If we want to understand how science works, it seems that the first thing
we need to do is work out what exactly we are trying to explain. Where
does science begin and end? Which kinds of activity count as “science”?
Unfortunately this is not something we can settle in advance. There is a
lot of disagreement about what counts as science, and these disagreements
are connected to all the other issues discussed in this book.
There is consensus about some central cases. People often think of
physics as the purest example of science. Certainly physics has had a heroic
history and a central role in the development of modern science. Molecular
biology, however, is probably the science that has developed most rapidly
and impressively over the past fifty years or so.
These seem to be central examples of science, though even here we en-counter hints of controversy. A few have suggested that theoretical physics
is becoming less “scientific” than it used to be, as it is evolving into an esoteric,
mathematical model–building exercise that has little contact with
the real world (Horgan 1996). And molecular biology has recently been
acquiring connections with business and industry that make it, in the eyes
of some, a less exemplary science than it once was. Still, examples like
these give us a natural starting point. The work done by physicists and molecular
biologists when they test hypotheses is science. And playing a game
of basketball, no matter how well one plays, is not doing science. But in the
area between these clear cases, disagreement reigns.
At one time the classification of economics and psychology as sciences
was controversial. Those fields have now settled into a scientific status, at
least within the United States and similar countries. (Economics retains an
amusing qualifier; it is often called “the dismal science,” a phrase due to
Thomas Carlyle.) There is still a much-debated border region, however,
and at the moment this includes areas like anthropology and archaeology.
At Stanford University, where I teach, this kind of debate was one element
of a process in which the Department of Anthropology split into two separate
departments. Is anthropology, the general study of humankind, a
fully scientific discipline that should be closely linked to biology, or is it a
more “interpretive” discipline that should be more closely connected to the
humanities?
The existence of this gray area should not be surprising, because in contemporary
society the word “science” is a loaded and rhetorically powerful
one. People will often find it a useful tactic to describe work in a borderline
area as “scientific” or as “unscientific.” Some will call a field scientific
to suggest that it uses rigorous methods and hence delivers results we
should trust. Less commonly, but occasionally, a person might call an investigation
scientific in order to say something negative about it—to suggest
that it is dehumanizing, perhaps. (The term “scientistic” is more often
used when a negative impression is to be conveyed.) Because the words
“science” and “scientific” have these rhetorical uses, we should not be surprised
that people constantly argue back and forth about which kinds of
intellectual work count as science.
The history of the term “science” is also relevant here. The current uses
of the words “science” and “scientist” developed quite recently. The word
“science” is derived from the Latin word “scientia.” In the ancient, medieval,
and early modern world, “scientia” referred to the results of logical
demonstrations that revealed general and necessary truths. Scientia could be
gained in various fields, but the kind of proof involved was what we would now mostly associate with mathematics and geometry. Around the seventeenth
century, when modern science began its rise, the fields that we would
now call science were more usually called “natural philosophy” (physics,
astronomy, and other inquiries into the causes of things) or “natural history”
(botany, zoology, and other descriptions of the contents of the world).
Over time, the term “science” came to be used for work with closer links to
observation and experiment, and the association between science and an
ideal of conclusive proof receded. The current senses of the term “science”
and the associated word “scientist” are products of the nineteenth century.
Given the rhetorical load carried by the word “science,” we should not
expect to be able to lay down, here in chapter 1, an agreed-on list of what
is included in science and what is not. For now we will have to let the gray
area remain gray.
A further complication comes from the fact that philosophical (and
other) theories differ a lot in how broadly they conceive of science. Some
writers use terms like “science” or “scientific” for any work that assesses
ideas and solves problems in a way guided by observational evidence. Science
is seen as something found in all human cultures, even though the
word is a Western invention. But there are also views that construe “science”
more narrowly, seeing it as a cultural phenomenon that is localized
in space and time. For views of this kind, it was only the Scientific Revolution
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe that gave us science
in the full sense. Before that, we find the initial “roots” or precursors
of science in ancient Greece, some contributions from the Arab world and
from the Scholastic tradition in the late Middle Ages, but not much else. So
this is a view in which science is treated as a special social institution with
a definite history. Science is something that descends from specific people
and places, and especially from a key collection of Europeans, including
Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, who all lived
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
To set things up this way is to see science as unlike the kinds of investigation
and knowledge that routinely go along with farming, architecture,
and other kinds of technology. So a view like this need not claim that
people in nonscientific cultures must be ignorant or stupid; the idea is that
in order to understand science, we need to distinguish it from other kinds
of investigation of the world. And we need to work out how one approach
to knowledge developed by a small group of Europeans turned out to have
such spectacular consequences for humanity.
As we move from theory to theory in this book, we will find some people
construing science broadly, others narrowly, and others in a way that lies in
between. But this does not stop us from outlining, in advance, what kind of understanding we would eventually like to have. However we choose to
use the word “science,” in the end we should try to develop both
1. a general understanding of how humans gain knowledge of the world around
them and
2. an understanding of what makes the work descended from the Scientific Revolution
different from other kinds of investigation of the world.
We will move back and forth between these two kinds of questions throughout
the book.
Before leaving this topic, there is one other possibility that should be
mentioned. How confident should we be that all the work we call “science,”
even in the narrower sense described above, has that much in common?
One of the hazards of philosophy is the temptation to come up with
theories that are too broad and sweeping. “Theories of science” need to be
scrutinized with this problem in mind