It is fun to think for oneself about grand intellectual issues. This book focuses upon some of the big questions about science. Little attention is paid to the personalities or politics of the science studies area on which it builds. It stands back from the literature of its field, avoiding reliance on arguments from disciplinary authority and ignoring the shorter swings of disciplinary fashion.

The big questions about science are those which try to assess what science has accomplished and what it might yet achieve. The traditional image of science as progressively building reliable knowledge of external reality on a foundation of secure fact, has had its underlying assumptions effectively criticised, especially by the present generation. There is a new image available. Science is merely a prominent form of socially legitimated belief in modern society. As society moves from depending on an aristocracy of learning to a free market in ideas, science moves from the consensual pronouncements of an institutionalised international orthodoxy to multi-faceted linguistic codifications of the culture of competing local forms of life.

The new image is not entirely persuasive. The practical ways in which science affects our everyday lives seems to require that science contains at least approximate truth about reality. In science studies, debates occur between the older philosophically oriented view and the newer view of science as a social construction (e.g. Kitcher, 1993, which follows a similar strategy to the present book). The older view asked the big questions but answered them unsatisfactorily, while the newer view has put much more limited questions in their place.