ABSTRACT
In her introduction to her translation of Cajal, Laura Otis writes: Originally, there were twelve Vacation Stories. Cajal wrote them early in his career, but he waited nearly twenty years to publish them. According to Cajal, the stories were unoriginal and stylistically defective. More probably, he feared that these ‘anti-religious, anti-establishment’ tales would jeopardize his scientific funding. Significantly, Cajal was more of an ambassador than a critic of the scientific establishment, though he was critical of ethically irresponsible science as well as popular ‘assumptions about the way science worked’. His stories tend, therefore, to impart a balanced view of science that is often missing from both idealized, internalist accounts of science as well as literature and science criticism. When a recent study of judges concluded that judges do not generally understand how science works, the point of reference for a ‘genuine understanding’ was the Daubert four-part test for valid scientific knowledge: testability, peer-reviewed publications, and general acceptance in the relevant field.
