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Books 247 hostility towards the person and that feelings of this kind are not based on a cognitive sense of information. Furthermore, such feelings can be expressed in words by means of a chosen vocabulary and style of presentation and, in speech, by intonation. He states that semiotics at present does not allow one to deal satisfactorily with such matters. I believe that he is only partly correct as regards information one receives by listening, by reading or by contemplating an artwork because of psychological lines of approach to such matters initiated by Pavlov and by Freud-but, as Kipling said, this is another story! How We Know: An Exploration of the Scientific Process. Martin Goldstein and Inge F. Goldstein. Plenum Press, New York, 1978. 357 pp., illus. $14.95. Reviewed by Waldo E. Haisley* The Goldsteins are a husband-wife team, both practicing scientists. Their book is an attempt to 'explain scientific method' to 'the average educated person' and to provide professional scientists with broader perspectives on their own discipline. For an initial approach, they present at some length (about half of the book) three diverse case studies, each chosen to illustrate a particular aspect of their subject. The cholera investigations of physician-scientist John Snow during 19thcentury epidemics in Great Britain (which revealed and established drinking water and contaminated food as primary mechanisms in spreading the disease) were chosen to document and illustrate a general exposition of controlled experiment and selective observation as effective means for testing hypotheses, as well as the need for the latter in guiding the former. The development of the 18th-century caloric hypothesis of heat and its 19th-century successor, the kinetic theory of gases, is described in detail to make concrete the general theme of inventing and adopting quantitative criteria for simplifying the analysis of qualitatively complex phenomena. The 20th-century story of mental illness is told, with its vicissitudes of understanding, diagnosis and treatment, in order to bring out the importance and difficulty of attaining stable and fundamental classification systems and to emphasize the problems and pitfalls due to effects that may be mere projections of previous belief or of artifacts of the observation process. There follows a more general section in which the authors elaborate on such major themes as scientific understanding, the scientific goal of generality, the reliability and limitations of experiment and precision measurement, the role and origin of hypotheses in scientific development and the cultural roots of science. A final section on Mathematics and Science is directed to the needs and interests of the nonmathematical reader. A primary theme in the book is the assertion that the process of scientific development is much more than the prosaic accumulation of factual detail and precise measurement in terms of which it has often been portrayed. The authors stress that the infinite multiplicity of trivial fact is a positive hindrance to the achievement of valid scientific generalizations , which require imaginative testable hypotheses demanding as much of the 'creative' faculty as any major artwork. The humanistically oriented reader will find much fresh, substantive and interesting material in this book. It is indeed a far cry from the collections of pious scientistic platitudes that used to be staple fare 50 years ago in textbook expositions of the 'scientific method'. The authors have kept up with the times-they have read, for instance, and taken to heart the writings of Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi and others who have enriched the perspectives on science recently. They are also engagingly modest in their willingness to admit that 'scientific method' contains no magic formula for instant sure-fire certainty, and they claim that other approaches to truth, as practiced, for instance, in the humanities, are neither *.Dep~. of Physics and Astronomy, Phillips Hall 039A, Umverslty of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, U.S.A. invalid, inferior nor as dissimilar from the scientific enterprise as some believe. The book's major weakness, I find, is its failure to achieve a clear and definite overview. Partly because of their sincere and vigorous effort to tackle the larger questions and to eschew simplistic shortcuts, one gets a persistent impression of uncertainty and of failure to assimilate fully. The...

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