The Changing Faces of Reality

I. The Changing Character of Physical Reality

We live in a world of change, and nowhere is that more pronounced than in the sciences. Indeed, a textbook unrevised for two or three years is practically useless in most fields, and a laboratory with ten-year-old equipment is a museum. But most scientists are quick to point out that some things in science are far more secure—the periodic table, the laws of thermodynamics, relativity, the genetic code, biological evolution—and that we are steadily building a foundation of unchanging fact from which a clear picture of physical reality is emerging.

Not everyone agrees with this expectation, however, even within the scientific community. In fact, among the growing group of scientists interested in the philosophical implications of science, it has become apparent that we can no longer talk about scientific concepts and even mechanisms as though they were literal descriptions of objective reality.

A. NAIVE TO CRITICAL REALISM

In his book Intimations of Reality, Arthur Peacocke tells us that from about 1920 until 1970 science was viewed as an "essentially logical enterprise" through which the external world could be exhaustively described. Peacocke quotes Mary Hesse's version of the earlier view in Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science:

Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observations. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.

Mary Hesse goes on to explain that the developments of the past two decades have made this description appear exceedingly naive. Indeed, every part of this account has been brought into question. A forerunner in this critique of science is Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1970, proposed a new interpretation of the history of science. Kuhn argues that science goes through periods of normality during which accepted paradigms—broad conceptual frameworks—are employed and applied, and periods of revolution in which these paradigms are shattered, and replaced by new ones. The implications of this picture for our understanding of physical reality are far-reaching. If this be true of science, there seems little hope that the "hidden explanatory mechanisms of the world" can be discovered. A simple convergence to a unique scientific truth seems highly unlikely.

Following Kuhn, a new emphasis was placed on the sociological factors influencing the development of science, an analysis of which turned out to be as complicated as the scientists themselves. As Arthur Peacocke describes it:

Science came to be seen as a continuous social enterprise, and the rise and fall of theories and the use and replacement of concepts as involving a complex of personal, social, intellectual, and cultural interactions that often determined whether a theory was accepted or rejected. Theories are constructed, it was argued, in terms of the prevailing "world view" of the scientists involved: so to understand them one must understand the relevant world view. A new emphasis was therefore placed on the history of science, especially the sociological factors influencing its development. Thus a new area was opened up for the application of the expanding enterprise of the sociology of knowledge in general and of scientific knowledge in particular. However, it turns out that the "world view" of the scientist is an exceedingly complex and elusive entity—even more so when a community of scientists is involved.

Some sociologists of science concluded that the physical world has little to do with the conclusions arrived at by the scientific community. In essence, the products of science are social constructions like any other products of culture.

This extreme view finds many critics in and out of the scientific community. One of the most effective spokesmen for scientific reality is philosopher Ernan McMullin, who has argued for uniqueness in scientific truth gathering. He points out that even though science is a social product, the social factors are limited by the unique corrective character of scientific activity. The continuous filtering and sifting that go on in the course of experimental collaboration and scientific interaction and publication lead to a progressive elimination of distortion. McMullin has also commented on the "fertility" of scientific theories in further support of their realistic status. A good scientific theory in his view is able to predict novel phenomena and new directions. It has what he calls "logical resources." It also has another resource, a subtle capacity to suggest modifications when predictions fail, thereby providing a creative move for the scientist. In this respect McMullin compares the scientific theory or model with the poet's metaphor, which he describes as follows:

The poet uses a metaphor not just as decoration but as a means of expressing a complex thought. A good metaphor has its own sort of precision, as any poet will tell you. It can lead the mind in ways that literal language cannot. The poet who is developing a metaphor is led by suggestion, not by implication; the reader of the poem queries the metaphor and searches among its many resonances for the ones that seem best to bear insight. The simplistic "man is a wolf" examples of metaphor have misled philosophers into supposing that what is going on in metaphor is a comparison between two already partly understood things. The only challenge then would be to decide in what respect the analogy holds. In the more complex metaphors of modern poetry, something much more interesting is happening. The metaphor is helping to illuminate something that is not well understood in advance, perhaps, some aspect of human life that we find genuinely puzzling or frightening or mysterious. The manner in which such metaphors work is by tentative suggestion. The minds of poet and reader alike are actively engaged in creating.

The comparison of the creativity of scientific theory and poetic metaphor brings to mind the special contribution that scientist-philosopher Michael Polanyi has made to our appreciation of the belief system of the scientist. To raise the question of belief might seem to provide one more salient argument for the social scientists, but Polanyi's analysis arrives at the astounding...