Abstract

Blair, David Concerning David Tribe's rejoinder to my 'Science works better than that' , it's pleasing to see that there are some points on which we agree. Unfortunately he continues to make a strong and unjustified attack on the scientific community as a whole-essentially on the grounds that, of the conclusions of science that later turned out to be false, virtually all of them were at some time 'believed' by most scientists. In reply, I shall show that it is his underlying framework that needs to be altered-quite radically. He does not understand what the activity of scientists is like-indeed what it has to be like, when faced with the task of extracting knowledge from the real world