Steven Shapin Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science Harvard University Science and the Modern World Do we live in a scientific world? At least since Max Weber in 1918 announced the "disenchantment" of the world, social and cultural commentators have insisted, or assumed, that we do. This lecture will assess some very substantial senses in which science is now the defining and most authoritative form of knowledge, and has been since perhaps the late nineteenth century. And it will point to a series of considerations which argue that we do not now, and never have, inhabited a scientific culture. Connections will be pointed out between this problematic state of affairs and the changing identity of the scientist in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. NBA Home