I've always felt that science was about the pursuit of knowledge, not truth. The attitude I've felt was that science is always changing and thinking about it in terms of truth is missing the point of its evolutionary nature and its mission to explain. I've never felt that my duty as a scientist was to uncover any truths, more so to create models that say "hey, it works pretty well, let's go with that". I guess we differ a lot in that I'm much more of a materialist. Truth isn't so much important to me as what works, and what works boils down to I guess the material interests of all of us. So yeup, by knowledge I mean something that is much more material than what one might suggest by truth (I'm only posing them against each other for simplicity's sake).
As for those of us who treat science as the only viable source of knowledge, perhaps it's because they're only concerned with a subset of knowledge that is useful to them, like practical knowledge.
All that remained was the scientific specialist, who knew "more and more about less and less", and the philosophical speculator, who knew less and less about more and more.
Oh, this popular dichotomy. I think it's a bit overplayed. I know from experience in political science we have debates on terminology all the time - whether they serve to clarify anything or are simply terminology for terminology's sake. And at least in this field we're not looking at less and less - the challenge is to explain politics in a rational manner and so we're always trying to generalize if possible (because if we can do it, it'll be very insightful). But the flip side is that we study specifics to learn if our generalizations really are generalizations, and what exceptions exist and why. At least in political science we study all scope of politics that are relevant and so we can't just go on learning "more and more about less and less". If we have specialists in that field, it's only because they're harnessed with the understanding and insight to synthesize and create new information that the rest of us can read and assess XD At the end of the day, I think specialists don't necessarily know more than the rest of us (since their ideas will be published and everyone will learn), but they are able to create more than the rest of us - and that to me is a very neat tool to have.
Same goes for biology really. There are many scopes of biological investigation from the molecular to the ecological level. If we become more specialized that's to dig down to the small-scale that is harder to investigate, but of course we can't separate that from its context. We could be looking for, I dunno, to what extent the alpha-Q1-IL10C2C4S5 receptor (I'm making this up btw) is affected by mutations in F348, CD351 whatever, but there's always a tissue level, organ level, physiological level and organism level context. Maybe we want to investigate how it effects a nervous response to whatever, or maybe this behaviour, or maybe that disease. And this goes up into a social context, an industrial context as we figure out how to deal with it. My point is, maybe there's no "wisdom" or really insightful conclusions that comes out of this, but maybe there'll be an impactful solution to an issue - or perhaps we've created a better understanding of a certain mechanism that might prove useful when we investigate the next issue. And technical terminology is really important for biology. It's not like people can't understand it. I'm sure that most scientists can explain the phenomenon they're studying to someone and it would make sense. It might just take a while to explain the background information and context, but if a person is actually interested in learning about something, they'll understand it. And if Durant's worried about too much specialization in the sciences, he certainly doesn't have to fret about that in biology. You've heard of genomics, but we can extend that to transcriptomics and proteomics and interactomics - there is a "revival" (now that is a word that imposes value) of holistic thinking as we realize how complex life is and how everything interacts with everything else.
I dunno, I think he's painting in some very broad brushstrokes because science would be useless without context. And judging by what I've seen in life, scientists do try really hard to understand and contextualize what they learn. And there are a million different levels of analysis. It's not going to tell us the meaning of life or anything, but it is going to solve some big problems and hey, isn't that all we should ask for? I think, from what I just read, is that philosophers are too caught up with the idea of truth - so when you impose that on science, it doesn't make much sense. I read up the wiki page on the philosophy of biology, not sure if it's good enough an intro - but I, and many people that study biology, can identify with the questions it poses. Maybe some of us don't consider it as an individual, but the scientific community sure does consider these questions collectively through debate and discussion.
So the philosopher-mediator's duty would be to clarify what science is and what it is not, what does scientists mean when they say a theory is true, etc.
As for this, I thought our education system was supposed to do this, innit? :P Have more kids stay in school, have scientific education be something that is valued in society, and we won't have to go back in time and create an entire class of the population to deal with this issue XD