Joseph Agassi

A century and a half ago James Spedding wrote a two-volume review of Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon’. That review inaugurated a career dedicated to the study of Bacon, including a biography that is still, perhaps, the best extant, and the preparation of the collected works-by Ellis, Spedding, and Heath-which is still the standard edition in Bacon scholarship. Had I treated Kuhn’s new book with a similar degree of attention, the result would be a book-length study of Max Planck and his contribution to twentieth-century thought. Let others take up that task. Here is a mere outline of the task, a few hints. Such a story as Kuhn has attempted to tell is, of necessity, full of loose ends. The choice of which loose end to tie up may be ad hoc; the choice is then open to criticism. Or, it may be in accord with some principle; the choice and the principle are then both open to criticism. A detail may be wrongly presented or rightly presented but its role in the story wrongly judged. Nor is this all: the list of what may go wrong and be open to critical comments is already too long. A reviewer must, then, either cover all grounds by a book-length review, or make many questionable choices tacitly. Both options are unsatisfactory, and all that is left for the reviewer is to ask for his reader’s sympathy and indulgence and to attempt to be as transparent as possible. What is the book about? The title suggests the answer: it is the story of how the study of black-body radiation (see below) led to the idea that matter emits and absorbs radiation, i.e., light, not continuously, as required by the wave-theory of light, but in discrete bursts of energy, now known as photons. This idea was revolutionary. Thomas S. Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has now written the story of one of the greatest and most exciting scientific revolutions of all time that of the quantization of light: the quantum revolution. One might expect this book, then, to be not merely about the quantum revolution but also about its structure. Is it? Most authorities on the matter tend to answer in the negative. This review takes the opposite stand and is thus a tribute to this book.

The aim of this discussion is practical; otherwise it largely repeats some very general observations, chiefly historical and philosophical. I boast no expertise in anything specifically medical, to do with either medical care or medical administration. My concern is with the system of medicine and with the ethical and social issues that it involves. Applied philosophy is a still uncharted territory. Philosophers traditionally focus more on justifying accepted solutions than on seeking new solutions to urgent or interesting problems: their staple problems are those of justification. Thus, they spend less time discussing scientific problems and difficulties, and more time discussing the justification of the claims that we know. They habitually choose the simplest and most unproblematic claims for knowledge, and then try to substantiate them...

New York University Professor Jerome S. Bruner, an eminent and influential educationist, is the author of numerous papers published in professional journals as well as of several highly successful books. Bruner's slim book titled The Process of Education is a most significant work. At the time of its publication (1960), Bruner was a professor of psychology at Harvard University, where he ran the Center for Cognitive Studies. It is an acclaimed classic and was translated into several languages within a few years of its original publication. Though published in 1960, The Process of Education is still very prestigious and influential (see, for example, The Encyclopedia of Informal Education found at http://www.infed.org/thinkers/bruner.htm).

A good theory of rationality should accommodate debates over first principles, such as those of rationality. The modest challenge made in this article is that relativists try to explain the (intellectual) value of some debates about first principles (absolute presuppositions, basic assumptions, intellectual frameworks, intellectual commitments, and paradigms). Relativists claim to justify moving with relative ease from one framework to another, translating chunks of one into the other; this technique is essential for historians, anthropologists and others. Thus ideas concerning false prophecy are transferable to contemporary discussions. Ancient false prophets offered illusions of overcoming difficult problems cheaply; relativists do that too. The problem that relativism purports to solve cheaply is that of legitimizing pluralism. As the absolutist theory of truth is intuitively problematic, relativism seems intuitively more acceptable, but this intuitive advantage vanishes when it manifests as false prophecy.

the walls of the academy. The wall is defended by the idea that not only do experts possess knowledge beyond the ken of lay people, which is trivially true, but that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the two. The aim of this presentation, then, is to discuss the possibility of building a bridge between the ordinary educated citizen and the expert. The tool for this is the famous effort to disseminate scientific literacy, or more generally, any specific sophisticated literacy. The subject-matter of this presentation, then, is scientific literacy, and the question is, how can it best be disseminated? Now the word "literacy" in expressions like "scientific literacy" and "computer literacy" may be meant literally or metaphorically. As I will try to show later on, if time permits, profound ambiguity and ambivalence reside here. The significance of all this remains to be seen. Let me first contrast any specific sophisticated literacy with elementary literacy, and center first on the elementary. It is of course the one that is denoted by the first two of the three r's, reading writing and arithmetic, the three skills teachers of the lower grades of elementary schools are supposed to transmit to their charges. Before discussing scientific literacy or computer literacy or any other specific sophisticated literacy, I will discuss this elementary literacy. My suggestion is that by advancing somewhat our knowledge of elementary literacy we can see what is specific to any specific literacy, however sophisticated it may be, but that there is more profit for understanding the nature of elementary literacy by examining specific cases. My thesis will be that any literacy, elementary or specific, is best achieved by guided, aided experimentation: the trainee should learn by trial and error..