The nature of science and the problem of demarcation
pp. 123-142
in: Gonzalo Munvar (ed), Spanish studies in the philosophy of science, Berlin, Springer, 1996Abstract
The tremendous success of science as a mode of inquiry into the nature of the universe is a matter of wonderment. The technology derived from scientific knowledge is equally wondrous: the high-rise buildings of our cities, thruways and long span-bridges, rockets that bring men to the moon, telephones that provide instant communication across continents, computers that perform complex calculations in millionths of a second, vaccines and drugs that keep bacterial parasites at bay, gene therapies that replace DNA in defective cells. All these remarkable achievements bear witness to the validity of the scientific knowledge from which they originated. No other kind of knowledge affects human life so pervasively and drastically.