TY - JOUR AU - Ellis, Brian PY - 2019/03/31 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Enlightenment and Realism JF - Filozofia Nauki JA - FN VL - 27 IS - 1 SE - Artykuły DO - 10.14394/filnau.2019.0007 UR - https://www.fn.uw.edu.pl/index.php/fn/article/view/1053 SP - 139-143 AB - <p>Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now is a landmark achievement, if it is considered only as a&nbsp;review of the history of social progress in the world since the mid-eighteenth century. Pinker&nbsp;demonstrates, beyond reasonable doubt, that great progress has been made on almost every&nbsp;front. But, it is argued, much of this progress has been bought at the cost of social progress in&nbsp;First World countries. For it has been achieved by reverse engineering the social structures to&nbsp;make them resemble more closely the neoclassical model of a nation’s economy — a model that&nbsp;contains neither a government nor any socially-funded social services. The reviewer argues that&nbsp;the practice of changing the social facts, in order to make them fit a given theoretical model better, is contrary to scientific method, and that we need a new enlightenment now to develop scientifically more realistic theories in the social sciences.</p> ER -