The disenchanted world and beyond: toward an ecological perspective on science

Abstract

Positivism and, especially, Max Weber's vision of the modern disen chantment of the world are incoherent because they separate human culture from the environment in which human agents pursue their life- projects. The same problem is manifested, more blatantly, in current social studies of science, which take the project of disenchantment further by disenchanting science itself. A different image of science is traced to classical empiricism, whose paradigm of learning is belief and, more specifically, the practical nature of the believer's experience of the environment of his or her actions. The believer's ecological imagery of the world, as it was elaborated by classical empiricism, provides the means to transcend the disenchanted image of the world and its prob lems.