Oxford University Press, 1993
Once, in those dear dead days, almost, but not quite beyond recall, there was a view of science that commanded widespread, popular and academic assent. That view deserves a name. I shall call it "Legend."
Legend celebrated science. Depicting the sciences as directed at noble goals, it maintained that those goals have been ever more successfully realized. For explanations of the successes, we need look no further than the exemplary intellectual and moral qualities of the heroes of Legend, the great contributors to the great advances. Legend celebrated scientists, as well as science.
The noble goals of science have something to do with the attainment of truth. Here, however, there were differences among the versions of Legend. Some thought in ambitious terms: ultimately science aims at discovering the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the world. Others' preferred to be more modest, viewing science as directed at discovering truth about those aspects of nature that impinge most directly upon us, those that we can observe (and, perhaps, hope to control). On either construal, discovery of truth was valued both for its own sake and for the power that discovery would confer upon us.
According to Legend, science has been very successful in attaining these goals. Successive generations of scientists have filled in more and more parts of the COMPLETE TRUE STORY OF THE WORLD (or, perhaps, of the COMPLETE TRUE STORY OF THE OBSERVABLE PART OF THE WORLD). Champions of Legend acknowledged that there have been mistakes and false steps here and there, but they saw an overall trend toward accumulation of truth, or, at the very least, of better and better approximations to truth. Moreover, they offered an explanation both for the occasional mistakes and for the dominant progressive trend: scientists have achieved so much through the use of SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
Variants of Legend often disagreed, sometimes passionately, on details of method, but all concurred on some essential points. There are objective canons of evaluation of scientific claims; by and large scientists (at least since the seventeenth century) have been tacitly aware of these canons and have applied them in assessing novel or controversial ideas; methodologists should articulate the canons, thus helping to forestall possible misapplications and to extend the, scope of scientific method into areas where human inquiry typically falters; in short, science is a "clearing of rationality in a jungle of muddle, prejudice, and superstition."[1] Indeed, many advocates of Legend would maintain that science is the pinnacle of human achievement not because of its actual successes but in virtue of the fact that its practice, both in attaining truth and in lapsing into error, is thoroughly informed by reason. Even those whose historical situations lead into making mistakes still do the best they can in the interests of truth,.judging reasonably in the light of the available evidence and bowing to whatever new findings expose their errors.
Who were-and are-these advocates of Legend? Many reflective people, if asked for an assessment of science, would respond with a version of Legend. Practising scientists have sometimes been more ambivalent, proclaiming Legend on high days and holidays, sometimes unconsciously using it in formulating their plans, sometimes, in their cups, confessing that the realities of science do not reflect Legend's rosy glow.[2] However, the most detailed articulations of Legend have been provided not by the practitioners but by their amanuenses in history of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science.
To find confident testimonials to the progressiveness of science and the rationality of individual scientists, we need look no further than some widely read writings of the 1940s and 1950s. James Bryant Conant's volumes of Case Studies in Experimental Science, designed to convey to general readers "the variety of methods by which [the physical] sciences have advanced" (Conant 1957 vii), attempted to recreate the evidence and reasoning that led scientists to support novel ideas. Objectivity and rationality are the order of the day. Similarly, Bernard Barber, reflecting on the cultural values of the "modern world," recognized a "belief in and an approval of "progress" in this world, a progress which is not necessarily of a unilinear evolutionary kind, but which is somehow cumulative in the way in which science and rational knowledge are cumulative" (Barber 1952 66; italics mine). [3] Although the truth about nature may be difficult to attain, Barber insisted that the cornerstone of "scientific morality" is "devotion to the 'truth' " and that "it is worth endless human striving to attain those provisional and approximate statements of truth that make up the substance of science at any given historical moment in its course of development" (Barber 1952 87).
Philosophical articulations of Legend are even more rich and impressive. The failure of simple attempts to demarcate the cognitively meaningful (science) from the cognitively meaningless (post- Kantian German metaphysics) inspired the original members of the Vienna Circle and their philosophical kin to investigate the characteristics of good science.[4] Rudolf Carnap, Carl Gustav Hempel, Ernest Nagel, Hans Reichenbach, and Karl Popper endeavored to analyze good science by focusing on questions about the confirmation of hypotheses by evidence, the nature of scientific laws and scientific theories, and the features of scientific explanation. They differed on many points of detail, but some major articles of doctrine united them. Among these was the conviction that the succession of theories in the physical sciences constituted a progression and that the achievements of earlier theories (confined, in some versions, to the deliverance of statements about the observables) were retained in later theories. Another was the understanding that, while there is no systematic way to generate new hypotheses-, once hypotheses have been proposed there are principles for their proper assessment in light of statements of evidence. Inspired by the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the architects of modern mathematical logic, logical empiricist philosophers of science proposed to uncover the logic of confirmation, the logical structure of theories and the logic of explanation, thus formulating with precision those canons and criteria that they took to be tacitly employed by scientists in their everyday work. References to logic reverberate like drumrolls through the classic works of logical empiricist philosophy of science, works that, because of their clarity, rigor, and attention to a wide range of considerations, belong among the greatest accomplishments of philosophy in our century.
So much for the dear dead days. Since the late 1950s the mists have begun to fall. Legend's lustre is dimmed. While it may continue to figure in textbooks and journalistic expositions, numerous intelligent critics now view Legend as smug, uninformed, unhistorical, and analytically shallow. Some of these critics, the science bashers, regard the failure of science to live up to Legend's advertising as reason enough to question the hegemony of science in contemporary society. I shall not be concerned with them, but with the critiques of the Legend bashers, those who believe that Legend offered an unreal image of a worthy enterprise. [5]
My aim in this book is to probe the notions of progress and rationality, dear to Legend's champions but often trimmed, defaced, or discarded by detractors. Contemporary scholars have raised penetrating questions about truth and scientific progress. Can we legitimately view truth as a goal of science? Is it meaningful to talk of approximations to the truth or to see science as "converging" on truth about nature? Can we expect to attain even part of the truth about nature? Does the historical record show even the accumulation of truths about observable phenomena?
These questions raise venerable worries (some as old as the Greeks). Some can be posed with renewed force in light of contemporary accounts of change in science. The famous opening sentence of (Kuhn 1962) - "History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed'~-began the enterprise of comparing the actual course of science with Legend's ideal of accumulation of truth. Disentangling two strands in the skeptical questions of the last paragraph, we might pick out issues of the coherence of certain putative aims, issues that have been addressed many times in the history of Western philosophy, and issues of the attainability of those aims. In the wake of Kuhn's work, the practice of science, past and present, is seen as raising doubts about whether the aims beloved of Legend have actually been attained, and these doubts then serve as the basis for wondering whether they are attainable. These latter concerns can also be motivated by adding the perspectives of the biologist, the cognitive scientist, and the sociologist. If scientists, like other people, are recognized as biological entities, who have evolved under selection pressures that are (at least prima facie) quite remote from the demands of the quest for the truth about quarks or about jumping genes, who are, in consequence, cognitive systems with identifiable limitations and deficiencies, and who are embedded in complex networks of social relations, then the chances that their activities will result in the attainment of truth can seem distressingly low.
Attacks on Legend's conception of the rationality of science accompany the critique of scientific progress. Philosophers, inspired by the view of scientists as paradigmatic reasoners, undertook the task of exposing the rules of good inference that their subjects were (unconsciously) following. Ideally, the result of their labors was to be a system of logic, as lucid and precise as that which has been provided for deduction. Criticisms of the rules specified by Carnap, Reichenbach, Popper, and others, on the grounds either that those rules did not endorse the right inferences or that they could not be articulated to reconstruct the actual inferences made by scientists, led to the more general claim that scientific inference should not be viewed as an algorithmic activity, that there is no set of rules that underlies the appraisal of hypotheses and theories in science. Here again (Kuhn 1962) is a seminal work. Kuhn did not simply propose that existing accounts of good reasoning in science were wrong, that the idealizations they employed were too simple, or that their vocabulary needed enrichment. Instead, he suggested that the entire project of finding a "calculus of scientific reasoning" ought to be abandoned.
One way of developing that conclusion would be to claim that there are no standards of good reasoning in science that are binding on all scientists at all times - or at least that such standards would be insufficiently powerful to endorse all the major decisions made in the history of science. In a celebrated discussion, Paul Feyerabend (1970, 1975) maintained that Galileo's defense of Copernicanism violated philosophers' favorite rules of good reasoning, and he concluded that the only maxim that can be applied across all historical instances is "Anything goes." Norwood Russell Hanson (1958) campaigned for the theory-ladenness of observation, suggesting that there is no theory-neutral body of evidence to which scientific theories must conform. So, by emphasizing the lack of shared methodological rules and the inefficacy of those few canons that are shared, by insisting on the variability of what is taken as evidence, some critics of Legend made it seem appropriate to talk of major scientific decisions as "conversion experiences."[6] Because massive underdetermination of belief by "objective" factors came to seem omnipresent, there opened up a vacuum into which social explanations of scientific behavior could be inserted. Instead of an ordered abode of reason, science came to figure as the smoke-filled back rooms of political brokering. This was not the way in which Kuhn intended to go, and, to the disappointment of some who have drawn inspiration from him, he has continued to insist on a set of commitments that scientists share, that cannot be articulated as rules but that function in distinguishing good reasoning from bad. [7]
Critics of scientific rationality maintain not only that those who Yesisted past decisions that we endorse as "correct" may have been just as reasonable as their opponents but also that our endorsement itself is crucially dependent on that initi at decision. We should not comfort ourselves with the idea that the choice among rival theories was temporarily underdetermined and that those who prevailed were - luckily - subsequently vindicated by the exposure of decisive evidence. Instead, we should recognize that either the choice actually made or its rival would have been self-sustaining: had matters gone differently, our counterparts would have seen a history of success, congratulating themselves on the fact that subsequent evidence had supported the initial decision. From this perspective, claims about the success and rationality of science are a wonderful illusion, fostered by our ability to rewrite history and to lose sight of the possibilities of discarded points of view. Legend's praise of science is only the kind of boosterism that any proponent of any "form of life" might engage in. Contemporary societies-at least those of the industrialized world-have made science part of their "forms of life," but those are, in the end, no better or worse than the practices of the Azande, the recommendations of homeopathy, or the promises of parapsychology. They are simply ours. [8]
Despite the efforts of a few philosophers, [9] little headway has been made in finding a successor for Legend. If anything, recent work in the history of science and in the sociology of science has offered even more sweeping versions of the original critiques. Philosophy of science, meanwhile, has enjoyed a renaissance of studies of particular sciences. [10] However, the contemporary attention to a wide range of examples is typically eclectic: practitioners borrow what general philosophical categories they need for the purposes of their individual studies, attempting only to rely on concepts and distinctions that seem to have survived Legend's demise.
Perhaps these individual studies (largely ignored by those who condemn philosophy of science as defunct) represent the proper role for the discipline. Perhaps there is no general picture of the sciences that philosophers can give. Perhaps individual scientific disciplines and achievements are just that-individual, bound together by nothing more than "family resemblance."[11] Although these suggestions may offer sound advice, I am hot yet ready to abandon the search for generality. For without some substitute for Legend, minimal, eclectic, and tacit though it may be, it is not clear that individual studies of particular sciences can be pursued. Moreover, the arguments of the Legend bashers deserve answers or acknowledgment of their correctness.
The goal of this book is to draw a picture of how science advances, using the commonsensical ideas that underlie Legend, the insights of Legend's critics, as well as the contributions of contemporary philosophers, historians, sociologists, and cognitive scientists. The chief questions I shall address are those that Legend took as central: What is scientific progress? How is science pursued rationally? Problems about progress occupy Chapters 4 and 5. The goal of Chapter 4 is to provide a definition of scientific progress, or, more exactly, to characterize some varieties of scientific progress and to connect them to aims that I take to be worth satisfying. Chapter 5 attempts to defend my characterizations against criticisms to the effect that the aims I specify are incoherent or unattainable, and I try to rebut charges that science does not make progress in the senses I pick out. In Chapter 6 1 turn to questions about scientific rationality, attempting first to specify what an ideal - or ideals - of rationality ought to be. The traditional project of articulating canons of rationality for the epistemic projects of individuals is taken up in Chapter 7. Finally, in Chapter 8, I turn to the important, though largely neglected, issue of how various combinations of individual epistemic strategies might advance or retard the community's epistemic enterprise.[12]
Before these accounts can be developed, some preliminary work is necessary. My attempts to combine what I take to be important (and currently unappreciated) insights of logical empiricism with the apercus of historians and sociologists will rest on a novel way of idealizing the phenomena. Instead of thinking of science as a sequence of theories and of theories as sets of statements, I shall offer a multi-faceted description of the state of a science at a time. Moreover, I shall be concerned to treat the growth of science as a process in which cognitively limited biological entities combine their efforts in a social context. Placing the knowing subject firmly back into the discussion of epistemological problems seems to me to be the hallmark of naturalistic epistemology. [13] Chapter 3 is my attempt to construct a framework for naturalism in the philosophy of science.
The constructions of Chapter 3 will be guided by a review of some phenomena. In Chapter 2 I shall offer an extended illustrative example, on which subsequent discussions will be able to draw." I shall examine some facets of the history of evolutionary ideas, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, with a view to fixing ideas about goals, methods, progress, rationality, individual scientific behavior, and the social structure of science.
All the discussions that follow are suffused with a vision of philosophy of science that should be made explicit. In my judgment, philosophical reflections about science stand in relation to the complex practice of science much as economic theory does to the complicated and messy world of transactions of work, money, and goods. Much traditional philosophy of science, in the style of some economic modeling, neglects grubby details and ascends to heights of abstraction at which considerable precision and elegance can be achieved. We should value the precision and elegance, for its own sake, for its establishing a standard against which other efforts can be judged, and for the possibility that extreme idealizations may lay bare large and important features of the phenomena. But, like ventures in microeconomics, formal philosophy of science inevitably attracts the criticism that it is entirely unrealistic, an aesthetically pleasing irrelevancy. To rebut such charges--or to concede them and to do better service to philosophy's legitimate normative project - we need to idealize the phenomena but to include in our treatment the features that critics emphasize.
Legend's legacy is the task of recognizing the general features of the scientific enterprise, most importantly by scrutinizing the apparent progressiveness of science, the seeming individual rationality of individual scientists, and the collective rationality of the scientific community. In light of the serious challenges to Legend, there is no doubt that the task is difficult. However, recurrent pronouncements of the death of philosophy notwithstanding, it is too important to be discarded.
1. The phrase is Bruno Latour's, who uses it for ironical effect. See (Latour 1988 6) and also (Latour 1987 chapter 5).
2. James Watson's celebrated (1966) is a striking confessional. The reaction of many reviewers is interesting and instructive. See, in particular, (Lewontin 1968).
3. Barber's reference to evolution appears to embody a common misunderstanding. See (Williams 1966 34-55) and (Gould 1989).
4. In my judgment it is important to separate two movements with an overlapping cast of characters. Ile earlier, logical positivism, took as its central philosophical problem that of presenting a criterion of cognitive significance. Although logical positivists sometimes offered analyses of particular parts of particular sciences, their involvement in issues Of general methodology was rather limited. With the demise of the demarcation problem, attention shifted to trying to understand the features of science that make it cognitively valuable. Thus, in the 1940s and 1950s, former positivists and sympathizers began intensive studies of scientific confirmation, explanation, and the structure of theories. These studies belonged to a new movement, logical empiricism, which no longer insisted on positivist doctrines about meaning and meaningfulness, and no longer viewed the positivist demarcation problem as either central or solvable. Ironically, the movement included, prominently, one outspoken former critic of positivism, Karl Popper, whose important (1934) had begun to tackle many of the problems that later became central to logical empiricism. I want to emphasize that the detailed articulations of Legend are the fruits of logical empiricism (although the logical positivists were surely devotees of Legend). For a classic account of the demise of the demarcation problem see (Hempel 1950, reprinted in Hempel 1965), whose final section outlines the agenda for logical empiricist philosophy of science.
5. Ultimately philosophy of science ought to attend to the most sweeping criticisms of the scientific enterprise and its role in out lives. However, before any such examination can go forward, we need an accurate picture of science, its goals, and its achievements. This book can thus be seen as a prelude to a more wide-ranging study.
6. The phrase is Kuhn's (Kuhn 1962 151). In the later~chapters of his book, Kuhn assembles many of the principal arguments that others have deployed to reach far more radical conclusions. He contends that observation is theory-laden (1962 chapter X) and that shared methodological canons are too weak to determine scientific choices (1962 chapter XII). Yet the penultimate paragraph of the latter chapter suggests a reshaping of traditional ideas about scientific rationality, not a decisive break. "Because scientists are reasonable men, one or another argument will ultimately persuade many of them. But there is no single argument that can or should persuade them all. Rather than a single group conversion, what occurs is an increasing shift in the distribution of professional allegiances" (1962 158). Chapters 6 and 8 later will develop some of the ideas at which Kuhn seems to hint here.
7. See, in particular, chapter 13 of (Kuhn 1977). In Chapter 6, 1 shall develop a position that has many affinities with Kuhn's attempt to steer a middle course between Legend and relativism.
8. For a strong version of this type of relativism, see (Barnes and Bloor 1982) and (Collins 1985). The case of parapsychology is discussed in some detail in (Collins and Pinch 1982). Similar ideas ares advanced in (Feyerabend 1975, 1979, 1987). The notion of a "form of life," now much in vogue among some sociologists of science, descends from (Wittgenstein 1953). A locus classicus for the application of this notion to the history of science and for many of the themes noted in the text is (Shapin and Schaffer 1985).
9. Most notably Imre Lakatos (1970), Larry Landau (1977, 1984, 1990), and Dudley Shapere (1984).
10. Not only in philosophy of physics, to which Legend's main elaborators made major contributions, but increasingly in philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology as well.
1 11. (Wittgenstein 1953 67). One might abandon the attempt to offer a general philosophical vision of science for Wittgensteinian reasons, holding that there is no essence to the enterprise, while commending the activity of studying and characterizing particular scientific contributions or debates. Arthur Fine has sometimes advocated this kind of view in lectures.
12. The idea of understanding how social institutions might promote knowledge has (been largely ignored in traditional epistemology. Parts of the problem begin to emerge in Kuhn 1962), in (Sarkar 1982), and in (Hardwig 1985). Some suggestive points are made in (Fuller 1988), and Alvin Goldman (1987) offers a general overview of the issues. Some highly pertinent source material with interesting interpretations can be found in (Ghiselin 1989) and (Hull 1988).
13. This is a common feature of the enterprises of (Goldman 1986) and (Quine 1970a), although they apparently disagree on the possibility of undertaking normative inquiries in epistemology. The present book exemplifies my kinship on this issue with 'Goldman (see also my 1983). Other accounts of what makes for a naturalistic epistemology can be found in the literature. Landau (for example) conceives of naturalistic epistemology as committed to the notion that methodological rules are empirical (see Landau 1989). General discussions of the character of naturalistic epistemology can be found in (Kornblith 1985), (Giere 1985), (Kim 1988), and (Kitcher 1992).
14. Other examples from past and present science will be discussed more briefly in later chapters, but it seems to me to be impossible to elaborate a convincing picture without providing one, fairly detailed, illustration. Ultimately, philosophical pictures should be tested against a range of cases, historical and contemporary. Articulating the methodology underlying this test procedure is itself a formidable task-and, moreover, one that cannot be detached from our philosophical picture of science.
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