Paradigm Shift

Although this stimulating book was published six years ago, its content is timely in raising issues related to the handling previous SARS outbreaks and the debate around climate change. The thrust is that scientific claims are presented as objective fact, while they are inherently rooted in human subjectivity and historically conditioned social structures, political fashion and even short-term economic self-interest. Cohen takes his cue from Thomas Kuhn and especially Paul Feyerabend in questioning expert opinion and warning against excessive orthodoxy and group-think, especially where science merges with propaganda, as we have seen over the past year. Progress is almost always accomplished by questioning consensus orthodoxy. In a series of wide-ranging chapters on issues in science, medicine, homoeopathy, neuroeconomics, cosmology and even synchronicity, the author begins with what we are supposed to think, followed by a statement of 'what you're not to say.'

We need to remember that expert opinions do keep changing, for instance on evolutionary theory and the practice of lobotomy in psychiatry. The chapter on inexplicable diseases highlights profits made from the fear factor, showing how previous virus scares have just failed to take off in the way that we have just seen, despite dire warnings from many experts, including Neil Ferguson. There is also a danger in identifying a single explanatory theory rather than considering multiple factors, complex systems, feedback loops and variable contexts. The author takes a sceptical view on global warming, especially as a political orthodoxy, and his arguments and related evidence are worth pondering in this contested field: 'science' is not monolithic, nor does it have a monopoly on rationality. The final chapter considers paradigm shifts more generally, reminding the reader of Sir Karl Popper's notion of falsification and the theory-laden nature of observation. New ideas are suppressed because they are necessarily subversive of existing basic philosophical commitments, as Kuhn pointed out – the author concludes that 'science is a historical, piecemeal and fallible process of gaining limited knowledge of the world' which is necessarily open to debate and revision.