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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
The thought that it might be possible to develop a method of scientific discovery, a procedure of investigation and reasoning which, so long as its principles were studiously followed, would be guaranteed to result in scientific knowledge, has long been recognized to be a mere philosophers' dream, with no more possibility of fulfilment than the alchemists' dream of producing a philosophers' stone which would turn base metals into gold. Yet it remains the case that the authority of science (the deference given to scientific experts, the credence given to their theories) rests on claims made on behalf of its methods; they are regarded as somehow superior to, or more reliable than, any other means of acquiring beliefs about the world around us. To say that there is no scientific evidence that any of the food additives currently permitted in Britain have any harmful effects is a way of dismissing as groundless and irrational the fears of those who think that such additives do have harmful effects. Whereas to say that it is scientifically established that smoking causes lung cancer is a way of saying that this is something a smoker ought to worry about.
page 49 note 1 Thus the conception of a scientific method as a method of discovery cuts across the distinction of which much has been made in the literature of analytic philosophy of science between the context of justification and the context of discovery. Here it should be noted that there is a distinction to be drawn between a scientific discovery (something which is recognized by the community of scientists as a discovery) and the original occurrence of an idea or the original making of an observation by an individual scientist. Even if Newton did first get the idea for his gravitational theory as a result of an apple falling on his head (which is itself doubtful), this would not be the point from which his gravitational theory can be ranked as a scientific discovery. Even Newton did not at that point believe it to be correct, but merely an hypothesis which was worth working out and testing. As Principia shows, there was a lot of work involved in thinking through the mathematical shape of the theory then comparing this with the available data on planetary motions. Only then was Newton sufficiently confident to present the whole to the public for critical scrutiny (and there was plenty of criticism). It is here, if anywhere, that method enters: it enters in the transformation of what may be no more than a daydream, a speculation, into a precisely articulated theory which has been tested against some observations and which thus can begin to claim for itself the status of a scientific discovery. An integral part of being judged and accepted as a discovery is being judged to have been a justified claim, not merely a true one.
page 50 note 2 Note that Bacon here means natural philosophy or what we now call science.
page 50 note 3 Bacon, Francis Novum Organum, trans. Spedding, J. and Ellis, R. L. (1857)Google Scholar, reprint Anderson, F. H. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), Book I, xcv.Google Scholar
page 50 note 4 Popper's answer is slightly paradoxical. He is saying that we should have most confidence in those theories which have been most severely tested and have survived, whilst at the same time insisting that the scientific attitude must be that we are not entitled dogmatically to assert the correctness of those theories (they do not constitute knowledge but are merely well-tested conjectures). The scientific approach consists precisely in being critical, in being prepared continually to subject theories to further tests and to think up better theories. Science is the product of critical rationality which compels us to recognize that no series of tests can establish the correctness of a theory beyond all doubt. Our so-called scientific knowledge is fallible. On Popper's account then, the very strength of science's claim to respect rests on its own recognition of its fallibility. It is just to the extent that the scientist is prepared to challenge his own pet theories, or is prepared to consider seriously the challenges presented by others, rather than to defend it at all costs, that we should respect his opinions. But it would then be paradoxical in the extreme to elevate the scientist to the position of guru, according to his pronouncements an absolute authority, treating them as dogma, for we would then be failing to recognize the inherent fallibility of all scientific knowledge claims, recognition of which is, if Popper is right, crucial to the progress and development of science.
page 50 note 5 Popper, K. R., Objective Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1972), 360.Google Scholar
page 50 note 6 That is, those philosophers of science who were either members of or were influenced by the Vienna circle. This includes philosophers such as Carnap, Russell, Hempel, Schlick and Ayer.
page 50 note 7 Objective Knowledge, 342–3 (see 5).Google Scholar
page 50 note 8 Millstone, Erik, Food Additives (Penguin, 1986).Google Scholar
page 51 note 9 Mill's Four Experimental Methods are set out in his System of Logic, Bk III, Ch. VIII. They owe much to Bacon's Tables of Induction set out in the second book of the Novum Organum.
page 51 note 10 See Carpenter, K. J., The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, which contains material providing nice examples both of the application of systematic methods of investigation and of failure to apply them in the search for means of preventing scurvy.
page 51 note 11 This story is told in Gordon, J. E., The New Science of Strong Materials (Penguin, 1968)Google Scholar, which is a fascinating and very readable book.
page 51 note 12 Kelly, A., ‘The New Materials’ in Science and Public Affairs No. 1 (Royal Society, 1986).Google Scholar
page 51 note 13 This assumption goes hand in hand with the idea that what science aims at is Truth and that the Truth is one—it consists in a non-distorted mirroring of the world. To reject this conception of the unitary aim of science is not to abandon all hope of objectivity—non-distorting mirrors within the world only ever present an image of a situation or an object viewed from a certain perspective.
page 51 note 14 The exercise of critical scrutiny has, for example, become very limited in areas related to research which is regarded a sensitive for one reason or another, toxicology and some areas of information technology provide cases in point.
page 68 note 1 Donnellan, K., ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966), 281–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar