ABSTRACT
Max Weber famously wrote of the ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) of the world that accompanied the incursion of instrumental rationality into all spheres of human life, starting in the sixteenth century, which resulted in the modern scientific world view.1 Thereafter the mark of epistemic success shifted from our comprehension to our prediction of reality. Indeed, within a decade of Weber’s death in 1920, a further disenchantment would occur – this time to science itself. The logical positivists argued that an event is not truly understood unless one could have predicted it. This stark formula, most closely associated with Carl Hempel’s influential theory of scientific explanation, would thus ‘disenchant’ the world in two senses.2
