The Triumph of Uncertainty: Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

From quantum mechanics to complex biological systems, science's quest for explanatory certainty has given way to probabilistic description. Uncertainty, thus, has become constitutive of depictions of reality. This is an inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the personal and the tacit) invariably affects how data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge.
Alfred I. Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science, investigates these issues as a participant-observer. The Triumph of Uncertainty tracks his own experiences as a laboratory investigator and as a philosopher, from the lingering positivism of the Vienna Circle to the post-positivism of late 20th century Boston. He shows, through autobiographical narrative, how immunology in particular exemplifies these post-positivist issues. Immunology's interpretive problems in regard to biological identity, individuality, and cognition resonate with postmodern debates in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and cultural criticism. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self-knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood converse.