS program and was a cofounder
of the National Association of Science, Technology and Society Studies. Professor Goldman has received
the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award from Lehigh University and a Book-of-the-Year Award for a book he
co-authored (another book was a finalist and translated into 10 languages). He has been a national lecturer for
Sigma Xi—the scientific research society—and a national program consultant for the National Endowment for the
Humanities. He has served as a board member or as editor/advisory editor for a number of professional
organizations and journals and was a co-founder of Lehigh University Press and, for many years, co-editor of its
Research in Technology Studies series.
Since the early 1960s, Professor Goldman has studied the historical development of the conceptual framework of
modern science in relation to its Western cultural context, tracing its emergence from medieval and Renaissance
approaches to the study of nature through its transformation in the 20th century. He has published numerous
scholarly articles on his social-historical approach to medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy and to modern
science from the 17th to the 20th centuries and has lectured on these subjects at conferences and universities across
the United States, in Europe, and in Asia. In the late 1970s, the professor began a similar social-historical study of
technology and technological innovation since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1980s, he published a series of
articles on innovation as a socially driven process and on the role played in that process by the knowledge created
by scientists and engineers. These articles led to participation in science and technology policy initiatives of the
federal government, which in turn led to extensive research and numerous article and book publications through the
1990s on emerging synergies that were transforming relationships among knowledge, innovation, and global
commerce.
Professor Goldman is the author of The Teaching Company course Science in the Twentieth Century: A Social
Intellectual Survey (2004).
Table of Contents
Science Wars:
What Scientists Know and How They Know It
Part I
Professor Biography............................................................................................i
Course Scope.......................................................................................................1
Lecture One Knowledge and Truth Are Age-Old Problems ..........3
The 17th Century
Lecture Two Competing Visions of the Scientific Method ............6
Lecture Three Galileo, the Catholic Church, and Truth....................9
Lecture Four Isaac Newton’s Theory of the Universe ..................11
Lecture Five Science vs. Philosophy in the 17th Century .............14
The 18th Century
Lecture Six Locke, Hume, and the Path to Skepticism...............17
Lecture Seven Kant Restores Certainty...........................................20
Lecture Eight Science, Society, and the Age of Reason.................23
The 19th Century
Lecture Nine Science Comes of Age in the 19th Century..............25
Lecture Ten Theories Need Not Explain .....................................28
Lecture Eleven Knowledge as a Product of the Active Mind...........31
Lecture Twelve Trading Reality for Experience ...............................34
Timeline .......................................................................................................Part II
Glossary.............................................................................................................37
Biographical Notes............................................................................................41
Bibliography................................................................................................Part II
Science Wars:
What Scientists Know and How They Know It
Scope:
The objective of this course is to explore, in depth, the nature of scientific knowledge and of the claims to truth that
scientists make on behalf of their theories. Are scientific theories true because they correspond to reality? How can
we know that they do, given that we have no access to reality except through experience, which scientists
themselves tell us is profoundly different from the way things “really” are? Are theories true because they account
for experience and make correct predictions? This sounds plausible, but theories that we now consider wrong once
were considered true because they accounted for our experience and made successful predictions then! Should we
assume that as new experiences accumulate, current theories will be replaced, as all previous theories have been?
But in that case, theories are not really knowledge or truth, in the strict sense of those words, but a special case of
experience-validated educated opinion.
These are more than just intellectually interesting questions. The roles that science has come to play in
contemporary society and world affairs make the answers to these questions important to society, particularly to the
citizens of democratic societies who have an opportunity and an obligation to influence science policy decisions.
Furthermore, since the 1960s, science has come under broad political, intellectual, and religious attack—erupting in
the 1980s in what was called the “Science Wars”—even as it achieved unprecedented recognition and support as
both critical to social well-being and the crown jewel of Western cultural achievement.
The first lecture in this course describes the post-1960 attacks on science and relates them to conflicting conceptions
of knowledge, truth, and reality in the history of modern science and, more broadly, in the history of Western
philosophy.
Lectures Two through Five are devoted to the 17th century and the conflicting conceptions of scientific knowledge
promoted by the “founding fathers” of modern science: Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Galileo Galilei. It
quickly becomes clear that there was then, and is now, no such thing as “the” scientific method, no one method that
can transform naive empirical experience into knowledge of nature.
Lectures Six, Seven, and Eight are devoted to 18th-century responses by nonscientists to the growing acceptance of
Newtonian science as the truth about reality, climaxing in the Enlightenment proclamation of an Age of Reason
with science as its living model. The central figures in these three lectures are John Locke, Bishop George Berkeley,
David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.
It was in the 19th century that modern science truly came of age, with the formulation of theories in physics,
chemistry, and biology that were far more sophisticated, abstract, powerful, and useful than 17th- and 18th-century
theories. But for those very reasons, these theories made more pertinent than before questions about the nature,
scope, and object of scientific knowledge. What were these theories about, given that the reality they described was
so different from human experience; given, too, the need for increasingly complex instruments to access this reality
and the increasingly esoteric professional languages in which scientific descriptions of the world were formulated?
Lectures Nine through Twelve are devoted to the range of interpretations among leading scientists of what
knowledge and truth mean in science, and of how they are arrived at using some combination of instruments,
experiments, ideas, facts, and logic.
If the maturation of modern science was a 19th-century phenomenon, the maturation of philosophy of science, that
is, of the systematic study of scientific reasoning and scientific theories as products of that reasoning, is a 20thcentury
phenomenon. Lectures Thirteen through Twenty-Two are devoted to exploring the rich and innovative
responses to science as knowledge by scientists, philosophers, historians, and sociologists from 1900 through the
early 21st century. Lecture Thirteen surveys the state of theories of science at the turn of the century, the social
status of science, and its cultural impact, especially on religion and art. Lecture Fourteen traces the interpretation of
science as deductive knowledge, focusing on the highly influential movement known as Logical Positivism.
The evolution of quantum theory, from Planck’s initial tentative hypothesis through the formulation of quantum
mechanics in the mid-1920s, raised new questions about the relationship of science to reality, as well as about the
ability sharply to distinguish objectivity and subjectivity. Lecture Fifteen addresses these questions, which continue
unresolved to this day. Concurrently, a number of thinkers inside and outside of science began reassessing the claimof science to possess universal, objective truths about nature. Lectures Sixteen through Eighteen explore this
reassessment, moving from interpretations in the 1930s of social influences on what we accept as knowledge to
historicists’ interpretations of scientific knowledge just before and after 1960.
Lectures Nineteen through Twenty-Two explore the increasingly aggressive critiques of scientific knowledge from
the 1970s through the 1980s, climaxing in the Science Wars of the 1990s. They describe both the postmodernist
attack on science and new attempts to defend science as a privileged form of knowledge and truth.
Lectures Twenty-Three and Twenty-Four address the creationism-intelligent design versus evolution controversy in
light of contemporary interpretations of science and the implications of these interpretations for science policy and
rational action as we enter the 21st century.
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