Good reason

Saturday, 14th August 2010

What Science Knows and How It Knows It, by James Franklin
Encounter Books, $39.99
pp. 283, ISBN 9781594032073

Too much of what passes for serious commentary nowadays is really just barracking — often in the thinnest disguise. There are honourable exceptions, but a good many journalists, columnists and self-styled public intellectuals tend to ‘take a side’ in party politics, or in the broader culture wars. Then, come what may, they staunchly defend it. Private citizens with strongly-felt allegiances often do the same.

The Iraq War was a revealing case study. In Australia and the US, the governments of John Howard and George W. Bush were regularly excoriated by their critics for mendacity, recklessness and incompetence. Meanwhile, in Britain, virtually identical charges were levelled for years against Tony Blair and New Labour. The difference in Britain was that many of those making the anti-war case were conservatives (at least in a partisan, capital ‘C’ sense). Arguments eloquently advanced in the London Times, say, or The Spectator, were spookily interchangeable with those appearing under the bylines of rusted-on lefties in the Sydney Morning Herald. It was hard to know who was sincere, and the point I am making is that rigorous independent analysis of key public policy issues is much more scarce than it should be.

What a joy it was, then, to read James Franklin’s lucid and timely book What Science Knows. It has received some critical attention overseas but little in Australia. This is a pity, because Franklin, a professor of mathematics at the University of New South Wales, is a fine writer. He is schooled in many disciplines, including philosophy, and appears to have no personal or ideological axe to grind. His interest is seeking out truth, insofar as science (and other bodies of relevant human knowledge) are capable of leading us to it.

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