ABSTRACT
In his book Dreams of a Final Theory, Steven Weinberg, while acknowledging social and cultural influences upon science, responds forcefully to postmodernist critiques of science: What Weinberg describes as his experience and that of all working scientists constitutes the germ of the epistemology to be expounded in this chapter. This epistemology, called critical realism, is, according to John Polkinghorne, 'embraced by almost all practising scientists' at least implicitly, and may be said to characterize the process of knowledge-seeking in general. The chapter deals about epistemology and virtually nothing about art. The ontology onto which critical realism opens, according to Polanyi, requires a given, 'a transcendent reality' over which science has no control, that reaches out beyond us in an indeterminate range of intelligibility but which also beckons us on to unending questioning through its intimations of hidden dimensions of order and meaning.
