Scientific Truth and The Arbitrament of Praxis Nicholas Rescher Noûs, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1980 A. P. A. Western Division Meetings. (Mar., 1980), pp. 59-74. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28198003%2914%3A1%3C59%3ASTATAO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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Scientzfic Truth and
The Arbitrament of Praxis
UNIVERSITY OF PITISBURGH
/
1. SCIENCE AS TRUTH-ESTIMATOR
The aim of science as a cognitive venture is to provide us with information about how matters stand in the world-with an estimate as to the truth of things. But this perspective at once poses the question: can we say anything about how good an estimate of "the real truth" science in fact provides? Clearly we cannot determine the truth of things directly, independently of scientific inquiry, and then endeavor to monitor the adequacy of our science by comparing its deliverances with this independently determined truth.' Therejust is no science-independent means at our disposal for getting at the real truth of things. On the other hand, we can, however, monitor the adequacy of our science by considering how well we fare when it comes to applying and implementing its claims in prediction and control. On this perspective, the adequacy of our predictive and interventionist praxis becomes the quality-controlling monitor of our scientific claims, doing so not because of an instrumentalistic commitment which, abandoning the pursuit of truth, sees prediction and control as the sole goals of science, but faute de mieux, because there is no prospect of any more direct alternative, any immediate comparison of these claims with the science-independent "real-truth" of things. Received wisdom has it that the telos of science is represented by the traditional quartet of description, explanation, prediction, and control. This produces the following picture: Theoretical Goals 1. Description (answering how? and what? questions) 2. Explanation (answering why? questions) NOOS 14 (1980) 01980 by Indiana University
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Practical Goals 1. Prediction (successful alignment of expectations) 2. Control (effective intervention) The issues of the theoretical sector are matters of characterizing, explaining, accounting for, and rendering intelligible-its concern is with purely cognitive issues in short. Those of the practical sector deal with canalizing expectations, guiding actions, and in general relate to the control of our environment necessary to conduct our affairs with affective satisfaction. And the burden of our present deliberations is that this second, practical dimension is ultimately in the controlling portion; that praxis affords our quality-control monitor over theom'a, that applied science is ultimately in command vis-a-vis theoretical science. Control-throughout the range from mere prediction as minimal (i.e., "merely intellectual") control (the adequate alignment of our own expectations) to the more elaborately modifactory change in the course of nature through effective intervention in the course of things--comes to be seen in the pivotal role of the final arbiter of adequacy. This aspect of the cognitive centrality of control over nature leads us to an interventionalist theory of knowledge, one which sees the issues of monitoring the adequacy of our theorizing residing ultimately on the side of efficacy in a p p l i c a t i ~ n . ~ In this connection, it is imperative to distinguish carefully between the ontological and the epistemological aspects. In ontological perspective the aim of science is undoubtedly realistic-to offer us a true description of the world, or at any rate a best available estimate of such a description. But epistemologically the only monitor we have of the adequacy of our efforts along these lines of reality-characterization lies on the side of an assessment of the efficacy of the praxis underwritten by the inquiry methods by whose use we construct the world-characterization at issue. This systemic pragmatism must be distinguished carefully from a thesis pragmatism that assesses the acceptability of individual propositions or theses in terms of the pragmatic benefits of the adoption. Our theory eschews any attempt to assess the truth of individual theses by assessing the pragmatic efficacy of adopting them in isolated particularity. Thesesadoption continues to be geared by the generic probative
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practices of scientific method. But the adequacy of the venture as a whole is monitored via the pragmatic route.3 The difficulty we encounter in this area is a reversal of the same familiar Duhemian one. On Duhem's analysis, if something goes wrong when we adopt a thesis we cannot lay the blame specifically at its door, because the problem may lie not with it, but with others with which it interacts in its wider cognitive environment. We simply know that something is wrong with the system as a whole, but cannot allocate blame specifically here or there. On the present perspective, exactly the same holds in reverse. When things go well with the adoption of a thesis we cannot specifically give it the credit which may appertain principally to others in its cognitive environment with which it interacts. This Duhemian difficulty, however, is one which a sufficiently systemic approach avoids by its very nature of allowing comparisons to operate only at the systematic level. 2. WHY THIS LINK BETWEEN PRAGMATIC EFFICACY AND TRUTHFULNESS
Consider the traditional objection against pragmatism that it might well prove highly successful to act on some (quite incorrect) thesis-say, that one's superior is competent in his vocational role, a stance that will presumably please him and thus prove likely to lead to good results. This perfectly possible prospect makes one rightly hesitant to maintain that the successful implementation of a thesis in practice is an adequate basis for holding it to be true. But the matter stands differently if what were in view were, say, a universal and systemtic organon with reference to which one ruled generally in any and every sort of situation. If application of this procedure proved highly successful, the issue of the rational warrant for accepting its rulings as correct would clearly rest on a very different, infinitely more secure basis. Accordingly, the systemic and unnecessitized aspect of our pragmatism is crucial. It is not a matter of a thesis pragmatism that operates with the relation pragmatically successful
:. presumptively true
at the level of individual theses, but a generalized pragmatism operates with the relation
pragmatically successful :. presumptively adequate at the level of generalized systems or methods. Our concern is with the products of scientific inquiry at a totally generalized systemic and methodological level. The range at issue is to be literally boundless: no factual issue is to lie outside its intended province. This is so comprehensive that probatively irrelevant side effects by way of fortuitous bonuses o r disasters become cancelled out in the larger scheme of things. That a mistaken or unwarranted body of scientific commitments might prove really successful at this level of generality is a prospect so farfetched that it can be dismissed with confidence. Fundamental mistakes at this level would have repercussions across a limitless frontier and would be bound to prove ultimately catastrophic. As was stressed above, the "pragmatic success" now at issue must be construed in systematic terms: working on one occasion-or on some limited number of occasions-does not entail working in general, and failing on one or more occasions is not necessarily completely invalidating. Success hinges on how our science fares ingeneral over the whole gamut of its applications. The range and versatility of an inquiry procedure is too obvious to need much elaboration. Generality is here tantamount to openendedness: our systematic commitments operate across the board of an enormous variety of areas of application and a literally innumerable proliferation of particular instances. It is inconceivable that a systematic success across so broad a range should be gratuitous. Here all of the safeguards built into the statistical theory of the "design of experiments" come into play with respect to the probative significance of the number and variety of instances. We cannot reasonably look on nature as a friendly collaborator in our human efforts, systematically crowning our cognitive endeavors with a wholly undeserved success that ensues for reasons wholly independent of their actual adequacy. In the circumstances of the case success must be viewed as strongly indicative of adequacy or appropriateness. In reasoning within science the principle of "inference to the best explanation" is bound to play a current role. Just the same holds for reasoning about science. And the best explanation of our increasing success is applying the deliverance of our science in that science is doing a better job in the search for truth.
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Accordingly, we can appropriately monitor the relative adequacy of our truth-estimates in this domain-and thus the progressiveness of science--on the side of its applications, both in cognitive praxis (predication = the correct channeling of expectations) and of activistic praxis (control = the effective intervention in the otherwise expectable course of things). The efficacy of practice affords a straightforward (and largely nontheoretical) device for telling if we have a better rational basis for claiming that we are getting at the truth of things. 3. PERFECTION NOT ATTAINABLE: TECHNOLOGICAL ESCALATION
On the pragmatic standard envisaged in the preceding discussion, our present-day science affords a picture that is neither all white nor all black, but is painted in various shades of gray. Viewed in the perspective of the applicative success, science is very much of a mixed bag-a compound of solid strengths and signal weaknesses. A hundred years ago, the English physicist and chemist George Gore did his sums on the negative side of the ledger in a way that still holds good today. Another reason for concluding that the future of science is immense is because, in a very large proportion of new experiments, we are unable to predict the results successfully. Knowledge of principles and laws enables us to predict effects; and the extent to which we are unable to predict successfully indicates, in a rough sort of way, the proportionate amount of such principles and laws yet to be found. I f . . . in 100 proposed new experiments we can only predict successfully the result of 10, the knowledge necessary to enable us to predict successfully the remainder has yet to be obtained. . . .4
The situation we face today is different from that described by Gore only in degree, and not in kind. What of the prospect of remedying this situation? The most plausible response lies in considering that while we can confidently anticipate improvement here, we cannot expect ever to attain perfection. For the prospect of continuing improvement spreads unendingly before us with respect to the issue of "control over nature." A vista of ongoing potential improvements spreads unendingly before us. Our procedure of inquiry can be enhanced not only on the side of theoretical resources but preeminently on the side
of the technological instrumentalities of observational and experimental intervention. The impetus to augment the adequacy of our science-to enhance even more the extent to which we can have a rationally warranted confidence in its deliverences-is a crucial aspect of the project of rational inquiry. It demands an unending effort to improve the range of effective experimental intervention, because only by operating under new and heretofore inaccessible conditions of observational or experimental systematization-attaining an ever more extreme temperature, pressure, particle velocity, field strength, etc.--can we realize those circumstances that enable us to put our hypotheses and estimates to the test, and thereby to test and control the adequacy of those probative methods which have vouched for them. In considering this phenomenon we come to the idea of a drive towards ever-increasing technological capability, which may be characterized as technological escalation. Let us adopt the label of a "technology-level" corresponding, in the present context, to a certain state-of-the-art in the technology of inquiry (data-generation and processing). These levels reflect the capacity of a technology to set up experiments (to create specified temperatures, pressures, voltages, etc.), to determine the quantities in such situations (to yield exact measurement, sensitive detection, etc.), or to process the data (to deploy mathematical technique, computers, etc.). This technology of inquiry falls into relatively distinct levels or stages in sophistication-correlatively with successively "later generations" of instrumentative and manipulative machinery. Such levels are generally separated from one another by (roughly) order-of-magnitude improvements in performance in realizing the relevant information-providing parameters (exactness of measurement, detection-sensitivity, high voltages, high or low temperatures, etc.). Once the major findings accessible at a given datatechnology level have been attained, the very structure of scientific inquiry forces us into the situation of an arms-racereminiscent technological escalation in which the frontier equipment of today's research becomes the museum piece of tomorrow under the relentness pace of technical obsolescence. One acute observer has rightly remarked: "most critical experimental [in physics] planned today, if they had to be constrained within the technology of even ten years ago, would be seriously comprorni~ed."~
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We here face a technological imperative that drives us on to ever new levels of state-of-the-art systematization which is the machinery by which we intervene in nature to effect control at levels of experimental systematization that were heretofore unattainable. But we can never reach "the end of the line." There is always more to be done. The accessible pressures and temperatures can in theory always be increased; the lowtemperatures experiments brought closer to absolute zero, the particles accellerated closer to the speed of light, etc. Every state-of-the-art level has its inherent limits and limitations whose overcoming opens up yet another more sophisticated level of the technological state-of-the-art. Any such enhanced practical mastery carries along-so experience teaches-new phenomena and an enhanced capability to test yet further hypotheses and discriminate between alternative theories worthwhile to the deepening of our knowledge of nature. We must, accordingly, come to terms with the fact that we cannot realistically expect that our science will ever-at any given stage of its development-be in a position to afford us more than a very partial and incomplete control over nature. And thus, in our present pragmatic perspective, means that we will never be able to claim a finished and perfected "picture of the truth" in matters of scientific fact, but only a relatively imperfect estimate. 4.HOW FAR?
This line of deliberation leads to the position that in scientific inquiry we attain no more than an estimate of the truth, an estimate whose credentials we must monitor through applications-i.e., in terms of its conduciveness to effective prediction and control-and whose adequacy we must always deem suboptimal on this basis. Since this capacity to achieve effective control is (as we cannot but presume) and always will be, imperfect, such a perspective indicates the unrealizability of perfected science. After all, the achievement of control over nature requires not only intellectual resources (concepts, ideas, theories, knowledge), but physical resources ("power"), as well. And our physical resources are limited. Hence, our control is bound to be imperfect and incomplete, with much in the realm of the doable always remaining undone. And to this-however greatly we may be able to improve it-we have
no alternative but to presume our knowledge (i.e., purported knowledge) to be inadequate at this and indeed at any other particular stage of the game. Even if (per impossibile) a "practical equilibrium" between what we can and what we wish to do in science came to be realized, we could not rest totally confident that this circumstance would remain unchanged, that the seeming equilibrium we had reached between questions and answers represented a permanent o-condition. We can never shake off the possibility that "just around the corner" things will become unstuck. Even if we "achieve control" to all intents and purposes, we cannot be such that we lose our grip upon it-not because of a loss of power, but because of cognitive changes, changes involved in the very condition of "having control" itself, and inherent in a broadening of the imagination and a widened apprehension as to what "having control" involves. The project of achieving practical mastery directions can never be accomplished in a definitively satisfactory way. These considerations will leave open the questions: Just exactly how far is it reasonable to expect that human effort could-ultimately and eventually-be able to push the enterprise of inquiry towards a state of recognizable completion? How much successful prediction and effective control over nature can we eventually hope to realize in that theoretical long run which was so near and dear to the heart of C. S. Peirce? T o throw light on this far from easy question, we must look more closely at what is involved in achieving "control over nature." The issue of "control over nature" involves more complexities than may appear on first view. Forjust how is this conception to be understood. Clearly in terms of bending the course of events to our will, of attaining our ends within nature. But this brings to light the prominence of our own contribution. Now if we are inordinantly modest in our demands (or very unimaginative) we may even achieve "complete control over nature" in the sense of being in a position to do whatever we want to do, but yet attain this happy condition in a way that betokens very little real capability. On the other hand, if our understanding of nature is suitably bizarre, we will "ask the impossible" by way of achievement (e.g., putting spaceships into an "overdrive" that accellerates them to speeds exceeding the velocity of light) and thus complain of incapacity to achieve control in ways that put unfair burdens on this conception.
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It is clearly science itself (in its existing cognitive "stateof-the-art") which, in teaching us about the limits of the possible, shapes our conception of this issue. As science grows and develops, it poses new issues of power and control, reformulating and reshaping of those demands that constitute the realization of "control over nature." (At a suitable stage, the idea of "splitting the atom" will no longer seem a contradiction ; in terms.) This state-of-knowledge correlative aspect of "control over nature" means that a problem about comparisons arises. If in state-of-knowledge X we can do pretty much everything we can do in state-of-knowledge Y, and then some, we can clearly credit the former with a greater capacity than the latter. But in which basis is this "capacity" to be assessed:X's or Y's or yet another tertium quid that is neutral between them? It is, in fact, this third alternative that is appropriate-namely the ordinary pre- or sub-scientific lingua franca that affords the thought framework of everyday life. This issue deserves closer exploration. 5. THE "DIRECTIONALITY" OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND THE PROBLEM OF CONTINUITY
Consider the following argumentation: You maintain that it is the theoretical telos of science to estimate the truth as to how things stand in the world. But it is irrational to adopt an aim whose realization cannot be monitored-to set out for a destination when there is no way of telling that we have actually arrived there, or at any rate are drawing closer to it. Now as regards such propinquity, you have already conceded that there is no strictly noncircular way of telling whether science has arrived at the truth-no way that is wholly independent of scientific inquiry itself. Accordingly, you must provide some noncircular (and thus,. in the final analysis, some extratheoretical) account of how we can tell if science is progressing and somehow getting closer to the truth of things. There is a large measure of justice to this complaint. The historians of science and its other theoretical analysts are occasionally heard to complain about the absence of any
clear sense of the direction of development in the structure of modern scientific work. I n the words of one such writer: The blackest defect in the history of science, the cause of dullest despair for the historian, lies in the virtual absence of any general historical sense of the way science has been working for the last hundred years6
But any such lack of direction at once disappears when we turn from the content of scientific discovery to its tools and their mode of employment-in short, when we turn to the technolog2cal side of the matter. For all of recent science has a clear thrust of development-using ever more potent instruments to press ever further outwards in the exploration of physical parameter-space, forging more and more powerful physical and conceptual instrumentalities for the identification and analysis of new phenomena. Some recent writers on the philosophy of science, influenced by the doctrines of Thomas Kuhn's influential book on scientific revolution^,^ tend to stress the ideational discontinuities produced by innovation in the history of ~ c i e n c e . ~ Scientific change, they rightly maintain, is notjust a matter of marginal revisions of opinion within a fixed and stable framework of concepts. The crucial developments involve a change in the conceptual apparatus itself. And when this happens there is a replacement of the very content of discussion, a shift in "what's being talked about" that renders successive positions "incommensurable." T h e change from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian concept of time, exemplifies a meaning-shift of just this sort. And these discontinuities of meaning make it impossible (so it is said) to sayjustifiedly that the latter stages represents a somehow "better treatment of the same subject matter," since the very subject that is at issue at the later stage has become something different. Such a theory of a radical discontinuity of meaning-shifts seems to throw the very concept of progress in science into question. For if the later stage of discussion is conceptually disjoint from the earlier, how could one consider the later as constituting an improvement upon the earlier? T h e replacement of one thing by something else of a totally different sort can hardly qualify as meliorative. (One can improve upon one's car by getting a better car, but cannot improve it by getting a computer or a dish-washing machine.)
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T o draw this sort of implication from the meaning-shift thesis is, however, to take an unduly literary view of science. For at bottom the progress at issue does not proceed along purely theoretical but rather along practical lines. Once one sees the legitimation of science to lie ultimately in the sphere of its applications, the progress of science will be taken to rest on its pragmatic aspect-the increasing success of its applications in problem solving and control, in cognitive and physical mastery over nature. The traditional theories of scientific progress join in stressing the capacity of the "improved" theories to accommodate new facts. Agreeing with this emphasis on "new facts," we must, however, recognize two distinct routes to this destination: the predictive (via theory) and the productive (via technology). And it would appear proper to allow both of these routes, the predictive and the productive, to count. T o correct the overly literary bias of the purely theoretical stress of traditional philosophy of science requires a more ample recognition of the role of technology-cum-production. T o say this is not, of course, to deny for one moment that the two (theory and technology) stand in a symbiotic and mutually supportive relationship in scientific inquiry. But the crucial fact is that the effectiveness of the technological instrumentalities of praxis can clearly be assessed in the absence of any invocation of the cognitive content of the body of theory brought to bear in their devising. The introduction upon the stage of consideration of the technological sector as supplementary or complementary to the theoretical has far reaching ramifications. Since Bacon's day, this idea of control over nature has been recognized as the keynote of scientific progress. The question of technologzdzl superiority (i.e., our ability at a given state-of-the-art level to obtain desired results-never mind for the moment if they are intrinsically desirable or not) is something far less sophisticated, but also far more manageable than issues of theoretical superiority. For the factors determiniative of technical superiority operate at a grosser and more rough-and-ready level than those of theoretical meaning content. At the level of praxis we can operate to a relatively large degree with the lingua franca of everyday affairs and make our comparisons on this basis-we need not worry about the issue of incommeasurability owing to the inaccessibility of a theory-neutral perspective for appraising "incommeasurable" theories.
'
Moreover, it is significant here that these applications are in large measure operative at the level of the ordinary, everyday concepts of natural-language discourse, concepts that remain relatively fixed throughout the ages, and that afford a relatively stable element of intellectual continuity at a level which lies deep behind the changing sophistication of scientific discussion. The ancient Greek physician and the modern medical practitioner might talk of the problems of their patients in very different and conceptually incommensurate ways (say an imbalance in humors to be treated by countervailing changes in diet or regiment vs. a bacterial infection to be treated by administering an antibiotic). But at the pragmatic level of control-i.e., a removal of those symptoms of their patients (pain, fever, dizziness, etc.) that are describable in much the same terms in antiquity as today-both are working on "the same problem." And just as the merest novice can detect a false note in the musical performance of a master player whose activities he could not begin to emulate, so malfunctioning of a missile or computer can be detected by the relative amateur. Dominance in technological power to produce intended results tends to operate across the board. (The superiority of modern over Galenic medicine requires few if any subtle distinctions of respect.) This technological dimension endows science with the continuity it may well lack at the contextual level of the theoretical machinery of its ideas and concepts-a continuity that finds its expression in the persistence of problem solving tasks in the sphere of praxis. Despite any semantic or ideational incommensurability between a scientific theory and its latter day replacements, there yet remains the factor of the pragmatic commensurability of a constellation of problem-solving tasks that can (by and large) be formulated in the ordinary everyday language that antedates scientific sophistication alike in the development of the species and that of its individuals.Vhe fundamentally pragmatic aspect of its applications in problem-solving and control at the level of everyday life manifests those continuities of the scientific enterprise with reference to which the idea of progress can be invoked.1° In this way, applicative and technological dimensions of scientific progress can be assessed comparatively without any explicit reference to the semantical content of scientific theories or the conceptual framework used in
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their articulation. When the "external" element of control over nature is given its due prominence, the substantiation of imputations of scientificpropess becomes a more manageable project than it could ever possibly be on an "internal," contentoriented basis. The progressiveness of science appears most strikingly and decisively on its technological side, marked by an ever widening ability,to operate at further and further removes in parametric remoteness o r complexity of detail, and by an ever expanding predictive and physical control over nature." The old Hobbesian conception of scientiapropterpotentiam provides a perfectly workable basis for taking the expanding horizons of technological capacity as an index of scientific progress.12 But this basis is purely comparative. We can tell that certain things are doable on one basis but not doable on another. And this only affords a rough guideline of comparative capacity-and thus of relative progressiveness. It affords no basis for claiming absolute perfection-the "effecting of all things possible,"-since "things possible" requires a framework-correlative notion of possibility. (The "possibility" at issue cannot be conceivably as construed relative to ordinary, everyday framework of thought which encompasses possible velocities greater than light, conjoint location-velocity determination for particles, etc.) 6. IS T H E PRESUMPTIVE INCOMPLETABILITY O F SCIENCE A MISFORTUNE?
The idea of improving our science is workable and unproblematic. The idea of improvement is valued and useful-as is the correlative regulative ideal of "working to perfect" our science. But the idea of "achieving a perfected science" is inherently problematic. Our standards of assessment and evaluation are such that we can realize the idea of improvements, of progress, but not of completion, of realized perfection. Yet the question remains: T o how satisfactory a state of control can we in principle advance? This is a question we cannot resolve "in principle" or "in theory" but only in practice. We must come to grips with the fact that here is something we cannot expect to settle in advance on the basis of considerations of the theoretical general principles of the
matter, but can only judge on the basis of the wisdom of a hindsight that shows us what it has in fact become possible to do. And as best we can tell, there is no basis for an optimistic expectation that we can travel down this route as we might ideally like to do. Is this circumstance unfortunate? Perhaps not. The insatiability of human reason-the endlessness of the whylbecause cycle of fact and ground-is the basis for constituting man as the sort of creature he is, as the questioning animal. Were our knowledge of nature completablewere we able to comprehend the world totally as one finished and ultimately adequate system, then our intellectual posture would indeed be God-like. But this circumstance could only occasion distress for a creature whose inherent nature is, after all, not divine but human. Man's project of question-answering-of rational inquiry into the ways of nature-is an inherently worthy enterprise. And the fact that it cannot be brought to an end is rather a benefit than a source of appropriate regret. The natural philosopher would rightly lament the ending of man's intellectual struggle with nature. The termination of science as an inventive venture-its falling once and for all into the hands of schoolmasters and expositors-would surely spell its doom rather than its victory. The work of intellect would be reduced to the handing over from generation to generation of a finished and final body of doctrine. The old dictum holds with respect to inquiry: it is better to travel than to arrive; the limitations of theoretical reason make way for the demands of practical rationality. It would be far from satisfactory to bring natural science to a satisfactory end. With respect to the moral aspirations of man's will, Kant writes: [Plerfection [of the moral will] is a thing of which no rational being in the world of sense is at any time capable. But since it is required [of us] as practically necessary, it can be found only in an endless progress to that complete fitness; on principles of pure practical reason, it is necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will. . . . Only endless progress from lower to higher stages of moral perfection is possible to a rational but finite being. (CPrR, p. 122 [Ak.].)
Much the same story surely holds on the side of the cognitive perfecting of man's intellect. Here, comparable regulative
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demands are at work governing the practical venture of inquiry, urging us to the ever fuller realization of the potentialities of the human intellect. The discontent of reason is a noble discontent. Man's commitment of the idea of reason in systematic completeness, with its unrealizable goal of all-inclusive comprehensiveness and all-integrating unity of principle, is the epistemic counterpart of our commitment to moral ideals. It reflects a striving to realize the rational ultimates of completeness, totality, and systematic finality-a striving that is all the more noble because it is not finally attainable. If the work of inquiring reason were completable, this would be something utterly tragic for us men. The crucial stimulus for our intellectual striving would be withdrawn. The day of mindless idlenessof what Kant calls ignava ratio-would beset our reason, and we would fall into a slothful torpor, bereft of any incentive to bestire ourselves in ways befitting our humanly characteristic intellectual condition. l 3
'Compare the discussion of the so-called Wheel Argument (diallelw) in the author's Methodologacal Pragmatism (Oxford: 1977): 15-17 et passim. 21tis worth stressing one important feature of pragmatic efficacy in the qualitycontrol of cognitive systematization. All of the other theoretical parameters of systematizing adequacy (unity, uniformity, simplicity, etc.) exert an impetus in the direction of simplicity (economy, austerity). Their operation would never in itself induce us to move from a system-in-hand that is relatively simple to one that is more complex. But the pursuit of applicative adequacy can counteract the simplicityoriented tendency of the theoretical parameters. 3The line of reasoning operative here is set out in Chapter VI, "Why Relate Success and Truthfulness?" of Methodological Pragmatism. 4George Gore, The Art of Scientific Discovery: Or the General Conditions and Methods ofResearch i n Physics and Chemistry (London, 1878): 26-7. 5D. A. Bromley, et al., Physics i n Perspective: Student Edition (Washington, D.C.: NRCINAS Publication, 1973): 23. 6Derek J. Price, Science Since Babylon (New Haven, 1961): 137. 'Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: 1962; 2nd ed., 1970).See also I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.),Criticismand the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: 1970). T h e prime exponent here is Paul Feyerabend. See his essays "Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism" in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (eds.),Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy ofscience, Vol. 111 (Minneapolis: 1962), "Problems of Empiricism" in R. G. Colodny (ed.), Beyond the Edge of Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, 1965): 145-260 and "On the 'Meaning' of Scientific Terms," The Journal of Philosophy, 62(1965): 266-74. YPracticalproblems have a tendency to remain structurally invariant. The sending of messages is just that, whether horse-carried letters or laser beams are used in tramsmitting the information.
IOOnthis approach it is easy to account for the contrast between the growth of consensus in science and the cumulative progressivism of the enterprise o n the one hand, and on the other the endless disagreements regarding most questions of philosophy, ethics, or religion. T h e difference lies precisely in this, that the latter fields are so little subject to the controls of pragmatic efficacy. "This (essentially Baconian) idea that control over nature is the pivotal determinant of progress-in contrast with purely intellectual criteria (such as growing refinement, complication, precision; let alone cumulation o r proliferation)-has been mooted by several writers in response to Kuhn. See, for example, Peter M. Quay, "Progress as a Demarcation Criterion for the Sciences," Philosophy ofscience, 41(1974): 154-70 (see especially p. 158). T h e relevant issues are treated in depth in the author's Methodological Pragmatism [I]. See also Freidrich Rapp, "Technological and Scientific Knowledge" in Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the Vth International Congress of DLMPSIIUHPS: London (Ontario) 1975 (Toronto: 1976). 12For Hobbes' ideas in this region see Hans Fiebig, Erkenntnis und Technische Eneugung: Hobbes' Operationale Philosophie der Wissenschaft (Meisenheim am Glan: 1973). 13Someof the theories of this discussion are developed at greater length in the author's Scientific Progress (Oxford, 1978).
