Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 1 (of 2)
Religion
Studies in the History and Method of Science, vol. 1 (of 2)
Medicine -- History; Science -- History
It stands to reason that such an evaluation cannot operate merely
with the criteria of formal logic. Indeed, of the processes known
to the traditional logic, only those which _cannot_ be represented
as ‘formally valid’ will be exemplified in scientific knowing. It
will not be possible to find any genuine cases of absolute certainty
or unconditional proof; but analogies, probabilities, hypotheses,
alternatives, even fallacies and fictions, will abound, and will
somehow have to be discounted. Clearly the evaluation of such things
will be a delicate affair; it cannot be accomplished by reciting
_Barbara Celarent_ and crudely applying a few simple mechanical
formulas. It will demand the energetic co-operation of the whole
intelligence, and indeed of the whole personality, and cannot scorn the
aid of psychological factors. For it is plain that the evaluation of
a complicated scientific situation will require both expert knowledge
of scientific detail and philosophic grasp of general principles
and connexions; it will need also ‘tact’, ‘judgement’, an ‘eye from
experience’, and a host of similar qualities that elude precise verbal
formulation. It will no longer be practicable to flatter mediocrity and
dullness, and to impede discovery, by proclaiming methods that dispense
with imagination, ingenuity, originality, boldness, enterprise, and
vainly endeavour to put genius for discovery on a par with mindless
pedantry in applying stereotyped and sterile rules.
§ 34. But just because a logic that recognizes the actual process of
discovery does not presume to dictate formal methods to the discoverer,
and leaves him a very free hand, it does not relieve him of any of the
responsibility for conducting his researches to a prosperous issue.
As there is no longer any pretence that any logical machinery can be
devised to guarantee success, success and failure become his personal
achievements. If he fails, he can no longer plead that it is not his
fault, seeing that he has kept every letter of the law and broken
no logical rule. This may be precisely _why_ he failed. Perhaps he
should have taken risks. He may have gathered such enormous masses
of fact that he could no longer see through them, nor select the few
that were relevant to his problem. He may have been so sensible of
the need for caution that he dared not speculate or move. He may have
devoted himself to unimportant problems or missed the important sides
of important problems, or have wandered away into barren wastes of
dialectics, or have got bogged in a mire of verbalism, or have pursued
elusive phantoms of unverifiable speculations. For there are clearly
many ways of failing. Only in whatever way he fails, his personal
failure is _pro tanto_ a failure of science to progress. Every science
has somehow to get hold of a clue to guide it through the labyrinth of
fact, and this clue has to lead it right, though it need not ‘follow
necessarily’ from previous knowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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