THE IMAGE OF INDUCTIVE SCIENCE

The traditional religious agnosticism is usually coupled with a traditional scientific assurance. Again, I am making a broad and sweeping empirical observation. Let me, then, describe scientific assurance.

The mood, the inductive mood for short, is that of a self-sufficient intelligent agent. Self-sufficiency is a terrific feel, one which is described in many stories and ballades and plays and movies, from Robinson Crusoe to Citizen Kane. It has diverse components, it has diversity; but usually it contains the idea of self-assurance, of self-reliance, of self-confidence and, above all, of confidence and optimism. When C. P. Snow - now Lord Snow-described the scientific temperament, meaning the tempera­ment given to the inductive mood, he described it as optimistic, progressive, future-oriented. For Snow this will do; for us here it will not.

The specific thing to the inductive mood is the rational grounding of the self-reliant, optimistic mood. Anyone can be self-reliant and optimistic, say, by living in a fool’s paradise, by refusing to look far enough into the future to be able to forecast disasters and willing to try to take proper measure against them. Not so the optimist in his inductive mood: he is rational and his optimism is grounded in his rationality.

It does not matter much who should serve as an example, but I wish to take, for the sake of convenience, as my example, none other than Bertrand Russell, the author of “Free Man’s Worship”. Russell’s grim vision of Man was no mere abstraction. In his late Has Man A Future! Russell seriously considers the possibility that we shall destroy the earth and all its inhabitants. He does not express any optimism or hope - he pleads with us not to destroy. Even in his most inductivist and celebrated Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits he start by the image science has of man; trapped in a very narrow strip of barely livable and barely stable corner of the universe, most of which is utterly uninhabitable for Man; in a hostile universe we have to make do as best we can. Yet this making do, which is largely science and scientific technology, is based on induction, in the idea that science validates its theories and assures us - not absolutely but quite very probably - that our expectations based on our scientific knowledge will indeed come true.

The idea that science has no validity at all, that it offers no assurance whatsoever, is dismissed by Russell off-hand as too defeatist. In his pre­face to the new edition of Nicod’s classic book on induction Russell has one line on Popper’s view of science: it is defeatist and our duty is to try and do better than he.

Are Russell’s pessimism and optimism reconcilable? I think not. Be­fore we examine that we can ask, do we really need assurance? The answer is, alas, yes.

III.