In all this, there is no difference of kind between the methods of
science and those of the plain man. The difference is the greater
control in science of the statement of the problem, and of the
selection and use of relevant material, both sensible or ideational. The
two are related to each other just as the hit-or-miss, trial-and-error
inventions of uncivilized man stand to the deliberate and consecutively
persistent efforts of a modern inventor to produce a certain complicated
device for doing a comprehensive piece of work. Neither the plain man
nor the scientific inquirer is aware, as he engages in his reflective
activity, of any transition from one sphere of existence to another. He
knows no two fixed worlds--reality on one side and mere subjective ideas
on the other; he is aware of no gulf to cross. He assumes uninterrupted,
free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking,
from thought to fact, from things to theories and back again.
Observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods
pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into
action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular
task in question. The fundamental assumption is _continuity_ in and of
experience.
This does not mean that fact is confused with idea, or observed datum
with voluntary hypothesis, theory with doing, any more than a traveler
confuses land and water when he journeys from one to the other. It
simply means that each is placed and used with reference to service
rendered the other, and with reference to future use of the other.
Only the epistemological spectator is aware of the fact that the
everyday man and the scientific man in this free and easy intercourse
are rashly assuming the right to glide over a cleft in the very
structure of reality. This fact raises a query not favorable to the
epistemologist. Why is it that the scientific man, who is constantly
plying his venturous traffic of exchange of facts for ideas, of theories
for laws, of real things for hypotheses, should be so wholly unaware of
the radical and generic (as distinct from specific) difficulty of the
undertakings in which he is engaged? We thus come afresh to our inquiry:
Does not the epistemological logician unwittingly transfer the specific
difficulty which always faces the scientific man--the difficulty in
detail of correct and adequate translation back and forth of _this_ set
of facts and _this_ group of ideas--into a totally different problem of
the wholesale relation of thought at large with reality in general? If
such be the case, it is clear that the very way in which the
epistemological type of logic states the problem of thinking, in
relation both to empirical antecedents and to objective truth, makes
that problem insoluble. Working terms, terms which as working are
flexible and historic, relative, are transformed into absolute, fixed,
and predetermined forms of being.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account