Science has been very successful at producing knowledge. But knowledge without wisdom, or science without civilization, is a dangerous thing, according to Nicholas Maxwell. And the reason we have the one without the other, he believes, is that science, as now practiced, does not question its own purposes or investigate its own presuppositions. It transforms the world but cannot transform itself. Nicholas Maxwell is a philosopher of science, now retired from University College, London, and the author of From Knowledge to Wisdom, first published in 1984 and just reissued in a revised edition. He argues – these are his own words – that: “We need a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, so that the basic aim becomes to promote wisdom by rational means, instead of just to acquire knowledge.” Nicholas Maxwell makes his case in the final episode of our series.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a disease first diagnosed in Vietnam veterans in 1980. It’s now part of our everyday vocabulary. In this episode, producer David Cayley speaks to Allan Young, Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill. He’s the author of The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The book traces the idea of traumatic memory from the 1860’s, when a British surgeon first described the lingering after-effects of railway accidents, to our own time when the National Institute of Mental Health in the U.S. estimates that every year 7.7 million Americans suffer from PTSD. More than that, Dr. Young’s work examines how a scientific object, like a psychiatric diagnosis, comes into existence, and how it then feeds back into the experience of those who have the diagnosis. Allan Young talks about his research, and about his intellectual journey.

"Science has spoken... to society for more than half a millennium... In the past half century science has begun to speak back." So say the authors of a book called Rethinking Science. In this episode, Michael Gibbons and Peter Scott share their thoughts on the growing integration of science and society. Then later in the hour producer David Cayley speaks to Janet Atkinson Grosjean of the University of British Columbia. She’s the author of recent book called Public Science, Private Interests, which looks at Canadian science policy, and its attempt to harness science to social and economic goals.

Some years ago, on Ideas, American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin delivered the  annual CBC Massey Lectures under the title Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. In his lectures Lewontin argued that science had replaced religion as what he called “the chief legitimating force in modern society.” Science sanctions the existing social order, he claimed, by telling stories about a universal “struggle for existence,” or about how we are all blindly programmed by our selfish genes. These stories, in Lewontin’s view, constitute the ideology of biology, and he has devoted much of his long career in trying pry the ideology apart from the science. In this episode he talks about how over-extended metaphors distort our understanding of both science and society.

Some years ago, philosopher Ian Hacking compiled a list of books whose titles used the term social construction. There were a great variety of such titles, Hacking found, but most used the expression with the same intent: to diminish the reality of the category that was said to be socially constructed. To say that knowledge is formed by a social process is still, very often, to say that that knowledge is compromised in some way. Something is either true or it’s socially constructed, but not both. Historian Steven Shapin thinks this is the wrong approach. He has argued in books like A Social History of Truth, and Science is Culture that science is social all the way, and that this in no way undermines its truth claims; truth also being, by nature, social. In this episode, Steven Shapin shares his thoughts on the history of science and the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Science, according to its first practitioners, was a masculine pursuit. Francis Bacon, writing in the early 17th century, invited “the sons of knowledge” to pass through “the outer courts of nature” and on into “her inner chambers.” Science was male, nature female. And, according to Evelyn Fox Keller, this was no mere figure of speech – it had a shaping influence through the centuries on how science was imagined and how it was done. Evelyn Fox is professor emeritus of the philosophy and history of science at MIT, and a keen observer of the ways in which models and metaphors condition our understandings. In recent years she has been particularly critical of the ways in which simplistic models of the all-powerful gene mislead public understanding of genetics and developmental biology. And her proposal with regard to what she calls “gene talk” is the same one she made in her pioneering Reflections on Gender and Science in the 1980s: “change the terms of the discussion.” Evelyn Fox Keller shares some of her story and some of her thoughts on how gender, language, model and metaphor have coloured the practice of science.

From time to time, researchers test the public’s understanding of science. The public, predictably, turns out to be woefully ignorant: 20% think the moon is made of green cheese, 30% think an electron is bigger than a molecule and so forth. But, for David Abram, this demonstrably shaky grasp on the details misses the point. He thinks we are conditioned by scientific understandings at a much deeper level, and that the main effect of this conditioning is to make us distrust our senses. For citizens of the republic of techno-science, he says, the real world is not the one we can touch and taste – it is the one that is disclosed by particle physics or radio astronomy. David Abram is a teacher and a writer, whose book The Spell of the Sensuous has been widely read and much praised. He believes that we ought to snap out of our technological trance and, literally, come to our senses. He shares his thoughts with producer David Cayley.

Technological science exerts a pervasive influence on contemporary life. It determines much of what we do, and almost all of how we do it. Yet science and technology lie almost completely outside the realm of political decision. No electorate ever voted to split atoms or splice genes; no legislature ever authorized the iPod or the Internet. Our civilization, consequently, is caught in a profound paradox: we glorify freedom and choice, but submit to the transformation of our culture by technoscience as a virtual fate. In this episode we explore the relations between politics and scientific knowledge. David Cayley talks to Brian Wynne of the University of Lancaster in the north of England. He’s the associate director of an institute that studies the social and economic aspects of genetic technologies, and is one of Britain’s best-known writers and researchers on the interplay of science and society.

Wendell Berry is known to the reading public mainly for his poems, essays and novels, not his commentaries on science. But in the year 2000 he published a surprising book called Life Is A Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. The superstition the book denounces is the belief that science will one day give us a complete account of things. Science is admirable, Wendell Berry says, but it can only be deployed wisely when we recognize the limits to our knowledge. Science must submit to the judgement of Nature. In this episode, Wendell Berry unfolds this philosophy to producer David Cayley.

Few people ever apply a name that sticks to an entire social order, but sociologist Ulrich Beck is one of them. In 1986 in Germany he published Risk Society, and the name has become a touchstone in contemporary sociology. Among the attributes of Risk Society is the one he just mentioned: science has become so powerful that it can neither predict nor control its effects. It generates risks too vast to calculate. In the era of nuclear fission, genetic engineering and a changing climate, society itself has become a scientific laboratory. In this episode, Ulrich Beck talks about the place of science in a risk society. Later in the hour another equally influential European thinker, Bruno Latour, the author of We Have Never Been Modern. He argues that our very future depends on overcoming a false dichotomy between nature and culture.

In 1993 medical anthropologist Margaret Lock published Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America. The book explores dramatic differences in the way women experience menopause in each place. Such variation is usually taken as purely cultural, but, in her book, Margaret Lock makes a surprising suggestion. She proposes that there are biological differences between Japanese and North American women. Culture doesn’t just interpret biology, she says, it also shapes it. Margaret Lock is a professor in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine at McGill. In this episode you'll hear her current reflections on what she calls “local biologies.” Producer David Cayley begins his conversation with a discussion of another path breaking book of hers called Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death.

In 1985 a book appeared that changed the way people thought about the history of science. Until that time, the history of science had usually meant biographies of scientists, or studies of the social contexts in which scientific discoveries were made. Scientific ideas were discussed, but the procedures and axioms of science itself were not in question. This changed with the publication of Leviathan and the Air Pump, subtitled Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life; the book’s avowed purpose was – “to break down the aura of self-evidence surrounding the experimental way of producing knowledge.” This was a work, in other words, that wanted to treat something obvious and taken for granted – that matters of fact are ascertained by experiment – as if it were not at all obvious; that wanted to ask, how is it actually done and how do people come to agree that it has truly been done.

The authors of this path breaking book were two young historians, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, and both have gone on to distinguished careers in the field they helped to define, science studies. Steven Shapin will be featured later in this series, but How to Think About Science begins with a conversation with Simon Schaffer. Producer David Cayley called on him in his office at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science at Cambridge where he teaches.