John Staddon Knihy

This expanded second edition of Scientific Method shows how science works, fails to work, or pretends to work, by looking at examples from physics, biomedicine, psychology, sociology, and economics.

Science is undergoing an identity crisis! A renown psychologist and biologist diagnoses our age of wishful, magical thinking and blasts out a clarion call for a return to reason and the search for objective knowledge and truth. Fans of Matt Ridley and Nicholas Wade will adore this trenchant meditation and call to action.Science is in trouble. Real questions in desperate need of answers—especially those surrounding ethnicity, gender, climate change, and almost anything related to ‘health and safety’—are swiftly buckling to the fiery societal demands of what ought to be rather than what is. These foregone conclusions may be comforting, but each capitulation to modernity’s whims threatens the integrity of scientific inquiry. Can true, fact-based discovery be redeemed?In Science in an Age of Unreason , legendary professor of psychology and biology, John Staddon, unveils the identity crisis afflicting today’s scientific community, and provides an actionable path to recovery. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Staddon answers pressing questions, Informed by decades of expertise, Science in an Age of Unreason is a clarion call to rebirth academia as a beacon of reason and truth in a society demanding its unconditional submission.

The book offers a comprehensive overview of behaviorism, tracing its historical development while critically examining radical behaviorism and its philosophical underpinnings. This expanded third edition introduces a new chapter focused on experimental methods and enhances discussions on the philosophical aspects of behaviorism, making it a valuable resource for understanding its applications to social issues.

Although I have been basically an academic for most of my life, the way I got there has taken some surprising turns. The first four chapters of this memoir describe what I can remember and discover about my early life: an unsuspected ancestry, fun in WW2 London, comical schooldays, and a spell in colonial Africa interrupting a wobbly college career at the end of which I left England for America. In the US I followed again a slightly erratic graduate-school trajectory that ended up in a Harvard basement. The main part of the book is about science, my efforts to understand the world opened up for me by biology, Darwin, the evolving cybernetic revolution and the experimental methods of influential and opinionated behaviorist B. F. Skinner. I have tried to make this part as simple and nontechnical as possible, although a couple of graphs have intruded.