SciAm on ‘A Cultural History of Causality’
Written on March 21, 2008
Intriguing books found around the Sci Am office… is intrigued by A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought by Stephen Kern (Princeton University Press, 2004) – “Search Inside” available at Amazon.
From the book description:
Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew.
Filed in: culture.
