The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other EssaysVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays
Veblen, Thorstein
Economics; Science
In this way, it may be conceived, modern science comes into the field
under the cloak of technology and gradually encroaches on the domain of
authentic theory previously held by other, higher, nobler, more
profound, more spiritual, more intangible conceptions and systems of
knowledge. In this early phase of modern science its central norm and
universal solvent is the concept of workmanlike initiative and
efficiency. This is the new organon. Whatever is to be explained must
be reduced to this notation and explained in these terms; otherwise the
inquiry does not come to rest. But when the requirements of this
notation in terms of workmanship have been duly fulfilled the inquiry
does come to rest.
By the early decades of the nineteenth century, with a passable degree
of thoroughness, other grounds of validity and other interpretations of
phenomena, other vouchers for truth and reality, had been eliminated
from the quest of authentic knowledge and from the terms in which
theoretical results were conceived or expressed. The new organon had
made good its pretensions. In this movement to establish the hegemony of
workmanlike efficiency--under the style and title of the "law of
causation," or of "efficient cause"--in the realm of knowledge, the
English-speaking communities took the lead after the earlier scientific
onset of the south-European communities had gone up in the smoke of war,
politics and religion during the great era of state-making. The ground
of this British lead in science is apparently the same as that of the
British lead in technology which came to a head in the Industrial
Revolution; and these two associated episodes of European civilisation
are apparently both traceable to the relatively peaceable run of life,
and so of habituation, in the English-speaking communities, as
contrasted with the communities of the continent.[3]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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