The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

When I suggest that science will better flourish if allowed to go its own way, then, Collins and Pinch might think that I have given a bad answer to the wrong question. What we should ask is: how can science be reined in? The archetypical golem was brought into being in the late 1500s by the leading rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, to protect the city’s Jewish population. According to one account, when it began to run amok, the rabbi had to take back the animating incantation—emet, the Hebrew word for truth—from the golem’s mouth. His creation turned to dust. In the legend, you might discern the radical subjectivist agenda: take away science’s claim to absolute truth and it will be tamed. A more careful reading of Collins and Pinch’s metaphor shows, however, that neutralization of the knowledge machine is very far from their aspirations. They take the golem to be a “bumbling giant,” a “creature of our art and our craft,” whom for all its faults “we should learn to love for what it is.” The aim of their book is not to bring science to heel, but to understand how it works, to see how its knowledge is made.