Antiscience clearly means different things to different people. Gross and Levitt find fault primarily with sociologists,philosophers and other academics who have questioned sciences objectivity. Sagan is more concerned with those who believe in ghosts,creationism and other phenomena that contradict the scientific worldview.
A survey of news stories in1996reveals that the antiscience tag has been attached to many other groups as well,from authorities who advocated the elimination of the last remaining stocks of smallpox virus to Republicans who advocated decreased funding for basic research.
Few would dispute that the term applies to the Unabomber,whose manifesto,published in1995,scorns science and longs for return to a pretechnological utopia. But surely that does not mean environmentalists concerned about uncontrolled industrial growth are antiscience,as an essay in US News World Report last May seemed to suggest.
The environmentalists,inevitably,respond to such critics. The true enemies of science,argues Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University,a pioneer of environmental studies,are those who question the evidence supporting global warming,the depletion of the ozone layer and other consequences of industrial growth. Indeed,some observers fear that the antiscience epithet is in danger of becoming meaningless. The term antiscience can lump together too many,quite different things,notes Harvard University philosopher Gerald Holton in his1993work Science and Anti-Science. They have in common only one thing that they tend to annoy or threaten those who regard themselves as more enlightened.
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