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Science is Sciencing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Leslie A. White
Leslie A. White*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Science is not merely a collection of facts and formulas. It is preëminently a way of dealing with experience. The word may be appropriately used as a verb: one sciences, i.e., deals with experience according to certain assumptions and with certain techniques. Science is one of two basic ways of dealing with experience. The other is art. And this word, too, may appropriately be used as a verb; one may art as well as science. The purpose of science and art is one: to render experience intelligible, i.e., to assist man to adjust himself to his environment in order that he may live. But although working toward the same goal, science and art approach it from opposite directions. Science deals with particulars in terms of universals: Uncle Tom disappears in the mass of Negro slaves. Art deals with universals in terms of particulars: the whole gamut of Negro slavery confronts us in the person of Uncle Tom. Art and science thus grasp a common experience, or reality, by opposite but inseparable poles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , October 1938 , pp. 369 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1938

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References

Notes

1 “Thermokinetics of Liometopum apiculatum Mayr,” and “Note on the Thermokinetics of Dolichoderine Ants,” Proc. National Academy of Sciences, VI (1920), 204-211; and X (1924), 436-439, respectively. He found a close correlation between the speed of ants and temperature, within certain temperature limits.

2 Dr. A. E. Douglass, an astronomer at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, has, by working out a correlation between climate and growth of trees, provided archaeologists with the most precise method for dating prehistoric remains unaccompanied by written records that has ever been devised. In this instance the astronomer has become an archaeologist. See “The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings,” National Geographic Magazine, December, 1929.

3 “… I think that social science is like a Welsh rabbit—not really a rabbit at all.” A. E. Hooton, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, in his Apes, Men, and Morons, p. 62.

4 The intra-organic functioning of the organism might also be included here. But since no organism exists except in an extra-organic setting, and since intra-organic functioning has significance only in terms of the interaction of organism and environment, we may confine ourselves to the latter and employ the following equation: organism x environment = experience.

5 I shall use the term reality as synonymous with experience thus defined. This is quite unwarranted from a philosophic point of view: we can be sure that the whole of reality is not experienced by us. But from an anthropological or behavioristic point of view, the term “reality” may be justified, since any portion of reality lying outside and beyond the range of experience is not significant behavioristically. From the point of view of behavior, then, that is to say, within the scope of science (sciencing) experience and reality are coextensive and equivalent, and hence may be regarded as synonymous. The term reality is to be preferred to experience because of its philosophic connotation. Reality is our ultimate interest.

6 Article Space-Time, by Albert Einstein, in Encyclopedia Britannica, XXI, 107 (14th ed.).

7 Address delivered at the 80th Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians at Cologne, Sept. 21, 1908.

8 To be sure, those who bear the label “historian” concern themselves with relationships other than temporal: they may wish to know where Lincoln was assassinated as well as when. “The temporal process” would probably be a better term for our purpose here than “history.”

9 “The relation is not analogous to that of soup to beef, but rather that of wardrobe number to overcoat,” p. 353, “Physics and Reality,” by Albert Einstein, Jour. Franklin Institute, Vol. 221, No. 3 (March, 1936).

10 It should be noted that this classification can have, logically, only three categories: t, s, and ts.

11 I.e., it tends to. The correlation between spatial distribution and age is not always close.

12 See A. L. Kroeber's essay, “The Culture-Area and Age-Area Concepts of Clark Wissler,” in Methods in Social Science, Stuart A. Rice, Ed., Chicago, 1931.

13 It may be. Actually they usually are not, for the reason that such distinctions except in rare instances—such as the real or imagined kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow that started the great Chicago fire, or the honking of the geese who “saved Rome”—have no significance for us as ordinary human beings. But for a philosophy of science the sneeze of an anonymous monkey in the depths of a jungle is as significant as illustrating the uniqueness of each event in a temporal series as is the birth of Christ or the death of Caesar.

14 Actually, this may depend upon one's point of view, or more accurately, upon the temporal scope of one's vision. To us, the cosmic process seems to be evolutionary in character: the universe is expanding (it may be assumed), or matter is being transmuted into energy. The process seems to be temporal-formal in character: non-repetitive and irreversible. But this appearance may be an illusion due to our infinitesimally brief span of observation. Were it longer, sufficiently longer, the cosmic process might reveal itself as a repetitive one: a period of contraction might follow expansion, and so on, in an endless series of pulsations; matter may be transmuted into energy and re-congealed into matter, an endless vibration of a cosmic pendulum. So, to a creature which, compared with us, had an infinitesimally brief span of observation, the repetitive and rhythmic character of respiration or the heart beat or the rusting of iron would appear to be evolutionary in character, for seeing only a minute part of the process, neither the beginning nor the end, he would observe only a temporal alteration of form, and might declare it to be a non-repetitive process. And he would be correct too, for the process which he observes is non-repetitive, just as the dying star and the decomposing radium represent non-repetitive processes to us. Thus, whether a process be labelled repetitive or evolutionary depends upon the unit of measurement. Any repetitive process is made up of a sequence of events which in themselves are non-repetitive. Conversely, any repetitive process is but a segment of a larger one which is evolutionary in character.

15 One must not confuse duplication with repetition: there may be transitions from reptile to mammal in different races; one stellar death may follow another. These are duplications, not repetitions.

16 Einstein and Infeld have called their recent book The Evolution of Physics, not the History of Physics, it is significant to note.

17 Tool-using is found among sub-human creatures, such as apes. But without articulate speech which provides a means both to communicate experience and to endow it with continuity, tool-using cannot become habitual, traditional and, hence, cumulative and progressive. The apes have the beginnings of culture but they never progress beyond beginnings. They make innumerable starts, but never arrive.

18 When an ape or man uses a random object as a tool he thereby endows that object with meaning—“poke meaning,” or “strike meaning.” But this endowed meaning is dependent upon the physical properties of the object-tool, and the meaning can be per. ceived with the senses. But when man endows a combination of sounds, or a color, or a gesture, with symbolic meaning (e.g., the word see, the x in algebra, the color of mourning, the tipping of a hat), the meaning is not dependent upon the physical properties of the symbol's from of expression, and hence can not be perceived with the senses.

19 It might seem, at first glance, that the psychologist could give a complete account of the swearing of an oath. But a second thought shows that no psychological examination of the human organism and no amount of psychological laws of human behavior would enable one to tell why one person took an oath to Jesus on a Bible and why another took an oath to the Sun on a tobacco pipe (Plains Indians), any more than a psychologist could tell by psychology alone whether a given human organism would speak English or Chinese.

20 It has been only recently that the superorganic level of phenomena has been recognized as a distinct stratum of reality. But even today there are many (anthropologists included) who insist upon dealing, or prefer to deal, with cultural phenomena in psychological or biological terms rather than in terms of its own order of existence. There is a close and interesting correlation between the arrangement of the strata of reality and the history of the sciences. At the bottom lies the inorganic; this was the first to be cultivated with success by the scientist in the persons of astronomers, physicists and chemists. Lying above the inorganic, and being in actuality, merely a special and peculiar form of inorganic components, is the organic. This was next in order of scientific development. Finally, superimposed upon the organic stratum is the superorganic or culture layer. The scientist has only recently invaded this realm, and, so far, his achievements here have been insignificant when compared with his triumphs in lower levels. But, given time, maturity will come here also, and with it achievement.

21 See, e.g., the discussions on “The Evolution of the Universe” by J. Jeans, R. A. Millikan, Eddington, W. de Sitter, G. Lemaître, et al, in Appendix, Report of the Centenary Meeting, British Assn. for Adv. of Science, held in London in 1931. Also, H. N. Russell's article “Stellar Evolution,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th ed.

22 I.e., of Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and their respective students.

23 See Introduction to Sociology, by Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess (Chicago, 1921). Among the students of Professors Park and Burgess: E. T. Hiller, The Strike (1928); F. M. Thrasher, The Gang (1936); A. Blumenthall, Small-Town Stuff (1932); N. Nelson, The Hobo (1923), etc.