MORE OF STRAUSS' IDIOCY

On page 24 in the Pangle book, Strauss makes another bizarre claim:

Stated generally. by virtue of the distinction between validity and genesis, positivism tries to treat science as autonomous, but it is unable to do so: that distinction merely prevents it from giving due weight to the question of the human context out of which science arises and within which it exists. Positivism treats science in the way in which it would have to be treated if science were "the very highest power of man,” the power by which man transcends the merely human; yet positivism cannot maintain this "Platonic"' understanding of science. The question of the human context of science, which positivism fails and refuses to raise. is taken up by its most powerful present-day opponent in the West, radical historicism, or, to use the better-known name, existentialism.

Strauss wrote this in 1956 so the date is no excuse for ignoring the work of J.S. Mill and Charles Saunders Peirce on the "human context." Sociologists have been investigating science since Robert K. Merton's 1938 classic, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-century England. In the early 60s, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn did breakthrough work in the social dimensions of science and the area has been growing ever since.