Raymond RC Tallis
professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, and consultant in healthcare of older people at Salford Royal Hospitals NHS Trust
The robustness and practical usefulness of scientific knowledge is based upon an unrelentingly critical attitude
I would emphasise that the robustness and practical usefulness of scientific knowledge is based upon an unrelentingly critical attitude to its own intuitions, theories and beliefs, so that what survives its scepticism towards itself is of a very high quality indeed. We need to understand that nature has intrinsic properties. These properties are not transparent to our prejudices. These properties are uniform throughout the universe, although they have a variety of expressions. And these properties are amenable to understanding, in ultimately mathematical terms. Raymond Tallis is author of books including The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)), and Why the Mind Is Not a Computer: A Pocket Lexicon of Neuromythology (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
| 
