READING NOTES January 7th Introduction No readings 1 2 January 9th Foundations of Science Readings Bowler and Morus Introduction See Blackboard for additional readings Bowler and Morus Chapter 1 Introduction Science Society and History We instinctively associate science with the modern world not with the past o Some of the great names familiar to the public evoke images that suggest that the advance of science has not been a smooth process of fact gathering There has always been controversy still controversy from Darwin s theory of evolution Historians often refer to the stories of the great discoveries as a form of Whig history a term borrowed from those British historians of the Whig or liberal party who retold the nation s history in terms of the inevitable triumph of their own political views o Nowadays any history that treats the past as a series of steppingstones towards the present and assumes the present is superior to the past is called Whig history The history of science has inevitably been sucked into the science wars since some of the ammunition used by those who attack science comes from the reevaluation of key areas where science has generated controversy in the past o Critics argue that the very foundations of scientific knowledge are contaminated by values o Science constructs a view of the world that sees it through tinted glasses so we should hardly be surprised when it turns out that what is offered to us as knowledge tends to reinforce the value system of the military industrial complex that funds it What we hope you will learn from this book is a willingness to see history as something more than a list of names and dates it is something that people argue about because the evidence can be interpreted in different ways and they care passionately about the interpretation they support The Origins of the History of Science o Something like the history of science in the modern tradition began to emerge in the eighteenth century this was the Age of Enlightenment Radical thinkers proclaimed the power of human reason to throw off ancient superstition and provide a better foundation for society Many of these Enlightenment thinkers were hostile to the Church which they saw as an agent for old social hierarchy derived from feudal times o Immanuel Kant and William Whewell believed that knowledge was not simply derived passively from the observation of nature it was imposed by the human mind via the theories we use to describe the world Whewell first coined the term scientist o Whewell more conservative than the Enlightenment thinkers in that he defended the possibility that the scientist might find phenomena that could only be explained as the result of divine intervention Would later refuse to allow a copy of Darwin s Origin of Species into the library at Trinity College Cambridge because it replaced divine miracle with natural evolution o To those who like Whewell retained the hope that science and religion could work in harmony the materialist program of the Enlightenment was a positive danger to science It encouraged scientists to abandon their objectivity in favor of the arrogant claim that the laws of nature could explain everything In the early twentieth century the legacy of the rationalist program was transformed in the world of Marxists such as J D Bernal who in is Social Function of Science 1939 called for a renewed commitment to use science for the good of all o The Marxists challenged the assumption that the rise of science represented the progress of human rationality For them science had emerged as a by product of the search for technical mastery over nature not a disinterested search for knowledge and the information it accumulated tended to reflect the interests of the society within which the scientist functioned o The aim of the Marxists was not to create a purely objective science but to reshape society so that the science that was done would benefit everyone not just the capitalists o It was around this time that the history of science began to achieve recognition as a distinct academic specialization There was supposed to be a clear distinction between the internal history of science which studied the intellectual factors involved in the development of theories and external history which looked at the wider implications of what was discovered The old idea of science as a process of fact gathering had been replaced by the hypo deductive method in which the scientist proposed hypotheses deduced testable consequences and then allowed experimental tests to determine whether the hypothesis should be rejected o This emphases on the scientist s willingess to test and if necessary refute hypotheses was carried even further by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery 1959 Need to establish a line of demarcation separating science from all other intellectual activities such as theology and philosophy The defining character of science was its reliance on falsifiability a scientific hypothesis is always framed in such a way as to maximize its exposure to experimental testing and potential refutation According to Popper religious believers philosophers and social analysts all evade this requirement by making their propositions so vague that they can explain almost anything and thus can never be refuted Science thus provides a unique form of knowledge about the world because its theories have all survived rigorous testing o Uncomfortable consequence of the hypothetico deductive method because no hypothesis can ever be proved to be true because no matter how many positive tests it survies there is still the possibility that the next one may refute The history of science is full of examples showing that a theory can be successful for decades or even centuries and then be exposed as false This means that our current theories too will eventually be refuted they can be accepted only provisionally as the best guides we have available at the moment o Science was objective in the sense that it exposed the weaknesses o The philosophy of science of its claims as quickly as possible and went on to devise something better creating ever more elaborate ideas about what scientists ought to do that were increasingly out of touch with how science really worked was becoming an armchair discipline o Thomas S Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962 argued that the replacement of theories is a much more complex affair than the orthodox or Popperian philosophies of