I'm about 15 minutes in to this episode and I just had to stop and reply to your comments on people's beliefs about the relative contingency of history and science. While I entirely agree with your ideas about people needing to not just uncritically accept the historical narratives we construct for ourselves; the contention that most people see historical models as more dependable and less contingent than scientific models is an inversion of the true situation. If anything, I would argue that most people have a tendancy to view scientific models as the ultimate in objective truth. I think even at the high school level of history teaching we're taught that different groups construct competing narratives of the same events. I remember as a 15 year old student in GCSE History class (I'm English) we did a unit on the conflict in Northern Ireland. I have a very clear picture of a cartoon with two guys arguing about the IRA one guy calls them freedom fighters and the other calls them terrorists. On the other hand in my science classes at the same level we were encouraged to uncritically accept the classical scientific method. As you've stated many times in feedback shows people are to a certain degree the product of their experiences. My BA is in philosophy and although we were taught to question pretty much every assumption the first time I remeber studying the subject in any depth was reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I'm sure I'd dipped into Popper and falsification by then too. I would respectfully suggest that your obvious familiarity with a range of scientific disciplines as well as your easy command of biology has given you a much more nuanced perspective on science than the majority of non-scientists.
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I'm about 15 minutes in to this episode and I just had to stop and reply to your comments on people's beliefs about the relative contingency of history and science. While I entirely agree with your ideas about people needing to not just uncritically accept the historical narratives we construct for ourselves; the contention that most people see historical models as more dependable and less contingent than scientific models is an
inversion of the true situation. If anything, I would argue that most people have a tendancy to view scientific models as the ultimate in objective truth. I think even at the high school level of history teaching we're taught that different groups construct competing narratives of the same events. I remember as a 15 year old student in GCSE History class (I'm English) we did a unit on the conflict in Northern Ireland. I have a very clear picture of a cartoon with two guys arguing about the IRA one guy calls them freedom fighters and the other calls them terrorists. On the other hand in my science classes at the same level we were encouraged to uncritically accept the classical scientific method. As you've stated many times in feedback shows people are to a certain degree the product of their experiences. My BA is in philosophy and although we were taught to question pretty much every assumption the first time I remeber studying the subject in any depth was reading Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I'm sure I'd dipped into Popper and falsification by then too. I would respectfully suggest that your obvious familiarity with a range of scientific disciplines as well as your easy command of biology has given you a much more nuanced perspective on science than the majority of non-scientists.