Historically-minded person that I am, when I initially heard that MIT Press was publishing a new book titled The Scientific Attitude, I naturally made the assumption that they were bringing out a new edition of C.W. Waddington’s classic 1941 work of that name, originally published as part of the brilliant Pelican series of paperbacks that provided generations of impecunious university students and any interested others with the opportunity to discover and read the works of many of the world’s great (then) contemporary thinkers (somewhat ominously discontinued in 1984 but resurrected by Penguin UK in a somewhat different physical as well as editorial form in 2014).
However I was mistaken. The new book of this title is in fact by Lee McIntyre, and carries the full title of The Scientific Attitude; Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. Much as the original The Scientific Attitude was a work addressing the popular questioning of science in its time, this new The Scientific Attitude takes up the challenge science is all-too-often facing in our own.
For those who would like the opportunity to hear the author discussing this new work, the New Books Network podcast recently featured an interview with him by Jonathan Haber that is very much worth the time spent listening to it.
