The Science and the Scientific Work

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Science and scientific research represent a unique field of knowledge. Philosophers and researchers express different ideas about the role and ideology of science and scientific work. Still, no consensus is reached. In the work The Scientific Life, Shapin (2008) writes: “The scientist was properly to be understood not on the model of the philosopher but on the model of the engineer and technician”. Generally, it is not wrong for a scientist to regard as one of the objects of his research the discovery of knowledge which will be practically useful and beneficial to mankind.

The scientist can be understood as a technician as the desire to serve one’s fellow-men and to increase their control of the forces of nature or of the causes of disease is a very proper inspiration for a scientist. This second object of science -to discover knowledge not only for its own sake but because it can be employed for the benefit and increased happiness of mankind is, like the first object, in complete harmony with research principles. Personal motives for scientific research are just as proper and respectable as purely intellectual ones. Applied science should not therefore be regarded merely as a degraded form of pure science. Looking at the 17th century, it is interesting to note that both these objects of science — the investigation of nature in order to satisfy reverent curiosity concerning natural phenomena, and the desire to obtain knowledge concerning nature which may be of practical benefit to our fellow men.

The most serious misuse of science today arises from the application for purposes of war and destruction of physical, chemical and bacteriological knowledge which could and should be applied for the well-being and benefit of humanity instead of for its terror and destruction. But if we consider why nations wage war, we are driven to recognize that they usually do so either from selfishness or from vanity or from greed. Thus, the fact that scientific advances have frequently caused devastation to the world is clearly due to such sinful tendencies in human nature.

Some modern scientists or scientific writers have suggested that the salvation of mankind can be achieved through the increase of knowledge; but, in fact, knowledge can never save, and those who begin by believing in salvation through knowledge often end by becoming disillusioned and embittered. “The only hope of salvation or of survival for mankind and for the world lies in recognition of their moral weakness on the part of men”. Thus, in approaching nature by the scientific method scientists deliberately select material suitable for study by that method, and tacitly agree to ignore all material and all phenomena which are not suitable for observation by it. There is a part of reality which can, as it were, be caught, studied, and observed by the scientific method; and there is another part which will always elude this method. But the second part is no less real and no less important than the first.

The model of the engineer and technician is more useful for analysis as it permits interpretation of results and scientific outcomes rather than a philosophical paradigm. This delightful analogy is extraordinarily appropriate and reminds us that any method of acquiring knowledge must be limited in its scope by the means which it employs and by the facts for which it is looking. This is true of science, and when scientists forget this fact and claim that what is demonstrated by the scientific method is the only possible knowledge, their claim is foolish, and cannot but lead to protest and antagonism, and others, who are well aware that much of their own knowledge, no less reliable than scientific knowledge, is derived by other methods of study and from other realms of experience.

Only in pure mathematics, which bears no relation to the actual external world, is rigid accuracy possible. In scientific research a reasonable degree of probability is all that is looked for or claimed; and not only here but in the whole field of active, practical life we must “live by faith” in this sense among others, that we must rest content with reasonable probability. The popular demand for certainty, or precise accuracy or conclusive proof, can never be met by science any more than it can by any other method of experience. Such a method has two clear limitations. First, the knowledge which it can convey is never more than approximate; and, indeed, it is a popular delusion that science furnishes rigidly accurate information. And it can give, and all the real scientist would claim to give, is a reasonable approximation to the truth. Even in some of the more exact branches of experimental science, this is certainly true. In various departments of biology, as well as in physics, the knowledge is purely statistical and approximate, and the application recently carried out of mathematical methods in the sphere of biology is entirely of a statistical character. A wider aspect of this inability of science to deal with individuality is the question of freedom and determinism. Science is bound to assume that the entities with which it deals are fundamentally deterministic in character; that is to say, that their behavior is rigidly, or at least statistically, controlled by precise principles and external conditions, and that they are incapable of independent volition or action. This assumption in its application to inanimate things and to the general consistency and regularity of nature is derived from theory rather than philosophy. Following Clark, “the disembodied genius raises the specter of the creative and original agent in science and academic, the subjectivity fabricating objectivity”

It is right and proper for the working scientist to attempt to extend his researches into any sphere to which his previous studies may have led; and there can be no objection to a scientific study of any field, so long as the scientists carrying it out recognize that on account of the limitations of the scientific method they are employing, a considerable amount of knowledge about the particular object in question is bound to escape them. It is possible to distinguish three types of behavior: (i) determined, (ii) undetermined and fortuitous, e.g. the case of electrons, and (iii) undetermined but correlated, or governed by objective law, which is conscious law. Science may almost be likened to a game which can only be played if we are prepared to abide by the arbitrary rules. Within these bounds it furnishes useful results and is an extremely valuable intellectual tool; but beyond these bounds it cannot be applied; and there is a wide field of reality which lies outside these bounds. A further limitation of science is that it depends upon experimental observations which are made by a human observer. While the tendency of modern science is always to eliminate the human observer or the human element so far as possible, it is nevertheless true that in many fields of science the human element still plays a large part, and this means that the accuracy of the observations made is dependent upon purely human factors. For example, for the observation of an experiment depending upon accuracy of sight or color vision, any weakness in this respect on the part of the observer will affect the accuracy of the observation. Again, the degree to which scientific knowledge is reliable depends upon the instruments available to the experimenter; and while an amazing degree of skill and complexity has been reached in the designing and manufacturing of scientific instruments, it is still true that the power of science to give full knowledge, even in its own field, is limited by the equipment at man’s disposal.

It remains true that a great portion of the population today is educated in a semi- or pseudo-scientific or technological way, which renders them expert in dealing with things, but quite incapable of dealing with persons or living animals. It is not without significance that we are informed by farmers and agriculturalists that it is very easy to obtain young men to use and maintain the modern mechanical equipment required on farms, but increasingly difficult to find anybody capable of understanding and looking after cattle and other livestock and willing to do it. How far this is really due to true scientific education and how far it is the result of a much more widespread technological bias is not always easy to say; but there is a great confusion in the common mind between what can properly be described as scientific education, and what ought rather to be called technical education or education in invention, engineering, or applied science, and it is the latter rather than the former which encourages so exclusively a concern with the material and impersonal.

Scientific thinking requires a different attitude of mind, a different habit of thought, a different mode of experience, and a different language, to understand, realize, and express the truths, from that which is required of the scientist in his scientific work. When by training and education one has been moulded in the scientific way, it is not easy to re-adapt one’s attitude and approach; and the impersonal or depersonalizing character of scientific study and observation do, for many, form a definite hindrance or obstacle to the appreciation and acceptance of the personal foundation of science. The recent development of branches of science, or fields where scientific method has been applied, in sociology, social sciences, some types of psychology (such as industrial psychology), and so forth, may, it is hoped, help to overcome some of this difficulty, by creating ‘personal sciences. Shapin claims: “what we call scientific objectivity is not the product of the individual scientist’s impartiality but a product of the social or public character of scientific method”.

For instance, it is true that the scientific method can give no information about Beauty — about the relative aesthetic values of works of Art or Music or Literature. Such things are by their very nature and by the character of the scientific method excluded from its purview. But the man must be either blind or deaf, or deliberately prejudiced, who refuses to recognize the existence and importance of these things, and their part in the whole of human life. Moreover, philosophy is closely associated with moral values. It is therefore essential, in order to understand or accept scientific thinking, to be aware of the nature and importance of such moral and aesthetic values, and of the fact that we can never learn to know or understand them by the methods of natural or technological science. For instance, the theory of Relativity denies the assumption that there is such a thing as a unique right frame of space. All frames of space are relative. The ideas of absolute space and time are figments of the imagination. Motion, distances, and volumes are also relative; length, mass, and time are not absolute quantities. They can only be defined relatively to one specified observer. A distance as reckoned by an observer on one star is as “true” as the same distance reckoned, in quite different terms, by an observer on another star. We must not expect them to agree, for the one is a distance relative to one frame, the other is a distance relative to another frame. Similarly, magnetic fields are relative. An electrically charged body at rest on the earth has no magnetic field relative to the frame of space; but it has a magnetic field relative to a nebular field of space. Researcher ask: Does the magnetic field exist or not? The answer is “yes” relative to one frame of space, “no” relative to another. It is clear that this raises philosophical questions as to what is meant by existence, and whether in fact there is such a thing as absolute existence at all. None the less, there are invariants in physics; but they are conceptions such as action (the product of energy and time), entropy, number or mathematical statements of relationships.

Without admitting this, scientists can agree that modern physical theory has considerably affected what we mean in Physics by matter and by existence. (In addition to the theory of Relativity, the modern conception of the structure of the atom tends in the same direction.) But there are two things to be said about this. The first is that, while modern physics has presented us, to use analogy, with a scientific table or, more accurately, a scientific picture of the table, which is very different from the picture of the table which we gain from ordinary everyday experience, it is at least doubtful whether this scientific picture of the table can be said to correspond to objective reality. Murphy (2008) has wisely pointed out that, notwithstanding all the discoveries of the physicists, we still see the same table and apply the word ‘table’ to the same object as that to which it was previously applied. But the more important side of this matter is that it appears to have been assumed by some people and others that if the developments of modern physics throw doubt on the reality or, to use a popular term, the solidity of matter, this is a great advantage to philosophy. Rhode (2006) appeared to think that if he could show that all matter had been reduced by modern physics to the status of a mental or intellectual conception, he would have done a service to philosophy; and there is a popular idea that if the only real things in the world could be shown to be mental or spiritual, that would harmonize with scientific doctrine. It may further be pointed out that the principle of complementary languages implies that no complete description of any situation can be given in terms of one language alone. For example, both in physics and biology it has now been recognized that to study a phenomenon purely by the analytical method of breaking it down into its individual parts in isolation gives a very partial and inadequate idea of the phenomenon as a whole.

By a natural law of averages it will happen that in any generation a small percentage will be born with longer necks than usual. These in fact will triumph in the struggle for existence and will therefore inevitably produce more offspring; and, since they belong to a long-necked strain, the long neck is part of the heritable characteristics of these individuals from generation to generation. Thus, in course of time they will form a higher percentage of the species, and those with shorter necks will gradually be eliminated in successive generations. The process is not due to any attempt on the part of the giraffe to stretch its neck, nor to the fact that a giraffe whose neck has become stretched can hand on its acquired characteristic to the next generation, but simply to the natural working of the law of averages and the elimination of the unfit. In any generation a minority of individuals will show variations which are in fact favorable to survival. These variations are due not to any sort of deliberate effort on the part of the parents to adapt themselves to their environment, but to purely mechanical (physical or chemical) causes. Similarly, in any generation a minority of individuals will show variations from the norm which are unfavorable and they will automatically be eliminated. Thus, in the next generation there will be a higher proportion of offspring of the minority with favorable variations and a lower proportion of offspring of the mediocre majority. In this way each generation will show a gradual but automatic progress, in the sense of a better adaptation to their environment. Again, if the environment changes, those individuals will survive which happen to be best adapted to the new environment. “Thus, whereas Lamarckism postulates some sort of deliberate effort on the part of the organism, Darwinism rules this out entirely, and the principle of natural selection is a process resting in a sense upon purely accidental variations”.

A scientist is not a philosopher as he does not follow speculative ideas but uses facts and theories. The primary question which we must consider is undoubtedly the nature of the struggle for existence. In biology, one type of organism preys upon another, and within the species those individuals which are weaker or less well adapted to their environment are ruthlessly eliminated. The consequence of such an approach to the external world is that we deliberately make a selection, paying attention only to those things which are amenable either to mathematical treatment or to classification. All scientific study of nature partakes of this process of selection, and the knowledge obtained by means of it must be partial and selective. The selection is subjective, because it depends on the sensory and intellectual equipment which is our means of acquiring observational knowledge. This delightful analogy is extraordinarily appropriate and reminds us that any method of acquiring knowledge must be limited in its scope by the means which it employs and by the facts for which it is looking. This is true of science, and when scientists forget this fact and claim that what is demonstrated by the scientific method is the only possible knowledge, their claim is foolish, and cannot but lead to protest and antagonism on the part of Christians, and others, who are well aware that much of their own knowledge, no less reliable than scientific knowledge, is derived by other methods of research.

Scientists are engineers because their findings depend upon experimental observations which are made by a human observer. While the tendency of modern science is always to eliminate the human observer or the human element so far as possible, it is nevertheless true that in many fields of science the human element still plays a large part, and this means that the accuracy of the observations made is dependent upon purely human factors. For example, for the observation of an experiment depending upon accuracy of sight or color vision, any weakness in this respect on the part of the observer will affect the accuracy of the observation. Again, the degree to which scientific knowledge is reliable depends upon the instruments available to the experimenter; and while an amazing degree of skill and complexity has been reached in the designing and manufacturing of scientific instruments, it is still true that the power of science to give full knowledge, even in its own field, is limited by the equipment at man’s disposal. Science must be ethically neutral. But no man can live a real human life in such a condition. No sooner is he faced with a decision between two lines of conduct than he must inevitably be guided by moral or ethical principles, resting upon values of goodness and right which science, by its very nature and methods, is unable to study or assess.

It is true that the scientific method can give people no information about Beauty — about the relative aesthetic values of works of Art or Music or Literature. Such things are by their very nature and by the character of the scientific method excluded from its purview. But the man must be either blind or deaf, or deliberately prejudiced, who refuses to recognize the existence and importance of these things, and their part in the whole of human life. Moreover, philosophy is closely associated with moral values. Our understanding of the nature must so clearly taught, be founded on ethical principles. It is therefore essential, in order to understand or accept science, to be aware of the nature and importance of such moral and aesthetic values, and of the fact that we can never learn to know or understand them by the methods of natural or technological science. Still, it is of interest that, just as in the physical field the conception of the Quantum Theory introduces the idea of discontinuity, so in the biological field the fact of mutations introduces it in the process of evolution. More recent study has shown that selective variations, too small to be detectible in a single generation, are capable, when operating on the scale of geological time, of producing all the observed phenomena of biological evolution; and genetics now deals with transmission and variation of characteristics on the great evolutionary scale as much as within individual species or individual pedigrees. Thus, the discontinuity in the process, though present, is not so great or so dramatic as was formerly thought.

In sum, the scientist can be properly understood based on the model of the engineer and technician as he uses ready-made facts and scientific data applied to further research. The limitations of philosophy are acquiring knowledge; but it cannot really be said that philosophy has any limitations. Science by its very character must be concerned with the whole of reality, including the entire natural world and every type of material or spiritual existence. Science is definitely one method of studying it, but it is not the only one. Therefore the scientist , precisely because he is prepared to employ both scientific and other methods, is in a far better position to acquire balanced and complete knowledge than the materialist scientist who confines himself solely to one method, the scientific. If by philosophical knowledge or method of acquiring knowledge researchers refer, as is often done, to spiritual discernment, or to “intuitive recognition of moral values”, or to emotional feelings, then researchers should certainly have to recognize a definite limitation in the method of acquiring knowledge.

Reference

Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.

Murphy, Sean R. Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life. Modern Language Association of America, 2008.

Rhode, Deborah. In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture. Stanford Law and Politics; 1 edition, 2006.

Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

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The Science and the Scientific Work

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