Book Review contributions are single-authored or multiple-authored reviews of recent books in the area of social epistemology.
My review of Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science commended Randy Allen Harris for not shying away from disciplinary controversy. Particularly, I complimented his decision to organize Case Studies (2018) and Issues and Methods (2020) around the numerous conceptual debates… Read More ›
Sheldon Richmond is a philosopher who spent his working career in IT, and has written an ambitious and courageous book on the philosophy of the problem of computer technology that integrates philosophy of science and cultural and political aspects of… Read More ›
Books like Christian Fuchs’s Communicating COVID-19 are necessary for our time. They are documents and analyses of global human civilization’s violent mutation, already catastrophically in progress. They document the causes and conditions of how humanity has failed the great test… Read More ›
Who says that book reviewing is dead? Within just a couple of weeks of the appearance of my new book, The Bias That Divides Us, it received two reviews that were in-depth and theoretically astute—one destined for the American Journal… Read More ›
How does it feel to be under lockdown because of the coronavirus epidemic? Bruno Latour, a leading scholar of the science studies community for the past four decades, answers: “I feel like a load of washing in the drum of… Read More ›
Bruno Latour’s new After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis (2021) offers to the reader in what is said in the text Latour at his best—and also, by what goes unsaid, Latour at his most cryptic … [please read below the rest of… Read More ›
In Material Girls, the philosopher Kathleen Stock argues that the categories WOMAN and MAN (capitalized by her to indicate that these are concepts and not the entities they refer to) are not altered by inner feelings of gender identity. Just saying… Read More ›
There is arguably no issue of greater urgency than the subject matter of You Are Here: the epistemic breakdown of public life. This is an ongoing crisis snowballing far faster than the sluggish pace of academic publishing. Whitney Phillips and… Read More ›
Although it may seem to be a paradoxical claim, we know quite a lot about ignorance. In fact, our knowledge and understanding of ignorance is increasing as the burgeoning field of agnotology gains traction. Kourany and Carrier’s book, Science and… Read More ›
The Bias That Divides Us (2021) is about myside bias, the supposed bias whereby we generate and test hypotheses and evaluate evidence in a way that is biased toward our own prior beliefs. Myside bias prevents convergence in beliefs: if… Read More ›