From Physics to the Human Sciences—The Itinerary of an Attitude

Taken in itself, each of the chapters that follow makes a more or less circumscribed point in its own way. They were not originally conceived in relation to one another, but their publication together offers an opportunity to rethink them as a coherent body of work, or at least as one facet of such a body of work. The best way of doing this is to say something of the project, in the Sartrean sense, out of which they arose.

Scientific Roots

My engagement with the philosophy of science goes back to readings of Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Alfred North Whitehead while I was still in school. The Jeans and Eddington were my father's; he wanted to understand the mysterious universe because it glorified God—or rather, I suspect (he was a humble man), he just wanted to feel how mysterious it was, thus savoring at once God's greatness and his own insignificance. He was impressionable, and continually awed by the dimensions of the atom (the nucleus as a pea in St. Paul's Cathedral) or the distance of the galaxies.

The effect of his sharing all this was that it became familiar to me and not very mysterious at all. I took physics in school, being initiated (which is, after all, the old sense of mystery) at the hands of a crusty and acerbic teacher whose name was S. V. Shingler. Two memories of Mr. Shingler stand out: first, his daily tirades in class about the hopeless stupidity of his pupils, and second, a more personal rebuke. In working

up some notes on fluid pressure—one of the very first assignments in the fourth form perhaps (I must have been about thirteen)—I ended with a flourish, writing the basic formula "p = f/a" in large letters in the middle of the notebook page and drawing a little box around it. It was a neat bit of work and I was proud of it. Mr. Shingler struck the formula through with his red pencil and made me redo the page. No physical expression, he said, was more or less important than any other; I would please make them all the same size. His tone as he administered this lesson was one of withering scorn mixed with genuine affection.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the British educational system I studied nothing formally except physics, mathematics, and a bit of chemistry between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. This coincided—sometimes to the detriment of academic work—with a period of personal struggle against a set of beliefs into which I had been indoctrinated since infancy by my parents, who belonged to a small and fanatical sect known as the Exclusive Brethren. The Brethren were always metaphorically writing things in large letters in the middles of pages: they hung great framed Biblical texts everywhere, making insistent claims on belief or action, and conducted their lives in an atmosphere of exaggerated fear and piety.

Physics seemed obvious from the beginning; religion became more and more dubious. Questions about belief, what it was and under what conditions it was justified, arose on both sides. Some of the claims of cosmologists and quantum theorists were every bit as implausible as those of theologians. But scientists were tentative where preachers were dogmatic, and it helped to remember that things didn't become truer because they were written large, or—as I was to put it many years later, in a review of a fellow philosopher of science—that "hypotheticals do not turn into categoricals just because one shouts them at the top of one's lungs."^[1] Nothing in science had the canonical and sacrosanct status of religious belief; everything was provisional. Local observations, suitably specified, and rule-governed derivations from stated givens—like the formula for fluid pressure—had what I would now call apodictic certainty (which, Kant to the contrary notwithstanding, is not the same thing as necessary truth), but beyond that every step had to be argued. Extrapolations and hypotheses were all right, but only as long as one remembered that that was what they were.

Science, therefore, never had for me the megalomaniacal pretensions so many people claim for or attribute to it. It was certainly not a substitute for religion—on the contrary, it was an antidote. The idea that science is just another kind of faith overlooks an essential difference between science and religion: as a scientist I might share with believers a kind of practical confidence in the stability of the everyday world,

but I rejected not merely as unnecessary but also as unworthy any commitment to an explanatory account of the origin or meaning of that world made simply for the sake of having something to believe, or for that matter any unwarranted extrapolation of the scientific account itself. As I came to see it, Newton's recommendation in his third Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy that locally encountered qualities should "be esteemed [emphasis added] the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever," subject always to the qualification in the fourth Rule ("till such time as other phaenomena occur"),^[2] only made sense, while on the other hand Laplace's postulation of "an intelligence . . . able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom"^[3] was just a bit of unwarranted melodrama.

At the same time science didn't seem, locally, to be more than a part of the story; it coexisted happily with the rest of life. Even if everything turned out to be explainable, that would not necessarily spoil its quality as experience. Eddington had been quite good on this point; I quote one of the relevant passages in chapter 22. So again, one of the things frequently held against science, one of the things that Whitehead himself had held against it—that it reduces reality to the mere hurrying of material, endlessly and meaninglessly, or words to that effect—struck me as based on a misunderstanding. To do Whitehead justice, what he was criticizing was the "scientific world-view" that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he seemed to think, as many people still think, that scientific work led more or less inevitably to this view, and that simply was not my experience.^[4]

One other attitude to science that dates from this early period is that it has always seemed to me a great playground of ideas. I read science fiction more or less avidly, but even in everyday life there were all sorts of ways in which scientific knowledge could transform or deform the ordinary, thus rendering it more interesting. One juvenile example of this is from roughly the period of my apprenticeship with Mr. Shingler, though it belonged in the chemistry laboratory next door, which was presided over by Dr. Stubbs. The structural elegance of organic chemistry came just too late in the curriculum to convert me to the subject (chemistry up to that point had been rather a cookbook affair), but it fed a certain speculative bent. Hydrocarbons come in series of ascending complexity; for example, the series of acids goes from formic (H.COOH) to acetic (CH₃ .COOH), then to propionic (C₂ H₅ .COOH), and so on. The alcohol series however begins with methyl (CH₃ .OH) and continues with ethyl (C₂ H₅ .OH), and so on. It is obvious on comparison that there is a missing first member in the alcohol series, namely the analogue of formic acid, with its single hydrogen rather than a hy-

drocarbon group. In the case of the alcohols this would clearly be H.OH. But that is water—so a case could be made for regarding water as an alcohol.

This was surely not original with me, though it was my own at the time. Also the argument had a fatal flaw: as Dr. Stubbs patiently pointed out, you can't have an organic compound without carbon. It amused me anyway, but I must I think have been after provocation as well—for example, people would have to redefine temperance. With my family I acquired a reputation for frivolity. This was no laughing matter, but then they took almost everything with deadly seriousness, whereas I thought (and still do) that there were very few things in life, with the possible exceptions of love and justice, worth taking altogether seriously. Traces of this perverse rethinking of the familiar are to be found here and there in this book.

Systematic Philosophy of Science

To a first degree in physics I added, after a transatlantic flight from religious suffocation, a doctorate in philosophy, for which it was natural to write a dissertation in the philosophy of science. The task of this discipline I took to be the understanding of what science was doing conceptually, not historically or anecdotally, which explains a lack of sympathy for subsequent efforts to make it "a more accurate reflection of actual scientific practice," as some revisionist philosophers of science put it. The structure of science as I envisaged it at this time involved a lowest level of concepts that corresponded to recognizable complexes in the perceptual domain, a next higher level of constructs which were qualitatively similar to concepts but had undergone a process of refinement (definition, quantification, etc.), and a highest level of isolates that had no direct or obvious correspondences in experience but were invoked because of their theoretical power. The isolates were hypothetical and for the most part invented, though it seemed possible that some of them might be called into being by structural considerations, as a matter of inference or of Gestalt completion. This terminology, largely adapted from that of my sponsor Henry Margenau, was not destined for wide acceptance, though I still think it lends itself to an interesting variant treatment of the observational-theoretical dichotomy (about which I shall have more to say). I had already abandoned it—at least the part about the isolates—by the time of my attempt at a systematic account of the philosophy of science in 1965. But I did not abandon then or later the realist conclusion of the dissertation nor my

reasons for reaching it; they are dealt with briefly in chapter 21 of the present book, which was originally written as a contribution to a Festschrift for Margenau.

My realism was what would now be called a structural realism, in that I did not necessarily expect the separateness and identity of "things" in the perceptual world to be faithfully mirrored in the real one, even though all their properties corresponded to something in the real, understanding by this term a universe independent of and ontologically prior to my knowledge of it. One could reasonably postulate an isomorphism, under some transformation, between the perceptual/conceptual and the real, but to ask what something is like when we aren't attending to it was to ask a silly question, since things are only "like" anything when we are attending to them. This did not mean a fall into idealism: attending to them didn't constitute the world in which the things were grounded, it only fixed how they would appear in my world. Again, my realism itself was hypothetical, and entertained by individuals, whose conceptual schemes were idiosyncratic and only partially isomorphic to one another. It made no sense to object that because something was hypothetical, it couldn't be real—that missed the whole point of making the hypothesis in the first place. That it was real was the hypothesis. I had not yet encountered phenomenology—one could get a doctorate in philosophy at Yale without ever hearing of it, an astonishing testimony to parochialism when one thinks of it, and a devastating indictment of places where it may still be true—and could therefore not see the hypothetical structure of the real as intentional. (It may be worth remarking that conceptual schemes as I construed them, meaning the conceptual furniture of individual thinkers, do not fall under Donald Davidson's later strictures in "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.")^[5]

The Philosophy of Science: A Systematic Account ,^[6] written after a number of years of teaching in this area, set out to organize, for didactic purposes, the content of what was at that time still an emerging discipline among the major subdivisions of philosophy as taught in universities. I did not consider that it had itself to be scientific or to mimic the technicalities of science. For heuristic purposes I made use of some diagrams and simple formulae, especially when dealing with logic and probability theory, but my main concern was to convey a sense of conceptual structure—always remembering that the subjects who were to entertain it were embodied macroscopically in place and time (in what I would later call the "flat region") and would stay that way, no matter how the objects of their interest might be pushed in the direction of the small or the fast or the distant.

It was my first book and in it I made a deliberate attempt to be

approachable. As some sharp-eyed reviewers pointed out, it was flawed by errors of scholarship, not excusable—as I am quite ready to admit—even on the grounds that I was painting in broad strokes on a large canvas. But as I look back I am struck by something that, now that it occurs to me, may be relevant to some of the material in the present book. The reviewers' complaints were not at all that I had got it wrong about science, nor indeed that any of my main claims were off target, but rather that I had misrepresented some details about the work of other philosophers of science—that I had attributed to Carnap a view he had once explicitly disavowed, that I had implicitly conflated the positions of Poincaré and Duhem on a point where they had in fact diverged. I think the trouble was that for me scholarship wasn't the main point, that I lacked the appetite for detail and the talent for perseverance that marked many of my colleagues. (Perhaps this plays out yet further the rejection of the kind of reverence for the Word I was surfeited with in youth.) At all events my attitude has always been that the fact that X said Y isn't really important, philosophically speaking, even if X is Plato or Kant; what matters is what reasons he or she gave for saying Y and whether they should compel our assent. Of course if X didn't say Y nothing excuses the misattribution, which is why my post facto contrition is genuine, and why I apologize in advance for such lapses as may have escaped my now more critical eye in what follows. But in cases like this history, not philosophy, is the offended party. In a similar way, when my students tell me what they think, I sometimes say—taking care to temper the point (perhaps I learned something from Mr. Shingler)—that it doesn't matter what they think; their opinions will become interesting to me only when they can tell me why they hold them.

More germane to the philosophy of science proper was the gentle reproach of a former student of mine, himself on the way to becoming a distinguished philosopher of science, who wrote to say how it worried him that while "Putnam, Feyerabend, Hanson, Kuhn et al. seem[ed] to have pretty effectively destroyed the tenability of the theory-observation dichotomy," I on the other hand seemed to cling to it in my book. But I thought they had done no such thing, and think now that I concede too much in chapter I of this book in calling the strong dichotomy untenable. In a subsequent paper (which, bucking such a trend, was never published and is now lost, or I should have included it here) I produced, as a test case, the Chinese observation of a "guest-star" in the year 1054. Thanks to astrophysics we now know, from the celestial house in which it appeared, that this was the supernova whose remains were recorded by Charles Messier in 1784 as M1 (the first item in his catalogue of nebulae) and were later named the Crab Nebula by

the Earl of Rosse, who thought them very like a crab. Even if the observations of Messier and the Earl of Rosse were colored by astrophysical theory, which I doubt to have been the case in any developed sense, those of the Chinese certainly weren't—and yet, because they fit the retrodicted light curve of the supernova, they count as confirming evidence of the theory.

Of course if what is meant by the rejection of the observational-theoretical dichotomy is that all grasping of anything in perception involves judgment, or, in Coleridge's words, "the meanest of men has his theory, and to think at all is to theorize,"^[7] that gets rid easily enough of theory-free observations. However, on the one hand it trivializes theory and on the other it makes room for the reemergence of the dichotomy at a higher level. For it will frequently be true that the background theory that is thought to contaminate the observations will also be a background theory for the theory that is invoked to explain them—but that the explanatory theory will be quite distinct from the background theory and will share no terms with it. So once again there will be a sharp distinction, against that background, between observation statements and theoretical statements.

Branching Out

A normal career in the philosophy of science would no doubt have involved plunging into the professional fray with these and other arguments, but even while engaged on the systematic project my interests were beginning to turn away from the defining problems of the field. Those problems, some of which are noticed occasionally in what follows, came to include paradigms, research programs, the realism-pragmatism debate, anthropic speculations, and eliminative materialism. As will become clear in the later parts of this book, a kind of reconvergence has taken place, especially in the domain of artificial intelligence (see for example chapter 24), now that the hardwired locus of the knowing subject is beginning to be taken more seriously.

A decisive event at the time of which I am speaking was a request from some bright and insistent students at the University of Kansas, who wanted to read existentialism with me. I was the youngest member of the department and the others had already refused. My job was to teach logic and the philosophy of science, but on the one hand I was curious about Kierkegaard, whom I had encountered in a backhanded way at Yale (where he had been introduced as a prelude to an exemplary dismissal), and on the other I liked the students. We read Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre; later I added Husserl on my own. It

amazed me that this rich material was held in such low esteem in the trade. It made no internal difference to the technical problems of the philosophy of science but it put, as it were, a modal prefix in front of the whole enterprise, the absence of which constituted, as I saw and still see it, a culpable failure of self-knowledge. And it did make an external difference (see for example chapter 20 of the present book).

Also I had begun even earlier to have some curiosity about the possibility of extrapolating results in the philosophy of science to theories in other contexts, notably at first that of value, an inquiry that resulted in Science and the Theory of Value .^[8] Attending to these and other eccentric speculations made all the more sense because of a growing feeling that much technical philosophy of science was in some quite deep way beside the point. It was full of what I thought spurious formalisms and aimed for what I suspected to be a spurious exactitude—spurious because the formalisms were often decorative and not used for any essential purpose (like proving theorems, as in mathematics) and because no adverse consequences followed (as they surely would have in the empirical sciences) from drawing conclusions with less than perfect exactness, or as Aristotle puts it in the Nicomachean Ethics , "roughly and in outline."^[9] Aristotle goes on in the same passage to say that "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits," and it seemed to me that philosophers of science who thought that what they did should be formal and exact were getting confused about their subject.

Philosophy is not a natural science, nor an exact science, and trying to make the philosophy of science imitate the hard sciences by the refinement of its technical formulae (as I once remarked at a conference, to the indignation of the advocate of "exact philosophy" on whose paper I was commenting) made about as much sense as my moving to Boston from New York, where I was then living, because I really wanted to live in London. The difference is stark and simple but often not grasped. The natural sciences look for their objects in the natural world, and what happens in that world selects, in the final analysis, what the science in question can plausibly say. The object of the philosophy of science is science, but science is not in the natural world . One aphoristic way of putting this is to say "the stars are indifferent to astronomy": they did whatever it is that they do long before astronomy was thought of, and news of what most of them are doing now may well arrive in these parts long after astronomy has been forgotten. Astronomy is something that human beings have made up—allowing themselves to be instructed by evidence from the stars, but deciding among themselves how to interpret that evidence and what conjectures to float in order to account for it.

I find myself hedging here, however, by taking care to say "natural

science," "exact science," and so on. The philosophy of science is the philosophy of what, exactly? And how can I use "exactly" in this challenging way when I have just been making excuses for inexactitude? In the period of my professional formation "science" nearly always meant "physical science" and "exactitude" nearly always meant "formal (or quantitative) exactitude." There were of course the biological and the social sciences, but these, when they were mentioned at all, tended to be compared to the physical sciences as ideals; their special problems were probabilistic or statistical but would become straightforwardly causal if only we knew enough. It was possible to expound the philosophy of the social sciences without once mentioning the feedback effect of knowledge of a theory on the population whose behavior it set out to explain. As to exactitude, the origins of the term certainly suggested something demanding—in the special and rather sinister case of "exaction" often enough a quantitative demand: the uttermost farthing, the pound of flesh. But exactus is the past participle of exigo, and it seemed possible to be exigent philosophically, to require reflective thinking-through, without insisting on axiomatic formalization. And "science" itself had only relatively recently, and only in the English-speaking world, come to have the narrow connotations of the quantitative (a term not itself always clearly understood—see for example chapter 19 of this book). Even in the English-speaking world, at Cambridge, older uses were preserved in the designation of science as natural philosophy, and of philosophy as moral science.

The idea of a thorough and demanding theoretical account is, in this light, the idea of a science, even an exacting science. In Science and the Theory of Value "science" still has the old meaning and there is no suggestion that there might be such a thing as a moral science. But a twenty-year detour through Continental philosophy—which began (as a main focus of professional work, rather than as a side interest) with the structuralists and only later, as a detour within a detour, involved concentration on the single figure of Jean-Paul Sartre^[10] —made me thoroughly comfortable with the European notion of the Geisteswissenschaften or the sciences humaines, inquiry into which made it clear that they were the lineal descendants of John Stuart Mill's version of the moral sciences.

The Human Sciences

I said just now that natural science looks for its objects in the natural world; in a similar way one might say that a human science would look for its objects in the human world. Now philosophy, and the philosophy of science, are "objects" among others in the human world; the "natu-

ral world" itself is, paradoxically enough, also an object in the human world. Nobody has ever dealt with this situation better than Husserl (in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology ). Husserl's key idea is that of the Lebenswelt , the "life-world," something that belongs in the first instance to the individual subject, although Husserl moves on (mistakenly, I think) to a collective form of it.^[11]

This world, this intentional domain of temporality and spatial extension, which is not an abstraction from anything but is the totality of lived experience at every moment, includes the natural and the human parts spoken of in the Preface—but as remarked there this very distinction is a human construction. The "natural world" component of the life-world encompasses everything I encounter or that happens, within my experience or within the reach of my learning, that would have happened even if there had been no human intentions (or intentionalities). Deciding just which things fall under that description is easy to a first approximation but becomes harder, as is usually the case at conceptual boundaries, the more "human" the natural becomes: What about language? What about the incest prohibition? But these contested cases do not vitiate the basic distinction. The life-world includes thought, and the distinction between natural and human is particularly interesting here: thoughts that occur to people unwanted, especially those that occur when they are very much not wanted, have to be treated as natural pathologies.

I do not wish to develop these ideas at much greater length here, since they form the object of several chapters in part VI of the book, but a couple of supplementary points may be in order. First—to return to a controversial issue—what I may call my scientific world is itself a complex domain in the life-world, by no means coterminous with the natural world; it will include parts of the natural world that fall under scientific explanation, and parts of the thought world that are involved in the explanatory activity. This being the case, however, it can readily be divided into an observational part and a theoretical part, once again no doubt with ambiguities at the boundary that, once again, do not vitiate the distinction itself. Second, all this talk of "worlds" invites a distinction, hinted at above, between "world" and "universe." Universe would stand for the totality of what there is, including us but also including the vastly greater sphere of what underlies and surrounds and precedes and will follow us; world would stand, in effect, for the reach of the human—which the very term seems originally to have meant, a wer-ald or "age of man," "age" being understood as an epoch or a life. Note once again however that the idea of the universe will be an item in my world.

Philosophers of science all too readily hypostatize the entities of

which they speak—the propositions, the problems, the laws, the theories, the research programs, the revolutions, the sciences themselves—as if there were a domain in which they existed independently, waiting to be thought about, a domain whose internal structure would perhaps embody some truth about them all, and provide a ground for the settling of disputes. Karl Popper even invented such a domain, which he called the Third World, or (in order to avoid confusion with geopolitics) World III.^[12] In this he seemed to be echoing Gaston Bachelard's call for a "bibliomenon" to supplement noumena and phenomena,^[13] though when I suggested this to him privately he rejected the idea indignantly, claiming originality for all his ideas. At all events World III seems to me a perfect candidate for Ockham's razor, since it is wholly unnecessary—everything it does can be accommodated in the life-worlds of individual subjects (always remembering that representations of other subjects, mediated by their embodiments, are included as elements in those life-worlds).

When a subject intends a problem or an argument, as I am doing now (and as I can assume the reader to be doing in his or her "now"), the problem and the argument, and what they are about, and their referents, and their histories, are all called into being, as it were, are invoked, are animated, by the subject in the moment of their being intended. There is no reaching out to some other domain: all that is happening has to be drawn, in the moment, from resources locally available: memory, including language, perception, conceptual apparatus, texts perhaps. It is as a thinking and knowing subject that I engage in scientific or philosophical pursuits, and such pursuits happen nowhere, as far as we have any means of knowing, except in life-worlds like ours. Nor of course do any other pursuits, in the sense of activities directed towards ends.

The human sciences deal with life-worlds and their products; they are themselves inscribed in such life-worlds, namely, those of their practitioners. The last chapter of this book is devoted to them. What I hope to have shown here is how a conception of science that I learned as a young physicist, among the "hard sciences," has evolved through a long practice of philosophical reflection into something more inclusive, to which the hard sciences are integral but which they do not begin to exhaust. The hard sciences take their data from experimentation and their structure from mathematics—but experimentation and mathematics are themselves only human strategies for finding intelligibility in, or lending it to, an otherwise unintelligible world, and as such take their place in turn among the objects of the human sciences.