Theory and Reality

by Peter Godfrey-Smith

  At the end of chapter i o, I said that we might think of science as a something like a strategy. In this sense science is the strategy of subjecting even the biggest theoretical ideas, questions, and disputes to testing by means of observation. This strategy is not dictated to us by the nature of human language, the fundamental rules of thought, or our biology; it is more like a choice. The choice can be made by an individual or by a culture. The scientific strategy is to construe ideas, to embed them in surrounding frameworks, and to develop them, in such a way that exposure to experience is sought even in the case of the most general and ambitious hypotheses about the universe. That view of science is a kind of empiricism.

  This description of science as a strategy is a start, but it needs to be made more precise. Back in chapter i, I noted that there is a lot of variety in how the word "science" is used; there are very broad and very narrow uses of the term. Here I will outline a two-part story that is related to that "broad versus narrow" distinction. Let us distinguish the general scientific strategy from a particular way of organizing how the strategy is carried out. The strategy itself is the attempt to assess big ideas by exposing them to experience. In a broad sense, that is what science is all about. But the Scientific Revolution and the work that followed it also developed a particular, socially organized way of carrying out the strategy. The term "science" can also be used, more narrowly, to refer to that social organization.

  I will say a bit more about how the two parts of the story fit together. I take from the empiricist tradition the idea of assessing ideas by exposing them to experience. An individual, all alone, can carry out a strategy of this kind. An individual could set up a private, self-contained program of formulating hypotheses and assessing them via observational testing. An individual can internalize the dialogue between the imaginative and critical voices. Such an individual might refuse to trust others and might attempt to get as close as possible to the old fantasy of the lone empiricist, relying entirely on his own experience.

  This is a possible way of carrying out the scientific strategy, but obviously it is very far from the usual way. If our aim is to understand what makes the tradition of work deriving from the Scientific Revolution different from other approaches, then we need a different kind of story. We need to focus on the development and structure of a socially organized way of carrying out the basic scientific strategy.

  The distinctive features of science as a social structure are found along two different dimensions. One has to do with the organization of work at a given time. Here we find the suggestion that science has developed a reward system and an internal culture that generate an efficient mixture of competition and cooperation, and a beneficial division of scientific labor across different approaches to a problem. These ideas were discussed in chapter ii. The general argument is that science (construed narrowly, as involving a particular social structure) is able to coordinate the energies of diverse individuals in an effective way.

  The other dimension has to do with the relationships between different times, and with the transmission of ideas between scientific generations. The crucial feature we find along this dimension is that scientific work is cumulative. Each generation builds on the work of predecessors; current workers "stand on the shoulders" of earlier workers, as Isaac Newton once put it. This requires both trustworthy ways of transmitting ideas across time and (again) a reward system that makes it worthwhile to carry on where earlier workers left off.

  With a social structure of this kind, the "dialogue between the imaginative and the critical voices" can become a real dialogue. We have social mechanisms in place that reliably bring about the checking and scrutinizing of ideas. To use a phrase suggested to me by Kim Sterelny, we get an "engine of self-correction" to accompany the speculative side of scientific thinking. In a situation like this, we can have a true division of labor in how the basic empiricist pattern is manifested. Some dogmatic and bloodyminded individuals can work within the system and even play a potentially useful role, provided that flexibility and open-mindedness is found in the community as a whole.

  For several of the figures discussed in this book, the way that the empiricist strategy has been socially organized by modern science exhibits a remarkable balance. Or, more accurately, we seem to find a couple of different balances. One is a balance between competition and cooperation; this is, in a sense, the message of the work by Merton, Hull, and Kircher discussed in chapters 8 and ii. The other is a balance between criticism and trust. That is one of the main themes of Kuhns work. It is also part of the message of Shapin's work. Shapin would be reluctant to accept my description of the relation between criticism and trust as a "balance"; this term suggests that the relationship is a good one. Shapin does not take a stand on that issue. Kuhn, however, did think that the relationship between criticism and trust found in science is a uniquely effective one.

  The idea of "balance," with its positive connotations, will make some people suspicious about this part of the story. The suspicion is understandable. When we describe the relations between competition and cooperation, and between criticism and trust, as exhibiting "balance," this makes those relationships sound like precious and fragile achievements. But why are we so sure that the present state is a good one? How do we know that we could not do better by changing the social organization of science? Feyerabend thought that recent science had lost its balance with respect to the relation between imaginative and pedestrian work, as we saw in chapter 7. In chapters 9 and i i, I also discussed the possibility of a feminist criticism of Hull's claim that the relation between competition and cooperation in science is well balanced.

  Let us also look briefly at some historical issues. Once we have worked out which features of science's social organization are essential to our epistemological theory of science, we get some new historical questions to ask. Above I distinguished two dimensions of the social organization of science: the organization of work at a time and the organization of work across times. Were there crucial transitions that gave us these features, or did they evolve more gradually? Did they arise together or separately?

  The cumulative structure of scientific work is something that is old in some fields and newer in others; this is something that can be gained and lost partially. In their historical description of the development of ideas about the universe from the ancient period to the early part of the modern, Toulmin and Goodfield emphasize the way that a cumulative structure was sometimes gained and then lost (z96z). A sustained line of work would be set up by a "school," often in some particular city, and then it would fade and be replaced by a succession of individuals working alone, often "reinventing the wheel" over and over again. Gradually, though, and field by field, this haphazard pattern was replaced by more cumulative work.

  Turning to the organization of scientific work at a time, and the relation between cooperation and competition in science, we find that the middle of the seventeenth century may be crucially important. Shapin and Schaffer (1985) emphasize the role of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society of London in setting up a new kind of culture of controlled criticism and a new kind of network of trust. This made possible new kinds of collaborative work. (Again, Shapin and Schaffer do not tell this story in a way that endorses this result, but many philosophers of science would want to do this.) If we regard this new organized culture of work as absolutely crucial to science, then the work of the "adventurers" of the earlier part of the Revolutionary period, like Galileo, becomes slightly less important in the story.

  The case of alchemy is also interesting here. Alchemy was the precursor to chemistry, and it was influential through the end of the seventeenth century. (Newton was very interested in it.) Alchemy was a combination of practical work based on detailed recipes and an amazingly strange set of accompanying theories. (Rocks were seen as growing, in a quasi-biological sense, in the earth; chemical reactions were signified in astrological relationships between planets.) Alchemy was quite empirical in some waysvery
results-oriented-but the work of alchemists was organized in a way that contrasts strikingly with modern science. Alchemy was often intensely secretive; rather than wide, accessible publication of results, there was a culture of private and restricted communication. This was partly because of the semi-mystical nature of the field, and partly because of the hope for massive financial benefits via finding a way to transmute other metals into gold. As Shapin and Schaffer emphasize, Robert Boyle contrasted his open, cooperative new scientific culture with the secrecy of the alchemists, as well as with the emptiness and dogmatism of Scholasticism.

  In chapter 1, I raised the possibility that the fields and practices that we call "science" are too dissimilar for there to be a detailed philosophical "theory of science." (This possibility is one aspect of a recent discussion about the "disunity of science" [Galison and Stump 1996; Suppes 1981]). In several of the previous chapters, I have argued for "mixed" or "pluralist" views on particular issues. In chapter 7 I argued that some scientific fields might fit reasonably well with Kuhns account of paradigm-dominated normal science (or something along the same lines), while others might fit better with the views of Laudan and Lakatos. My treatment of explanation in chapter 13 defended a "contextualist" position, and the same possibility arose also in my discussion of scientific realism. So the last half of this book has taken the idea of diversity in the nature of science fairly seriously, but this has not prevented the development of a philosophical account of those issues. Philosophy need not always strive for the most sweeping generalizations, and this kind of recognition of diversity need not involve relativism. Still, the account of the scientific strategy and its characteristic social structure described in this section is indeed rather general. Others might propose views that have less generality or unity than I am trying for here.

  15.4 A Last Challenge

  My discussion of the scientific strategy in the previous section was presented as a vindication of empiricism. But is this a misleading connection to make? (Some commentators on this book have thought so.) Has the story told in this book shown that empiricism was basically right all along, or has it rejected all the central ideas of the empiricist tradition?

  This challenge can be posed by thinking again about Kuhn. We can see Kuhn as arguing that science cannot be described by any kind of simple empiricist formula, because science is a much more complicated machine than traditional empiricism ever imagined. Empiricist ideas are not just vague and incomplete; they get it wrong. Empiricist views have no resources to describe the complex balances found in scientific work, especially balances found in the social organization of science. Kuhn's view of science was the first place in this book where we encountered the possibility of a very complex theory of science of this kind. I criticized a number of the details of Kuhn's theory of science, but not in a way that seems likely to help us with that basic challenge. We seem likely to end up with just as complicated a view of science, or something even more so.

  The empiricist can reply: "OK, there is a lot of complexity, but still the basic ideas of empiricism capture the most fundamental features of how science works. Let us not lose the wood for the trees!" That is indeed the reply that I propose. But we need to be aware of the objections to this position, as well as the points in its favor.

  From the point of view of some of its opponents, empiricism is based on a hopelessly simple picture of what knowledge involves. Empiricism is often summarized by saying that the only source of knowledge is experience. But what is this talk of "sources" doing here? We ask, Is there just one source of knowledge, or more than one? This is like asking, Is there just one pipe leading into this tank, or more than one? But the process of learning about the world is not like that; epistemology is not plumbing.

  So the critic of empiricism that I am imagining here is someone who thinks that the discussion of social structure, frameworks, rewards, and so on, in the middle part of this book should replace the simple empiricist ideas that we started out with. Suppose it can be shown that science works via a balance between competition and cooperation, and between criticism and trust. If that is the key to understanding science, it is not something that was suggested or summarized by traditional empiricist ideas. It is a different kind of story and also a better one. Or so says the critic.

  There is a connection here to the problem of "objectivity" in science. Back in chapter i, I noted that people often want to know whether science is objective; this is a central concept in many philosophical and sociological discussions of science. I said that I would avoid the term, because it is ambiguous and tends to set up the issues in a misleading way. Why is this? Let us look more closely at how the word is used. Sometimes people talking about objectivity have in mind a distinction, perhaps a vague one, between good and bad influences on belief. Objective influences on belief are contrasted with subjective influences. And objectivity involves some kind of impartiality, or lack of bias. Perhaps it is accurate to say that "objectivity" is a term used to refer to a loose family of distinctions, each of which makes some sort of contrast between two ways of forming beliefs, one way that is dependent on caprice, prejudice, or point of view, and one that avoids such "subjective" influences.

  At other times, the term "objectivity" is used to express a quite different idea. Some things exist objectively and some do not. Do colors exist objectively? Do moral values exist objectively? They are said to exist objec tively if they exist independently of what people think of them. There is a link here to the issues about realism discussed in chapter iz.

  In some discussions of science, these different senses of objectivity are brought together. Beliefs are said to be formed objectively when they are caused by, or guided by, real things. Science counts as objective if it is a process in which belief and theory change are controlled by contact with real things in the world. So is science objective in this sense? Or rather, when science is working properly, is it objective in this sense? Is the structure of science one that tends to produce objectivity?

  The view of science defended in this book sort of says yes to these questions. But these are not good ways to ask the key questions; the concept of objectivity is unhelpful here. It is crude, and it tends to suggest false dichotomies. People find themselves asking, Are scientific belief and theory change controlled by real objects, or by social factors? Are scientific ideas the products of the real world, or are they products of human creativity? Are we responsible for what we know, or is the world responsible for it? (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 344). These are all bad questions; they all involve false dichotomies. Scientific belief is not the product of us alone or of the world alone; it is the product of an interaction between our psychological capacities, our social organization, and the structure of the world. The world does not "stamp" beliefs upon us, in science or elsewhere. Still, science is responsive to the structure of the world, via the channel of observation.

  The critic of empiricism that I am imagining here makes a similar kind of objection. Why hold onto old empiricist slogans, when they seem to set up the issues in such simplistic and misleading ways? Why not tell the story in entirely new terms? There is more in science than was dreamed of in the tired old empiricist tradition.

  The critic of empiricism suspects that people like me want to hang onto empiricist ideas because they are pleasingly simple and often rhetorically useful. What makes science different from attempts to understand the world based on religious fundamentalism? When questions like this are asked, the empiricist seems able to give a simple and satisfying answer. "Science is different because it is a process in which beliefs are shaped by observation. Ideas are assessed not in terms of their origins, but in terms of how they stand up to testing. Science is open-minded, anti-authoritarian, and flexible." Nice and simple. Now suppose that these traditional empiricist ideas are replaced by a much more complex story, a story about delicate balances, a special reward system, moves within and between frameworks.... The defender of a more complex story might still insist that sc
ience is a superior approach to investigation. But the features that make science different will not be obvious, simple features, as they are according to the empiricist story. Simplicity is often attractive, but simple answers are often false.

  So I do recognize the force of the argument that empiricism has been buried rather than reformed in the latter part of this book. Nonetheless, I think the argument is erroneous. It does "lose the wood for the trees," as the saying goes. Modern science involves both a general strategy and a complex social structure that carries out the strategy. The first part of this two-part account, as developed in this book, is a modified, naturalistic form of empiricism.

  15.5 The Future

  What are the key issues for philosophy of science in the near future? What should people work on? The problems grappled with in the preceding section are certainly worth further discussion. But I will end by mentioning three issues that follow up discussions in earlier chapters, which I think are especially interesting at the moment.

  The first follows from the last section of chapter 7. What role do frameworks, paradigms, and similar constructs have in our understanding of theory change in science? Should we follow Kuhn and Carnap in having a sharp distinction between two "tiers" of conceptual change? Or is this a beguiling image that creates problems rather than solving them?

  The second has to do with the reward system in science, and the relations between individual-level and communitylevel goals. So far the philosophical treatments of this topic have tended to generalize a lot, and it has been assumed that scientists have all internalized a similar set of motivations. Using input from sociology of science, it should be possible to tell a much more detailed story. What differences are there between different fields and different subcultures in science, for example? The relation between competition and cooperation in science is a fascinating topic.