Navigating the Rough Seas of 21-century Science

We live increasingly immersed in science, and increasingly confused by it. Every day, the media publish hundreds of news items, previews, and comments on the results of scientific research that appear to say everything and the opposite of everything, with the result of feeding anti-scientism instead of combating it. Some fundamental methodological and epistemological questions, which should constitute the obvious and taken-for-granted basis for any assessment of scientific claims or products, are being lost in a cognitive fog that now affects even many specialists in the field, let alone ordinary people. The following lines aim to offer a very small, but hopefully not negligible, contribution to finding our bearings again.