Description: The sciences power our society, influencing our material surroundings, our imaginations, our political thought. For most people, understanding the sciences means familiarity with the end products of science -- a new drug, a new theory of the cosmos, yet another technological advance. The sciences are supposed to be a resource of objective answers extracted from nature via a pure and exact scientific method. But the fascination with, and emphasis on, these end products obscures the processes that underlie every stage of scientific inquiry, from the earliest posing of a question for research to the application of scientific truths to many of our most urgent and complex social problems.

In this provocative new book, Mike Fortun and Herbert J. Bernstein advocate a new approach to the sciences of the twenty-first century, based on the processes scientists and the sciences actually follow: "muddling through", the combined operations of language, experiment, and human social judgments. Readers will be drawn into case studies about genetic explanations of disease and behavior, quantum physics, scientific fraud, and other explorations of how the sciences continually challenge and change our understandings of ourselves and our world. The authors draw on historical events, the writings of scientists, and cutting-edge science to convey the complex interactions that determine how and why ideas, experiments, and expert interpretations are shaped into truths that are at once messy and reliable, ambiguous and robust, incomplete and illuminating.

Muddling Through points the way toward a true dialogue between science makers and their beneficiaries, a dialogue that will ensure better use of science'spower to shape the world.

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