Scientific knowledge

The purpose of science is to obtain scientific knowledge. That is to say, scientific work is directed towards acquiring a special type of information, either for immediate practical use or for publication in textbooks, encyclopaedias, learned journals, etc., under various headings such as physics, chemistry or biology. A typical item of scientific information might be, say: ‘The benzene molecule contains six carbon atoms arranged in a ring’. This is clearly somewhat different from the sort of knowledge usually to be found in novels, law reports, sermons, or political manifestos – for example, that ‘it is love that makes the world go round’, or ‘the greater the truth, the greater the libel’.

But what are the distinguishing features of scientific knowledge as such? This traditional philosophical question is important because it may decisively affect our actions to know that a particular piece of information is ‘scientifically’ warranted (cf. §16.3). It is also one of the key questions about science as a human activity, for it asks about the fundamental objectives of research.

Towards a social psychology of science

Science is what scientists do. The scientific life is notorious for the demands it makes on the mind and on the spirit. The social psychology of science is thus an essential metascientific discipline, along with philosophy, sociology, politics and history.

The traditional academic ethos (§6.3) lays great stress on the individuality of scientists, and thus emphasizes the distinctive mental and emotional traits that tend to separate them from the mass of people and from one another. The naïve history of science is a chronicle of heroic or saintly personalities who have triumphed through their innate abilities and virtues. More seriously and soberly, psychologists have tried to delineate or discover the personality types that are characteristic of scientists in general, or of scientists in particular disciplines, such as theoretical physics or experimental biology.

Unfortunately, these investigations have not proved very conclusive. Mature scientists, and even science students, are not, presumably, ‘just like everybody else’, but careful empirical research on their personality traits has not provided reliable insights that are superior to everyday ‘folk’ understanding of these matters.

Science as an instrument

Up to this point, we have been looking at science from the ‘inside’: now we take an entirely different standpoint, and consider science from the ‘outside’. The external sociology of science considers it simply as a social institution, embedded in society, and performing certain functions for society as a whole, on a par with other institutions associated with law, religion, political authority and so on. For the moment we shall treat science as a ‘black box’, whose inner workings are of no significance except to ensure that it can perform the functions assigned to it. Eventually (§12.5) we shall reopen this box, and reconsider the internal sociology and philosophy of science from an externalist point of view.

Science is valued by ordinary citizens, by powerful individuals such as politicians and company directors, and by corporate bodies such as commercial firms and government agencies, primarily for its use. It is fostered mainly as a resource to be applied to the furtherance of individual and/or collective activities whose goals are not specifically the advancement of knowledge. This conception of science as essentially an instrument for achieving a variety of goals other than the acquisition of knowledge is so widespread and so dominant in our society that it overshadows all other conceptions of its social function.

Costing the benefits

The purpose of R & D is to provide benefits. But how should the value of these benefits be assessed? It is all very well to say that research on insecticides has resulted in improved crops of bananas, but was the improvement worth the cost of the research? Research costs real money and its outcome is very uncertain. It might have been more profitable to invest the money in a new plantation. Without some rough estimate of the relative balance of costs and benefits, the use of science as an instrument of policy (§12.1) is based solely on blind faith.

The inputs to R & D can easily be quantified in money terms. The cost of employing researchers and providing them with suitable apparatus, buildings, technical staff, telephones, travel to conferences, and so on would normally appear as line items in the financial accounts of the corporation or agency supporting the laboratory.

Government support for science

There is nothing new about State support for science. From the seventeenth century onwards, scientists have been directly employed as government officials to chart the land, the seas and the skies, to check weights, measures and coins, to supervise the manufacture of dangerous chemicals and explosives and many other technical jobs. The industrialization of society as a whole has merely enlarged the responsibilities of every government for the welfare and security of its citizens, and correspondingly increased the scale and sophistication of the scientific work that has to be done by the government apparatus (§10.6).

Government patronage of ‘pure’ science also goes back a long way into history. In Britain, the Royal Society and other learned societies were institutionally independent of the State, but were sufficiently close to the centres of authority to extract occasional subsidies for major scientific projects (§10.5). The absolute monarchies of France, Prussia and Russia went much further, by setting up national academies whose members were paid a personal stipend to do full-time research (§10.3). Whatever the level of financial patronage it received, pure science was valued by the State as a cultural ornament, a sign of national superiority, and as a potential source of economic and military benefit.

Epistemology

Scientific knowledge takes a variety of forms, from the most obvious descriptive facts to the most abstruse and speculative theories. Yet it is often treated as a single body of information, of peculiarly high credibility. The fundamental concern of epistemology is how much of this knowledge can be considered true, or how firmly it should be believed.

The history of science should dispel any notion that all science is true. There are innumerable cases of elementary errors of observation which were long held to be facts.

Science and the sociology of knowledge

The Fleck–Kuhn account of scientific change (§7.5) suggests a more radical approach to our whole subject. Instead of starting with a philosophical perspective (chapters 2 and 3), which emphasizes the cognitive aspects of science, we should perhaps have taken a sociological point of view from the beginning. In the past decade, academic metascience has been greatly influenced by a research programme which looks on science as primarily a social institution. This programme stems from the more general discipline of the sociology of knowledge, which used to be concerned mainly with the place of social-science knowledge in the culture of a particular type of society, but which is now being turned on the natural sciences and their associated technologies.

A programme of this kind is clearly implicit in what has already been said in previous chapters. The historical course of development in any field of science has a significant social component. The rate of scientific change, for example, is strongly influenced by the disciplinary structure of the scientific community, and not simply by the scientific ideas that happen to be current.

Different aspects of science

What is ‘Science’? Our whole approach to the subject of this book depends on how we might be tempted to answer this question. But it is really much too grand a question to be answered in a few words. Conventional definitions of science tend to emphasize quite different features, depending upon the point of view. Each of the metascientific disciplines – the history of science, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, the psychology of creativity, the economics of research, and so on – seems to concentrate upon a different aspect of the subject, often with quite different policy implications.

For example, if science is defined as ‘a means of solving problems’, this emphasizes its instrumental aspect. Science is thus viewed as closely connected with technology, and hence an appropriate subject for economic and political study. The implication that this instrument should be used wisely and well puts it into the open arena of social conflict.

Another definition of science – as ‘organized knowledge’ – emphasizes its archival aspect. Information about natural phenomena is acquired by research, organized into coherent theoretical schemes, and published in books and journals.

‘R & D’ in ‘S & T’

Science and Technology – perhaps one should say, ‘the sciences and their associated technologies’ – together constitute a major social institution based upon the systematic generation, accumulation and utilization of knowledge. This knowledge is very diverse. Some of it is directly useful; some of it appears totally divorced from human affairs. Some of it is symbolically codified in the form of experimental data, theoretical formulae, solutions to standard problems, therapeutic protocols and engineering blueprints: some of it is essentially tacit, and only becomes manifest through expert technical work (§15.4). Much of the knowledge that is put to use has simply accumulated in the scientific and technical archives, over a period of many years. As in the past, a considerable amount of formal technological knowledge is continually being produced in day-to-day practice; in clinical medicine, for example, any novel course of treatment may be considered something of an experiment.

The immense social dynamism of modern ‘S & T’ comes from its aggressive employment of the social device of research – that is to say, systematic activity undertaken to obtain information or understanding that goes beyond established knowledge or accepted practice.