Echoes from the past
the persisting shadow of classical determinism in contemporary health sciences
pp. 245-256
in: Décio Krause, Antonio A. Passos Videira (eds), Brazilian studies in philosophy and history of science, Berlin, Springer, 2011Abstract
This text deals with the concrete implications of a set of theoretical – more specifically, epistemological – questions stemming from a fact of life in contemporary society: there is a set of interventions, whether in the lives of individuals or in collectivities, operated by professional agents socially perceived as legitimate operators of these interventions, which are presented as the application of reliable knowledge. Scientific, exact, objective, true: multiple adjectives that reinforce the idea of reliability.