| | Science in a Broader Context | The nature of science has been the subject of vigorous debate for centuries—a debate conducted by scientists, philosophers, historians, and other interested parties. Although no general consensus has emerged, several conceptions of science have attracted powerful support. (1) One view holds science to be the pattern of behavior by which humans have gained control over their environment. Science is thus associated with craft traditions and technology, and prehistoric people are regarded as having contributed to the growth of science when they learned how to work metals or engage in successful agriculture. (2) An alternative opinion distinguishes between science and technology, viewing science as a body of theoretical knowledge, technology as the application of theoretical knowledge to the solution of practical problems. On this view, the technology of automobile design and construction is to be distinguished from theoretical mechanics, aerodynamics, and the other theoretical disciplines that guide it; and only the theoretical disciplines are to count as "sciences." Those who adopt this second approach, viewing science as theoretical knowledge, do not generally wish to concede that all theories (regardless of their character or content) are scientific; and for such people the task of definition has just begun. If they wish to exclude certain kinds of theories, they must propose criteria by which to judge one theory scientific and another unscientific. (3) It has become quite popular, therefore, to define science by the form of its statements—universal law-like statements, preferably expressed in the language of mathematics. Thus Boyle's law (formulated by Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century) states that the pressure in a gas is inversely proportional to its volume if everything else remains constant. (4) If this seems too restrictive a criterion, science can be defined instead by its methodology. Science is thus associated with a particular set of procedures, usually experimental, for exploring nature's secrets and confirming or disconfirming theories about her behavior. A claim is therefore scientific if and only if it has an experimental foundation. (5) Such a definition, in turn, yields easily to attempts to define science by its epistemological status (that is, the kind of warrant its claims are held to possess) or even the tenacity with which its practitioners hold its doctrines. Thus Bertrand Russell has argued that "it is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition." Science on this view is a privileged way of knowing and justifying one's knowledge. (6) In many contexts science is defined not by its methodology or epistemological status, but by its content. Science is thus a particular set of beliefs about nature—more or less the current teachings of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and the like. By this test, belief in alchemy, astrology, and parapsychology is unscientific. (7) The terms "science" and "scientific" are often applied to any procedure or belief characterized by rigor, precision, or objectivity. Sherlock Holmes, according to this usage, adopted a scientific approach to the investigation of crime. (8) And finally, "science" and "scientific" are often simply employed as general terms of approval—epithets that we attach to whatever we wish to applaud. What this brief and incomplete survey demonstrates is something that should perhaps have been obvious from the beginning—namely, that many words (including most of the interesting ones) have multiple meanings, varying with the particular context of usage. These meanings are sometimes mutually compatible and complementary, sometimes not. Moreover, it seems futile to attempt to eliminate diversity of usage. After all, language is not a set of rules grounded in the nature of the universe, but a set of conventions adopted by a group of people and every meaning of the term "science" discussed above is a convention accepted by a sizeable community, which is unlikely to relinquish its favored usage without a fight. Or to put the point in a slightly different way, lexicography must be pursued as a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, art. We must acknowledge, therefore, the term "science" has diverse meanings, each of them legitimate. Even if we could find a definition of modern science that would satisfy everybody, the historian would still face a difficult problem. If the historian of science were to investigate past practices and beliefs only insofar as those practices and beliefs resemble modern science, the result would be a distorted picture. Distortion would be inevitable because science has changed in content, form, method, and function; and therefore the historian would not be responding to the past as it existed, but looking at the past through a grid that does not exactly fit. If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take the past for what it was. And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science. We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry. This is the only suitable way of understanding how we became what we are. | — David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 | Indexes/22 |
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