SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH CENTERS AROUND A FEW PROBLEMS
Since there are more scientific problems to be studied than researchers
to study them, a complete avoidance of overlap between projects is quite possible. The more the number of existing problems exceeds the number of researchers, the more one would expect the actual case to tend naturally toward the ideal of complete absence of duplication.
But the facts are quite otherwise. Here are two historical examples where numerous obvious problems have been ignored. Diffusion is a phenomenon with instances widespread in physical nature: river water rapidly mixes with the oceans’ waters, smoke with the atmosphere, salt with soup. Until the late eighteenth century no one paid any attention to this phenomenon and the scores of problems it raises. Priestley seems to be the first who studied it; Dalton concentrated on it for a while. Yet though Dalton’s study received great publicity, only a handful of thinkers worked on diffusion before the celebrated studies of Maxwell rendered it an integral part of physics. My second example is elasticity, which was left almost entirely unstudied between the days of Hooke and of Young but was studied more and more seriously in the nineteenth century, only to be relegated in the twentieth century to the borders of applied mathematics and technology.Whether concentration of intellectual power on a few problems is advantageous or a waste has hardly been studied because of misconceptions about science. Popper’s theory of science answers this question unambiguously: perfect division of scientific research work will quickly bring scientific progress to an end. This theory makes the ‘friendly-hostile cooperation’ between individuals crucial for progress. Some offer new ideas, some offer criticisms of these ideas, some offer alternatives to these ideas; if they all worked on different problems there could be no cooperation.
Robinson Crusoe would be unable to sustain the development of science, because of his limited capacity to criticize himself and thus to get out of the routine of his way of thinking.The existence of a variety of problems to be solved, and the fact that newcomers to science have a great variety of reasons which draw them to science, would by itself render science almost Crusonian. But by some process which has not yet been studied or even noticed, the more a person’s interest develops, the nearer it approaches the interest of other students of the same field. Somehow interests coordinate themselves. And my problem now is what is this means of coordination (though I shall not discuss here the way by which individuals learn to apply it).
Undoubtedly, there exists a variety of coordinating factors. New economic and political needs, new mathematical or experimental techniques, offer new avenues which are somitimes explored. Yet, by and large, there are minor and often secondary factors - secondary, because developments of techniques and of their fields of application often follow interests. By and large, widespread scientific interests may be shown to be connected with some metaphysical problem of the day. It is my contention that whatever the starting point of a person’s interest in a science, the more that person’s interest develops the closer it approaches the general interest, the interest which dominates the tradition in that science, and that this general interest springs from, and flows back to, metaphysics.
Most philosophers and historians of science would vehemently oppose this view. Descartes, as is well known, developed a philosophical theory in which metaphysics provides the framework for science. His ideas were greatly improved by Kant, but this was the last significant effort in this direction; for good reasons or bad Kant’s idea has been universally rejected. In this chapter I wish to rehabilitate metaphysics as a framework for science, but within the framework of Popper’s critical philosophy, with certain modifications, of course.
My view is this. Metaphysical theories are views about the nature of things (such as Faraday’s theory of the universe as a field of forces). Scientific theories and facts can be interpreted from different metaphysical viewpoints. For example, Newton’s theory of gravitation as action at a distance was interpreted by Faraday as an approximation to a (future) gravitational field theory. An interpretation may develop into a scientific theory (such as Einstein’s gravitational field theory) and the new scientific theory may be difficult to interpret from a competing metaphysical viewpoint. Metaphysical doctrines are not normally as critizeable as are scientific theories; there is usually no refutation, and hence no crucial experiment, in metaphysics. But something like a crucial experiment may occur in the following process. Two different metaphysical views offer two different interpretations of a body of known fact. Each of these interpretations is developed into a scientific theory, and one of the two scientific theories is defeated in a crucial experiment. The metaphysics behind the defeated scientific theory loses its interpretative power and is then abandoned. This is how some scientific problems are relevant to metaphysics; and as a rule it is the class of scientific problems that exhibit this relevance which is chosen to be studied.
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