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Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing Subject

University of California Press

Taken in itself, each of the chapters that follow makes a more or less circumscribed point in its own way. They were not originally conceived in relation to one another, but their publication together offers an opportunity to rethink them as a coherent body of work, or at least as one facet of such a body of work. The best way of doing this is to say something of the project, in the Sartrean sense, out of which they arose.

Scientific Roots

My engagement with the philosophy of science goes back to readings of Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Alfred North Whitehead while I was still in school. The Jeans and Eddington were my father's; he wanted to understand the mysterious universe because it glorified Godor rather, I suspect (he was a humble man), he just wanted to feel how mysterious it was, thus savoring at once God's greatness and his own insignificance. He was impressionable, and continually awed by the dimensions of the atom (the nucleus as a pea in St. Paul's Cathedral) or the distance of the galaxies.

The effect of his sharing all this was that it became familiar to me and not very mysterious at all. I took physics in school, being initiated (which is, after all, the old sense of mystery) at the hands of a crusty and acerbic teacher whose name was S. V. Shingler. Two memories of Mr. Shingler stand out: first, his daily tirades in class about the hopeless stupidity of his pupils, and second, a more personal rebuke. In working

up some notes on fluid pressureone of the very first assignments in the fourth form perhaps (I must have been about thirteen)I ended with a flourish, writing the basic formula "p = f/a" in large letters in the middle of the notebook page and drawing a little box around it. It was a neat bit of work and I was proud of it. Mr. Shingler struck the formula through with his red pencil and made me redo the page. No physical expression, he said, was more or less important than any other; I would please make them all the same size. His tone as he administered this lesson was one of withering scorn mixed with genuine affection.

Thanks to the peculiarities of the British educational system I studied nothing formally except physics, mathematics, and a bit of chemistry between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. This coincidedsometimes to the detriment of academic workwith a period of personal struggle against a set of beliefs into which I had been indoctrinated since infancy by my parents, who belonged to a small and fanatical sect known as the Exclusive Brethren. The Brethren were always metaphorically writing things in large letters in the middles of pages: they hung great framed Biblical texts everywhere, making insistent claims on belief or action, and conducted their lives in an atmosphere of exaggerated fear and piety.

Physics seemed obvious from the beginning; religion became more and more dubious. Questions about belief, what it was and under what conditions it was justified, arose on both sides. Some of the claims of cosmologists and quantum theorists were every bit as implausible as those of theologians. But scientists were tentative where preachers were dogmatic, and it helped to remember that things didn't become truer because they were written large, oras I was to put it many years later, in a review of a fellow philosopher of sciencethat "hypotheticals do not turn into categoricals just because one shouts them at the top of one's lungs."1 Nothing in science had the canonical and sacrosanct status of religious belief; everything was provisional. Local observations, suitably specified, and rule-governed derivations from stated givenslike the formula for fluid pressurehad what I would now call apodictic certainty (which, Kant to the contrary notwithstanding, is not the same thing as necessary truth), but beyond that every step had to be argued. Extrapolations and hypotheses were all right, but only as long as one remembered that that was what they were.

Science, therefore, never had for me the megalomaniacal pretensions so many people claim for or attribute to it. It was certainly not a substitute for religionon the contrary, it was an antidote. The idea that science is just another kind of faith overlooks an essential difference between science and religion: as a scientist I might share with believers a kind of practical confidence in the stability of the everyday world,

but I rejected not merely as unnecessary but also as unworthy any commitment to an explanatory account of the origin or meaning of that world made simply for the sake of having something to believe, or for that matter any unwarranted extrapolation of the scientific account itself. As I came to see it, Newton's recommendation in his third Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy that locally encountered qualities should "be esteemed [emphasis added] the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever," subject always to the qualification in the fourth Rule ("till such time as other phaenomena occur"),2 only made sense, while on the other hand Laplace's postulation of "an intelligence . . . able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom"3 was just a bit of unwarranted melodrama.

At the same time science didn't seem, locally, to be more than a part of the story; it coexisted happily with the rest of life. Even if everything turned out to be explainable, that would not necessarily spoil its quality as experience. Eddington had been quite good on this point; I quote one of the relevant passages in chapter 22. So again, one of the things frequently held against science, one of the things that Whitehead himself had held against itthat it reduces reality to the mere hurrying of material, endlessly and meaninglessly, or words to that effectstruck me as based on a misunderstanding. To do Whitehead justice, what he was criticizing was the "scientific world-view" that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he seemed to think, as many people still think, that scientific work led more or less inevitably to this view, and that simply was not my experience.4

One other attitude to science that dates from this early period is that it has always seemed to me a great playground of ideas. I read science fiction more or less avidly, but even in everyday life there were all sorts of ways in which scientific knowledge could transform or deform the ordinary, thus rendering it more interesting. One juvenile example of this is from roughly the period of my apprenticeship with Mr. Shingler, though it belonged in the chemistry laboratory next door, which was presided over by Dr. Stubbs. The structural elegance of organic chemistry came just too late in the curriculum to convert me to the subject (chemistry up to that point had been rather a cookbook affair), but it fed a certain speculative bent. Hydrocarbons come in series of ascending complexity; for example, the series of acids goes from formic (H.COOH) to acetic (CH3 .COOH), then to propionic (C2 H5 .COOH), and so on. The alcohol series however begins with methyl (CH3 .OH) and continues with ethyl (C2 H5...