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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
The argument of this paper is intended merely as a reassertion of John Dewey's naturalistic thesis that value and existence cannot be separated; and that the traditional concept of science which separates them (and which originated before the advent of science) is vicious. But the writer is not at all sure that he has not perverted the ideas of Dewey beyond recognition. If so, he hopes he has perverted them away from truth, but he fears otherwise. For there is not much hope of “reforming” science; at least, not of cutting and stretching it to fit the Procrustian bed herein prescribed. But if science really does not need reform, the writer is more than willing to submit to the sword of Theseus along with all other marauders and disturbers of the peace.
1 To deny that ideas refer to an antecedent existence is not to deny antecedent existence as many critics of instrumentalism believe. The idea of antecedent existence itself refers to certain consequences.
2 This I take to be a species of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But the fallacy is not avoided or corrected by placing the abstraction in a network of other abstractions, however comprehensive the total system may be. It can be avoided only by continuous testing and reconstruction of the abstraction in terms of its actual fruits, its human consequences, what it does.
3 The dominant ideology of science is supernaturalistic in an important sense. If engineers found it convenient as bridge designers to distinguish this function from actual construction, nothing logically could prevent them. And if they were haunted by a ghost-idea that there is an eternal realm of bridge designs underlying and regulating the world where actual bridges are constructed and eventually decay, then they could, as designers, distinguish between Pure Engineering and applied engineering and refuse to take responsibility for the consequences of their “pure” science outside its “subject-matter.” The only trouble with the distinction would be that they could not get by with it.
4 In a certain tautological (but important) sense the successful “isolated” propositions are true regardless of the bearing of the non-isolated realm on them. For the successful operations of an idea which define its truth are its intended operations. Consequently, if the “isolated” idea intends certain limited operations and is always successful in realizing them, it is “true” regardless of other of its consequences. But, unfortunately however many successful ideas by limitation of their intentions have been made possible by the growth of science (and their number is the glory of science), there is nothing in science which can guarantee that these intentions, limited in just this way, will continue to be relevant. Given our climate of intellectual opinion, they are relevant. But any climate of intellectual opinion is itself conditioned by the wider cosmic weather of social habits or institutions over which man has as yet won no control. It is these which will ultimately determine whether the world is mature enough to manage the human power which has been released by science.
Our climate of opinion is under deliberate attack in many parts of the world. Even in America there are foreboding signs. To choose an example at random, consider a recent best seller, Henry C. Link's Return to Religion. The book is an unblushing attack on science and a defense of superstition by one who calls himself a psychologist. Amusingly enough, about the only activities of psychology which are “really scientific”, according to Link, are personality and character tests and measurements. Unfortunately there are enough abuses of science and its applications to lend a color of truth to the entire book for its numerous uncritical readers. But the most potent enemy of science is dire want amidst the plenty science has made possible. It is time for the friends of science to become critical of it and all its concrete implications before the attacks by its enemies have made constructive criticism futile.
5 It ought not have to be argued today that the development of physics and chemistry was operationally desirable (however uncritically this “desirability” may have been conceived) in a struggling, young industrial capitalism.
6 Any attempt to combine the orthodox approach to ethics with scientific method will confound confusion. There are two basic ideas brought out in Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct which point the way to the unification of existence and value. One pertains directly to science. It is the distinction between an awareness of consequences and an awareness of an outcome. The function of science is not to predict the future. It is to reveal different possible futures and ways of attaining them. On the other hand the function of ends and ideals is not primarily to indicate that a future state of affairs should be realized. Ideals and ends are guides to present action. They themselves must be tested and improved in view of how they operate in present action. As Whitehead has said someplace, “The present is holy ground.” Woe is Israel, indeed, for there is little hope of science becoming operationally ethical, and there is no hope for ethics without science.
7 I am not sure but that the antecedent of this implicative proposition is also asserted in asserting the truth of physics; that is, that scientists will take such a concern; at least the only alternative condition would seem to be lady luck.
8 For a tentative suggestion as to an end upon which scientists might agree as a starting point which has a democratic preference see my paper “Method in Social Philosophy”, Journal of Social Philosophy 3 (July, 1938), 325-41.