What is science? Science is a body of knowledge; science is what scientists do qua scientists; science is a tradition; science is any empirically involved research activity; science is a faculty in the university. All these answers are true and meet the question, yet they are highly unsatisfactory. Hence, the question was ill-put. Here it is in its proper wording: what is the essence of science? This is a tricky question; without entering the hoary matter of the critique of essentialism one can re-word it: what differentiates science from……? Taking it seriously requires the study in depth of many competitors to science. The study of alien cultures is, of course, highly recommended and even the bouncers will not object to it unless it is done from the viewpoint of the competition. Yet controversy about alien cultures abounds in the scientific departments devoted to it, and consequently the task of characterizing science in opposition to them gets increasingly harder. Example: is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has created a revolution in the current view of myth and of magic, is he a bouncer or a competitor? He says he is a friend of science, a scientist indeed. Is he? The question is very difficult to settle and the anthropological literature is still struggling with it. Let us try to alter our strategy, then. Can we look at science rather than at the competition and find there some clear-cut characteristic that sets science clearly apart from all the competitors? If so, what is it?


This is the problem of the demarcation of science as semi-officially understood. The most traditional answer to it, to repeat, is that science is a body of theories, and what characterizes them is their certitude, our ability to prove their perfection and finality. (Bechtel:1988) The more modern answer is the theory that science is a prestigious social class which lends prestige to its ideas. These two answers are contested these days, though the first is advocated mainly by philosophers of science and contested mainly by sociologists and historians of science, and the second suffers the reverse role-we have here two groups of self-appointed public-relations spokespeople of science competing for the same territory. Let us take the first answer first.


In the twentieth century the impact of logic led to a shift on this matter. The scientific character of a sentence shifted: it was deemed not proof but provability. Now generally one cannot know if a sentence will prove true or false before it is compared with experience. So, a sentence was deemed not quite provable, but merely decidable; a sentence is decided if it is either proved or disproved (Brown:1977). This doubled the number of entries: not only a proven sentence but also its negation is scientific, as the negation of a proven sentence is disproved, and the couple of sentences taken together is decidable. Now the claim was that though generally a sentence cannot be declared a priori provable, it was declared that every well-formed sentence is a priori decidable. The justification for the relaxation of the criterion of demarcation of science to the extent of letting the negation of scientific claims be scientific was the wish to corner the competition once and for all by permitting the competition to contradict science openly. If the competition does contradict science, they will put themselves to ridicule, and if not, we will be able to expose them as saying nothing. The very idea that one can permit the competition or not, and decide that they say something or not, shows that the advocates of this view took anti-science to be passé, that they were serving science in the supposition that it is winning anyhow. In any case, they met the surprise of their lives when they learned that even in mathematics decidability is unattainable. In computer science it is at times an empirical affair: many tasks given to a computer for deciding the truth or falsity (called the truth value) of a sentence are performable, and demonstrably so; at times the demonstration is purely abstract, as when the time the task takes to complete is much too long (Chalmers:1999). And some tasks are not known to be performable or not. And then, if such a task is given to a computer, then, if the computer finishes the task, it is performable and the truth or falsity of the sentence in question is decidable; but until the task is completed it cannot be decided whether the task will be completed soon or not.


The Philosophy of Science


Science began in Antiquity as a branch of wisdom, and philosophy,  the love of wisdom) was distinguished from wisdom only by philosophers. Cultivators of science in its early modern times (c. 1600-1800) called themselves philosophers, and their activity was called not science but natural philosophy. What we call today the philosophy of science includes the theories of knowledge (epistemology) and of learning (methodology), as well as the study of the principles of science (metaphysics, the philosophy of nature) (Chalmers:1990). The first two disciplines were at the time neglected as they were considered marginal; the third, metaphysics, was deemed distinctly dangerous. Natural philosophers did not consider their work impractical; they called themselves ‘benefactors of humanity’, as they were convinced that their activities, in addition to their intrinsic merits, will bring peace and prosperity to the whole world (Godfrey-Smith:2003). But they insisted that the practical aspects of science, significant as they surely are, can only appear as by-products, not as the outcome of study directed to any goal other than the search for the truth: any other goal will render research biased and so worse than nothing.


 It is hard to examine this, quite generally received, assessment, since the expression ‘the philosophy of science’ is new. To repeat, traditionally the word ‘philosophy’ designated learning in general and empirical science in particular. After the defeat of the French Revolution, some fashionable reactionary philosophers swore allegiance to unreason. Other, more old-fashioned philosophers understandably attempted to distance themselves from the new advocacy of unreason, and one way they did this was by naming their own views ‘scientific philosophy’. This name usually designated mechanistic philosophy; its adherents considered theology to be typically metaphysical and so they branded all metaphysics evil; this enhanced their claim for scientific status for their own, mechanistic metaphysics (Charlesworth:1982). This way the philosophy that upheld the traditional esteem of reason centered mainly on science and on reasonability in the moral life of the individual and the nation. It naturally tended to centre increasingly on epistemology, methodology and rational metaphysics as a main tool to combat unreason (O’Hear:1989). The philosophers of unreason had-still have-their own philosophy of science, but this is scarcely recognized: the philosophers who defend reason against the attack on it from the advocates of unreason took a monopoly on science and its defense.


The philosophy of science thus evolved into a specific activity of philosophers of the rationalist persuasion-the activity of defending science against its detractors. This explains the poverty of the field today: today science has no worthy detractors to combat; and no dragons to slay, no heroic deeds (Newton-Smith:1981). Even the philosophers of science themselves are aware of this fact, as they defend science not only by singing its praise, but also by attempting to solve problems in epistemology and in methodology, and by seeking newer and better arguments to combat metaphysics with. They do this as a mere pious act, paying no heed to the possibility that the problems they pose are insoluble, at least insoluble as long as they are presented in the traditional manner and settings (Godfrey-Smith:2003). They cling to the pre-critical, optimistic view of science in the face of the risks to the very survival of humanity which scientific technology has originated: they relegate these risks to the new field of the philosophy of technology (which is less than half a century old), as if their philosophy of science does not include the philosophy of technology and as if their philosophy of science does not credit science with scientific technology as a great achievement (Charlesworth:1982). It really is a cheap trick to admit to the field of the philosophy of science the praise for science as the source of the benefits from scientific technology and its great achievements, and to banish to the philosophy of technology the possible and actual ill-effects of the same scientific technology. The efforts to solve the traditional problems of the philosophy of science, he says, are commendable even if these should turn out to be insoluble. For, he explains, the struggle is the ongoing defense of science and thus of traditional rationalist philosophy and thus of rationalism as such (Schick:2000).


T.S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions begins with the observation that our image of science might well undergo a complete transformation if we took a dispassionate look at the actual history of science (Bechtel:1988). On this picture the scientist disinterestedly applies his special tool, the scientific method, and each application takes him further on the road to truth. In making this observation Kuhn is not simply looking forward to his own conclusion that between the ideology of science and the realities of scientific practice there falls a vast shadow. Rather he is suggesting that mere reflection on the source of our image of science is likely to prompt the conjecture that the image is gravely distorted. For the vast majority of us acquire our image either through contemporary scientific textbooks or through popular accounts of science the authors of which in turn derive their image from the standard texts. Such texts are designed to present contemporary scientific beliefs and techniques. In so far as we learn thereby anything about the history of science, it is through cleaned-up versions of past scientific triumphs (Chalmers:1999). The grasp of the struggles that preceded the great moments of science derives more often than not from what the makers of these moments themselves said about the struggle.


If this is the source of one’s image of science one ought to worry about its viability, just as one should be worried about one’s image of the political process if that image was derived solely from, say, reading the memoirs of Wilson and Brezhnev. The weak or boring attack is launched by one who accepts both that there is some special method and some ideal mode of applying it but who thinks that the actual practice of the scientific community falls short to a greater or lesser extent from what could be achieved (Brown:1977). The strong or exciting attack, on the other hand, is waged by those who deny that there is any such defensible ideal with which actual practice can be compared. The investigations into the history of science, which Kuhn advises, lead him, initially at least, to embrace the exciting attack. However, in response to criticism Kuhn has so modified and altered or re-interpreted the position advanced in the first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that it is no longer clear whether a rationalist is committed to denying anything that Kuhn asserts. To begin with I shall be concerned with the earlier strong Kuhnian position, which deserves to be taken seriously (more seriously than Kuhn himself now appears to take it). For it articulates the most basic challenge to the rationalist perspective, a challenge which has yet to be met in full.


The model of science which Kuhn sees as emerging from a study of the history of science is to be explicated in terms of his notion of a paradigm. In his original essay Kuhn played fast and loose with this notion to the extent that one critic claimed to be able to discern twenty-two different senses in which the term was used. Indeed, several critics have maintained that this free and easy manipulation of the notion nullifies the value of his work (Chlamers:1999). This latter notion of a paradigm as a shared example was the genesis of Kuhn’s full notion of a paradigm, or as he now prefers to call it ‘a disciplinary matrix’. The notion of a shared example derives from his observation that we cannot give a rule specifying necessary and sufficient conditions for the applications of even simple, observational predicates such as ‘…is a swan’. Often we acquire a grasp of the sense of a predicate through the realization that certain objects constitute paradigm cases of the instantiation of the predicate. We acquire the ability to recognize other objects as being like the paradigm objects in the appropriate respect and apply the predicate to them.


Epistemologically the exemplars of the predicates are prior to any rules for their application. In fact, it may not be possible, even having acquired the use of a predicate, to specify its sense in this way. This point about the application of predicates is both familiar and not particularly contentious. Kuhn seeks to extend the general idea to more sophisticated predicates than ‘…is a swan’. For instance, the notions of a successful scientific practice or a significant problem or a successful solution to such a problem are taken to be notions the application of which is grasped through exemplars or paradigms without prior or even post specification of rules giving the necessary and sufficient conditions of, say, solutions being successful (Newton-Smith:1981). These ‘shared examples can serve cognitive functions commonly attributed to shared rules’. Kuhn is right in maintaining that there are no such rules available for these sorts of notion. However, there is a danger in assuming too easily that this is the case. For an endeavor to search for rules may reveal some necessary and some sufficient conditions, and the articulation of these may be of considerable interest even though we cannot produce rules which specify conditions which are jointly necessary and sufficient. His point remains that an explicit grasp of these partial rules is not a precondition of the application of the predicate. In the end it is not clear just how much light this casts on the nature of the scientific enterprise since it has nothing particular to do with the science. As we noted, Kuhn was led to introduce the particular term ‘paradigm’ in the context of considering the application of predicates. It was, therefore, misleading to extend that term to cover the other four ingredients noted above. Kuhn also employs the notion of an exemplar in giving his account of the meaning of scientific terms: ‘The process of matching exemplars to expressions is initially a way of learning to interpret the expressions.’ 


The positive and salutary virtue of Kuhn’s use of his notion of a paradigm is to remind us that in looking at the scientific enterprise it is important to focus on more than the theories (in the narrow sense of the term) advocated within a given community (Chlamers:1990). The danger in using the notion is that we may be led to view the history of science as a sequence of discrete, clearly demarked, paradigms. The notion is far too vague and imprecise for this. Given his own characterization it simply will not do to say that ‘despite occasional ambiguities, the paradigms of a mature scientific community can be determined with relative ease’. Notwithstanding this danger, it remains a useful term. For, in general, it directs our attention to the fact that in understanding the scientific enterprise we must look not only at theories proper but also at a wider range of beliefs, attitudes, procedures and techniques of the scientific community. In particular it reminds us that in explaining the replacement of one theory by another it is essential to look at this wider nexus and its evolution. However, as noted above, in view of the absence of any associated criterion of individuation we cannot think of the term as identifying any delimited class of particular items (Newton-Smoth:1981). This severely limits its utility as a term of art within the history and sociology of science. It is too vague a term to allow us to ask questions as to why one particular paradigm gives way to another or to seek to devise laws or general theories about paradigms. Kuhn unfortunately writes as if it were a technical term capable of utilization in this way. Interestingly, he himself finds no need to use the term in his recent historical study of the origins of Quantum Mechanics. And, more seriously, as we shall see, Kuhn holds a number of untenable theses about this only vaguely delimited phenomenon of paradigm change.


 


References


 


Bechtel, W. 1988. Philosophy of Science: An Overview for Cognitive Science. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.


 


Brown, H. I.: Perception, theory and commitment, Precedent Publishing, 1977.


 


Chalmers, A. F. (1999) What is this Thing Called Science?, Hackett Pub Co Inc


 


Chalmers, A. (1990) Science and Its Fabrication, Hackett Pub Co Inc


Charlesworth, M. (1982). Science, non-science and pseudo-science. Geelong: Deakin University Press.


Godfrey-Smith, P. (2003) Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, University of Chicago Press.


O’Hear, A. (1989) Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press


Newton-Smith, W.H. (1981) The Rationality of Science, New York: Routledge


 


Schick, T., Jr. (2000) Readings in the Philosophy of Science, New York: Routledge


 



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