THE DESIRE FOR STABILITY MAKES US SEE MORE OF IT THAN THERE IS
In my adolescence I found myself having Jewish religious education. I soon had doubts which led me to philosophy, and philosophy led me to science; by the time I entered the university I decided to study physics in order to have a better understanding in philosophy.
Unfortunately for me, it is no longer customary to teach physics to budding philosophers, but rather to budding nuclear engineers and their like. I must have been quite a pest to my teachers. When they told me that I should postpone arguing for a few years and do my homework first, I retorted saying that I had heard the same proposal from my teachers in theology. When they said that the theories they were teaching me fit the facts admirably well, I said this had been the case with theories of earlier generations which are by now superseded. When they said all that physical theory has to do is fit the facts well, I asked what is so great about such a fitting, which they found all too infuriating to answer. When they said science was useful, I said I had not come to a university to master a trade; when they said it was beautiful, I said they meant it was arbitrary and not necessarily true; and I wanted nothing short of the truth. The fact remained. I wanted some metaphysical enlightenment, they wanted tools of a very respectable trade. I was cantankerous, and they wanted to be left in peace; and as long as they were doing their job reasonably well they felt entitled to it. My main teacher was a quantum physicist of some moderate reputation in the world, and his lack of interest in Einstein’s work, his readiness to pay all the lip-service to complementarity as long as he could ignore it - all this shocked me. One remark I heard in a lecture on applied mathematics impressed me greatly: “One revolution per one generation or two is quite enough; we do not want too many of them.” I had to leave my professors in peace, then, as indeed they were entitled to, but I remained cantankerous. I found soon, what I knew all the time, that others were even less willing to argue than my physics teachers. I soon found that I had to debate with various people, often students like myself and young academics, the pros and cons of debate. I should mention here Shmuel Ettinger, at least, from whom I have learned to contrast dialectics with apologetics. This is only one point, yet a surprisingly important and useful one.But before going further into views on dialectics, I wish to stress one point. The main reason why I have later changed myattitude towards my teachers in science is not so much the realization that I had made much too great a demand on them in a rather adolescent fashion. The main reason why I have learned to appreciate them is that they did not try to satisfy my demand in an adolescent fashion. In the last century people like myself, who asked questions similar to mine, received an answer which entirely or almost entirely satisfied all or most of them. My teachers lived in the post-Einsteinian era. They did not know how to answer me, but they knew what answer will not do, and openly explained why. This seems to me rather of some significance. All too often we ignore Einstein’s impact. Arthur Koestler, for instance, who is a remarkably sensitive intellectual journalist, has said recently that Einstein did not yet make an impact on man’s changing view of the universe, because relativity still is not public knowledge. Koestler’s oversight is the oversight of the best intellectual public which he has observed with his keen journalistic eye. Like so many philosophers and scientists, he has overlooked the fact that so much of the new science was made possible when the old attitude towards science had been demolished by the Einsteinian revolution, and, this demolition surely is public knowledge. Consider, for instance, E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science. This work contains a critical assessment of Newton’s theories, the metaphysical ideas on which they depend, the tyrannical authority Newton had on his followers, etc.
It is hard to imagine that Burtt could have written all this prior to the Einsteinian revolution. Yet Burtt was not aware of such an indebtedness, though he is quite willing to admit is as a possibility.4 Whatever problems we have, even if they are not new, Einstein has made both the answers to them and the debates and arguments concerning these answers, quite new. This point may not be very striking; indeed, I think it will be taken for granted and agreed upon without much ado. Yet the fact remains that though Einstein’s impact in this way will be acknowledged without much effort, Einstein’s influence on the general outlook of the 20th-century man (other than his contributions to atomic warfare) is still viewed as minute. This may be due to mere oversight or to a simple inconsistency. But it need not be; one may explain this as the outcome of viewing debates and arguments, criticism and clearing the grounds, as of secondary importance in intellectual life, as mere preliminaries to the real work. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is not only that Einstein has had a wide and great influence. In addition, by having had such a wide influence, he has shown how important argument is; but on this score his impact is not as large as it might be. And so, in my view, the Einsteinian revolution may be pushed further and have a much greater general impact than it has had hitherto. But, if this needs saying, my view here is very much of a minority opinion. The majority, even amongst men of science, are still ambivalent, at best; even those who enjoy debate and argument, often tend to view such activity with some measure of distaste, as something not very useful and below a gentleman’s station.The best way to win an argument, goes a popular nasty quip, is to start with the right position. What position is right, of course, we do not know or else we would not start a debate; when we know, we all agree about what we know. Debate, I heard since my childhood, is the symptom of ignorance, and this is why politicians have debates but scientists agree amongst themselves.
I hated this idea before I could say why; later I came to think it is the same idea as: clean people do not have to take a bath, only dirty people bathe regularly. And so my counter-move was to show that politicians seldom debate, even though they often give the impression that they do, by conjuring imaginary opponents and knocking them down with great ease. It was harder to show that men of science constantly dissent, and debate, and examine, and cross-examine, and re-examine - always ready to consider. There is, to be sure, as great a semblance of agreement amongst scientists as there is a semblance of debate amongst politicians. And this semblance of agreement deserves some examination, both in order to show that it is not correct and in order to explain its persistence. That it is not correct is not so easy to show; the task looks rather baffling. It was with me somewhat approaching a religious conviction. I drew great encouragement from the little I knew about Einstein, and from remarks of his which expressed the critical attitude which I was after. But much remained baffling and obscure. Much of this obscurity and bafflement is presented in an impressive story which I have recently heard from I. B. Cohen. It is about a classics professor and a philosophy professor strolling on the lawns of a small American college - I forget the names - one lovely afternoon a generation ago. “You may find me old-fashioned”, said the classics professor, “but I confess, I do not believe the germ theory of disease.” “Old-fashioned, my dear fellow, not at all”, answered the philosophy professor, “I wouldn’t call it old- fashioned, but plainly ignorant.”The jibe at the classics professor, which for all I know was well deserved, and the fact that a philosopher delivered it, raise this lovely anecdote to the level of a fable: like a fable in Christian mythology it comes to drive home an obvious truth: in science there are no fashions, only ignorance can be eccentric in any way.
But take the germ theory of disease; ask yourself what the definite article in the descriptive phrase “the germ theory of disease” stands for. If you conduct an empirical research, as I have done, you will find that most people misuse the definite article here. (Philosophers have tried hard to find misuses of words, but they centred attention on such recondite words as ‘exist’ and ‘God’; the misuse of the definite article, and of rather common names, so well- known to school teachers, has thus far escaped their notice.) You will find that with very few exceptions, when people use definite articles and proper names of scientific ideas, they are not able to identify what they so describe or name. I find this fact most amazing and disturbing, and I wish to report it as an empirical finding, and as one to which I was led by the influence of Popper’s philosophy. For a time I was an avid student of the interpretations of quantum theory. I finally gave up hope to understand the literature, being convinced that there is no body of knowledge as the one labeled by so many physicists by the title ‘classical physics’, that no one knows what the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is, and that there is no proof answering the description ‘von Neumann’s proof’. What even such a common name as ‘Newtonian mechanics’ stands for is vague. It is fairly clearly - though not too clearly - identifiable, if the class of people who use it has a fairly homogeneous background. To some of the better contemporary authors, this expression denotes the theory discussed in the early part of Einstein’s classical The Meaning of Relativity; to others, including my own teachers, something much more similar to what was presented by the late 19th-century Cartesians - Thomson and Tait-and positivists - Mach and Poincare; to most historians of science, the phrase denotes the ideas expounded by Laplace, and to erudite historians of science, the ideas expounded by Newton. But let us return to the germ theory of disease. If you take a sample of people who use it, laymen, professional scientists, or medicine men, you will get answers vague or divergent. The germ theory of disease was originated by Pasteur and contested by Koch. In case you are interested, Koch won in the debate, but his ideas have meanwhile been superseded too. No one in his senses believes the germ theory of disease today: we all are all too familiar with the fact that some diseases are caused by very different factors - genetic factors, nutritional factors, malfunctioning of internal organs, whether caused by virus infection or not - and some diseases defy all etiology (cancer being one of these puzzles). So what do people mean when they profess belief in that theory? At best they mean to express their opinion that syphilis and malaria, for instance, and sometimes pneumonia, are caused by germs. If they are ignorant enough, they also think that diphtheria too is caused by germs (rather than by the toxin that certain germs secrete) or even that rabies is caused by germs (rather than by viruses). Anyhow, I think it is a fact that all well-informed people agree that malaria is caused by germs and scurvy by malnutrition of sorts (vitamin C deficiency). Does this not prove that in science some agreement exists?It does. And, indeed, there is some agreement almost anywhere - between scientists and even between politicians, between friends and even between foes; but the stress on agreement between scientists as opposed to the disagreement between politicians, the claim that agreement in science is good and argument is a symptom of ignorance - this claim is very far from having been established. We may ask: why do people agree so much? Why in particular do scientists agree? Why do they agree so widely on what are the facts of the matter and on what are the theories the facts support and on our reasonableness in accepting supported theories?
Let us pause here for a moment and reflect on what I have presented thus far. What I have tried to offer is an admittedly subjective picture of the intellectual background in which I found myself as a student, and which has made my encounter with Popper’s philosophy, and with the man himself, the most crucial influence on my outlook. But let there be no mistake: my own experiences of before having met Popper are here cast so very much in a Popperian frame as to be highly suspect historical records. It is a well-known fact that we see facts from given perspectives, so that any different perspective makes us see the same facts differently; but as I have not tried to set a historical record here, I need not bother about historiographic problems here. What I have tried to show, is how different the situation looks from different starting-points. Most philosophers take it for granted that science is agreement and agreement is good; their problem is to justify a principle which they think is responsible for the agreement. My own starting-point was so very different. Science had disappointed me, but I refused to give up interest in it. Consequently I was prepared to doubt most of what scientists say about science. Consequently, my problem was how to explain unanimity in science. How do you explain the fact that one Albert Einstein, a lad in his mid-twenties, unsuccessful in his search for an academic career, could upset all well- established scientific doctrine and become the new leader of science? The traditional answer is, of course, that his doctrines were empirically proven. So were the doctrines of Newton. Can we never learn from experience? Is science a Latin-American dictatorship?
Popper’s theory of science as disagreement rather than as agreement may offer new answers to such questions. I shall now very briefly sketch his theory, say how much of the situation it explains, and how we may push the explanation further.
iv. popper’s theory presents science as