next up previous contents
Next: The Subjective Character of Up: Part One Scientism and Previous: The Influence of the   Contents

The Problem and the Method of the Natural Sciences

Before we can understand the reasons for the trespasses of scientism we must try to understand the struggle which Science itself had to wage against concepts and ideas which were as injurious to its progress as the scientistic prejudice now threatens to become to the progress of the social studies. Although we live now in an atmosphere where the concepts and habits of thoughts of everyday life are to a high degree influenced by the ways of thinking of Science, we must not forget that the Sciences had in their beginning to fight their way in a world where most concepts had been formed from our relations to other men and in interpreting their actions. It is only natural that the momentum gained in that struggle should carry Science beyond the mark and create a situation where the danger is now the opposite one of the predominance of scientism impeding the progress of the understanding of society.2.1But even if the pendulum has now definitely swung in the opposite direction, only confusion could result if we failed to recognize the factors which have created this attitude and which justify it in its proper sphere.

There were three main obstacles to the advance of modern Science against which it has struggled ever since its birth during the Renaissance; and much of the history of its progress could be written in terms of its gradual overcoming of these difficulties. The first, although not the most important, was that for various reasons scholars had grown used to devoting most of their effort to analyzing other people's opinions: this was so not only because in the disciplines most developed at that time, like theology and law, this was the actual object, but even more because, during the decline of Science in the Middle Ages, there seemed to be no better way of arriving at the truth about nature than to study the work of the great men of the past. More important was the second fact, the belief that the ``ideas'' of the things possessed some transcendental reality, and that by analyzing ideas we could learn something or everything about the attributes of the real things. The third and perhaps most important fact was that man had begun everywhere to interpret the events in the external world after his own image, as animated by a mind like his own, and that the natural sciences therefore met everywhere explanations by analogy with the working of the human mind, with ``anthropomorphic'' or ``animistic'' theories which searched for a purposive design and were satisfied if they had found in it the proof of the operation of a designing mind.

Against all this the persistent effort of modern Science has been to get down to ``objective facts,'' to cease studying what men thought about nature or regarding the given concepts as true images of the real world, and, above all, to discard all theories which pretended to explain phenomena by imputing to them a directing mind like our own. Instead, its main task became to revise and reconstruct the concepts formed from ordinary experience on the basis of a systematic testing of the phenomena, so as to be better able to recognize the particular as an instance of a general rule. In the course of this process not only the provisional classification which the commonly used concepts provided, but also the first distinctions between the different perceptions which our senses convey to us, had to give way to a completely new and different way in which we learned to order or classify the events of the external world.

The tendency to abandon all anthropomorphic elements in the discussion of the external world has in its most extreme development even led to the belief that the demand for ``explanation'' itself is based on an anthropomorphic interpretation of events and that all Science ought to aim at is a complete description of nature.2.2There is, as we shall see, that element of truth in the first part of this contention that we can understand and explain human action in a way we cannot with physical phenomena, and that consequently the term explain tends to remain charged with a meaning not applicable to physical phenomena.2.3 The actions of other men were probably the first experiences which made man ask the question why, and it took him a long time to learn, and he has not yet fully learned,2.4that with events other than human actions he could not expect the same kind of ``explanation'' as he can hope to obtain in the case of human behavior.

That the ordinary concepts of the kind of things that surround us do not provide an adequate classification which enables us to state general rules about their behavior in different circumstances, and that in order to do so we have to replace them by a different classification of events is familiar. It may, however, still sound surprising that what is true of these provisional abstractions should also be true of the very sense qualities which most of us are inclined to regard as the ultimate reality. But although it is less familiar that science breaks up and replaces the system of classification which our sense qualities represent, yet this is precisely what Science does. It begins with the realization that things which appear to us the same do not always behave in the same manner, and that things which appear different to us sometimes prove in all other respects to behave in the same way; and it proceeds from this experience to substitute for the classification of events which our senses provide a new one which groups together not what appears alike but what proves to behave in the same manner in similar circumstances.

While the naive mind tends to assume that external events which our senses register in the same or in a different manner must be similar or different in more respects than merely in the way in which they affect our senses, the systematic testing of Science shows that this is frequently not true. It constantly shows that the ``facts'' are different from ``appearances.'' We learn to regard as alike or unlike not simply what by itself looks, feels, smells, etc., alike or unlike, but what regularly appears in the same spatial and temporal context. And we learn that the same constellation of simultaneous sense perceptions may prove to proceed from different ``facts,'' or that different combinations of sense qualities may stand for the same ``fact.'' A white powder with a certain weight and ``feel'' and without taste or smell may prove to be any one of a number of different things according as it appears in different circumstances or after different combinations of other phenomena, or as it produces different results if combined in certain ways with other things. The systematic testing of behavior in different circumstances will thus often show that things which to our senses appear different behave in the same or at least a very similar manner. We not only may find that, for example, a blue thing which we see in a certain light or after eating a certain drug is the same thing as the green thing which we see in different circumstances, or that what appears to have an elliptical shape may prove to be identical with what at a different angle appears to be circular, but also may find that phenomena which appear as different as ice and water are ``really'' the same ``thing.''

This process of reclassifying ``objects'' which our senses have already classified in one way, of substituting for the ``secondary'' qualities in which our senses arrange external stimuli a new classification based on consciously established relations between classes of events is, perhaps, the most characteristic aspect of the procedure of the natural sciences. The whole history of modern Science proves to be a process of progressive emancipation from our innate classification of the external stimuli till in the end they completely disappear so that ``physical science has now reached a stage of development that renders it impossible to express observable occurrences in language appropriate to what is perceived by our senses. The only appropriate language is that of mathematics,''2.5that is, the discipline developed to describe complexes of relationships between elements which have no attributes except these relations. While at first the new elements into which the physical world was ``analyzed'' were still endowed with ``qualities,'' that is, conceived as in principle visible or touchable, `neither electrons nor waves, neither the atomic structure nor electromagnetic fields can be adequately represented by mechanical models.

The new world which man thus creates in his mind, and which consists entirely of entities which cannot be perceived by our senses, is yet in a definite way related to the world of our senses. It serves, indeed, to explain the world of our senses. The world of Science might in fact be described as no more than a set of rules which enables us to trace the connections between different complexes of sense perceptions. But the point is that the attempts to establish such uniform rules which the perceptible phenomena obey have been unsuccessful so long as we accepted as natural units, given entities, such constant complexes of sense qualities as we can simultaneously perceive. In their place new entities, ``constructs,'' are created which can be defined only in terms of sense perceptions obtained of the ``same'' thing in different circumstances and at different times--a procedure which implies the postulate that the thing has in some sense remained the same although all its perceptible attributes may have changed.

In other words, although the theories of physical science at the stage which has now been reached can no longer be stated in terms of sense qualities, their significance is due to the fact that we possess rules, a ``key,'' which enables us to translate them into statements about perceptible phenomena. One might compare the relation of modern physical theory to the world of our senses to that between the different ways in which one might ``know'' a dead language existing only in inscriptions in peculiar characters. The combinations of different characters of which these inscriptions are composed and which are the only form in which the language occurs correspond to the different combinations of sense qualities. As we come to know the language we gradually learn that different combinations of these characters may mean the same thing and that in different contexts the same group of characters may mean different things.2.6 As we learn to recognize these new entities we penetrate into a new world where the units are different from the letters and obey in their relations definite laws not recognizable in the sequence of the individual letters. We can describe the laws of these new units, the laws of grammar, and all that can be expressed by combining the words according to these laws, without ever referring to the individual letters or the principle on which they are combined to make up the signs for whole words. It would be possible, for example, to know all about the grammar of Chinese or Greek and the meaning of all the words in these languages without knowing Chinese or Greek characters (or the sounds of the Chinese or Greek words). Yet if Chinese or Greek occurred only written in their respective characters, all this knowledge would be of as little use as knowledge of the laws of nature in terms of abstract entities or constructs without knowledge of the rules by which these can be translated into statements about phenomena perceptible by our senses.

As in our description of the structure of the language there is no need for a description of the way in which the different units are made up from various combinations of letters (or sounds), so in our theoretical description of nature the different sense qualities through which we perceive nature disappear. They are no longer treated as part of the object and come to be regarded merely as ways in which we spontaneously perceive or classify external stimuli.2.7 The problem how man has come to classify external stimuli in the particular way which we know as sense qualities does not concern us here.2.8There are only two connected points which must be briefly mentioned now and to which we must return later. One is that, once we have learned that the things in the external world show uniformity in their behavior toward each other only if we group them in a way different from that in which they appear to our senses, the question why they appear to us in that particular way, and especially why they appear in the same 2.9way to different people, becomes a genuine problem calling for an answer. The second is that the fact that different men do perceive different things in a similar manner which does not correspond to any known relation between these things in the external world, must be regarded as a significant datum of experience which must be the starting point in any discussion of human behavior.

We are not interested here in the methods of the Sciences for their own sake and we cannot follow up this topic further. The point which we mainly wanted to stress was that what men know or think about the external world or about themselves, their concepts and even the subjective qualities of their sense perceptions are to Science never ultimate reality, data to be accepted. Its concern is not what men think about the world and how they consequently behave, but what they ought to think. The concepts which men actually employ, the way in which they see nature, is to the scientist necessarily a provisional affair and his task is to change this picture, to change the concepts in use so as to be able to make more definite and more certain our statements about the new classes of events.

There is one consequence of all this which in view of what follows requires a few more words. It is the special significance which numerical statements and quantitative measurements have in the natural sciences. There is a widespread impression that the main importance of this quantitative nature of most natural sciences is their greater precision. This is not so. It is not merely adding precision to a procedure which would be possible also without the mathematical form of expression--it is of the essence of this process of breaking up our immediate sense data and of substituting for a description in terms of sense qualities one in terms of elements which possess no attributes but these relations to each other. It is a necessary part of the general effort of getting away from the picture of nature which man has now, of substituting for the classification of events which our senses provide another based on the relations established by systematic testing and experimenting.

To return to our more general conclusion: the world in which Science is interested is not that of our given concepts or even sensations. Its aim is to produce a new organization of all our experience of the external world, and in doing soit has not only to remodel our concepts but also to get away from the sense qualities and to replace them by a different classification of events. The picture which man has actually formed of the world and which guides him well enough in his daily life, his perceptions and concepts, are for Science not an object of study but an imperfect instrument to be improved. Nor is Science as such interested in the relation of man to things, in the way in which man's existing view of the world leads him to act. It is rather such a relation, or better a continuous process of changing these relationships. When the scientist stresses that he studies objective facts he means that he tries to study things independently of what men think or do about them. The views people hold about the external world are to him always a stage to be overcome.

But what are the consequences of the fact that people perceive the world and each other through sensations and concepts which are organized in a mental structure common to all of them? What can we say about the whole network of activities in which men are guided by the kind of knowledge they have and a great part of which at any time is common to most of them? While Science is all the time busy revising the picture of the external world that man possesses, and while to it this picture is always provisional, the fact that man has a definite picture, and that the picture of all beings whom we recognize as thinking men and whom we can understand is to some extent alike, is no less a reality of great consequence and the cause of certain events. Until Science had literally completed its work and not left the slightest unexplained residue in man's intellectual processes, the facts of our mind must remain not only data to be explained but also data on which the explanation of human action guided by those mental phenomena must be based. Here a new set of problems arises with which the scientist does not directly deal. Nor is it obvious that the particular methods to which he has become used would be appropriate for these problems. The question is here not how far man's picture of the external world fits the facts's but how by his actions, determined by the views and concepts he possesses, man builds up another world of which the individual becomes a part. And by ``the views and concepts people hold'' we do not mean merely their knowledge of external nature. We mean all they know and believe about themselves, about other people, and about the external world, in short everything which determines their actions, including science itself.

This is the field to which the social studies or the ``moral sciences'' address themselves.


next up previous contents
Next: The Subjective Character of Up: Part One Scientism and Previous: The Influence of the   Contents