> Is science deterministic and
> impersonal? Or does it also involve contingency and the personal, such
> that our state of scientific knowledge would be different if certain
> scientists had not been born?
The positivist concept of science does appear to me to focus overmuch
on the discovery of "truth", to the neglect of the individuals and
the community that are taking things forward. Part of the
fascination of scientific biography is that we are brought face to
face with real people, grappling with issues in a way that is
intensely human.
In reality. the agenda for science today is not the "quest for
truth", but whether funding agencies can be persuaded to give
priority to particular proposals. The decisions often relate to
industrial involvement, economic benefit, public policy. etc.
Del Ratzsch has a couple of excellent chapters on the philosophy of
science in his book: "The Battle of beginnings" (IVP, 1996). This is
a quote that I agree with and which seems relevant to this exchange:
"So our perceptions, theorising and evaluations of theories all seem
to have an inescapable human tinge to them. And given the significant
interflow among those various components, human tinges in any one of
the areas have at least the potential to seep into other areas as
well. Thus we cannot eliminate humanness from science (as
inductivists wanted to do), nor can we quarantine that humanness in
one small corner of science (as hypothetico-deductivists wanted to
do). Science is done by humans, and it cannot escape what is
inescapably human. Our science is limited to humanly available
concepts, humanly available data, humanly available patterns of
reasoning, humanly shaped notions of understanding and explanation,
and humanly structured pictures of what the world must be like. How
could it be otherwise? Science seems to have a serious and incurable
case of the humans". (page 129).
Best regards,
David J. Tyler.