Science, Common Sense, and Society
Wrrnotm doubt the chief reason why science has become a subject for common curiosity is the unsettling effect it has upon such vital processes as modes of production and means of transport, and thus upon social behaviour in general. Recently many writers have impressed on the world that science is also effecting a more fundamental change than is inherent in this social revolution, a change in methods. of thought. They. point out that " common sense " is mis- leading and spurious, and that what is given to the senses as real can be proved by science to be altogether illusory. ('hairs, for example, are proton-electron aggregates, and the lay mind is being taught that this is a phenomenon of greater interest to the scientist than the fact that chairs are things on which to sit. Such writing has created a belief that the central drive of science is the destruction of the common-sense world, and its replacement by one in which general and unchangeable laws operate on a something that never has been experienced and never will be experienced. iThis vision may be grotesque, but, if popular sales are a gauge, t is a welcome one. There seem to be two immediate reasons for this. First, it is a vision aesthetically satisfying, for it breathlessly outstrips the imagination of ordinary people whose lives are tied to all the vulgarities provided by science —to tramcars, to armaments, to tinned foodstuffs. Secondly, it is a vision which leaves in its trail the comforting impression that science is probing to the ultimates in Nature, and that when formulated these ultimates are almost identical with those of such religious beliefs as have given comfort to humanity for countless generations. Expositions by idealistic scientists are thus favourably handicapped for acceptance by the lay world.
Such interpretations of the general nature of scientific activity, however, are being strongly opposed by writers far more concerned to give a true description of scientific endeavour than to . argue on questions concerning reality and the meaning of life. Professor Levy is already well known among these writers, and in his new book he discusses the scientific movement so clearly that he cannot fail to drive home to the general reader and to the scientific worker the fallacies which, on a scientific level, he claims are inherent in idealistic explanations of science.
He points out—what is fundamental to his outlook— that science is an ever-changing aspect of a developing society. The primary aim of the scientist is to discover by observation and by experiment a form of empirical reality about the universe of which he is part ; and his method is to isolate from a wider and less definite context, constituting the changing matrix of the Uni- Verse, more and more precise " isolates," to use the term by which Professor Levy refers to the systems of things or events which form the subject of any particular scientific enquiry. The field of enquiry must, so far as possible, be neutral and controlled, independent of occurrences which are not meant to be included in it. Out of the enquiry emerges a " law " relating the various parts of the system. When it is found that such laws are not precisely fulfilled —and in science there is no last word—" more and more Of the environment is allowed within the precincts of the isolated system," so that " each neutral system becomes wider- than that preceding it, and laws of wider and wider generality emerge."
Constant change like this allows science no last word, and its backyards " are littered with discarded Principles, des-
troyed by a single fact." Its absolutes are changeable, and its only criteria of validity are that its laws must work, that they should be valid for purposes of prediction, and that the route by which they have been found should be such that it can be followed by other social beings. It is the science of an ever-changing and ever-expanding world, and its limits are set by the limits of man's endurance in the universe.
But however wide its generalities and its laws, science
can never depart from the general common-sense changing universe with which it begins. It can provide new knowledge about our immediate patch of that universe ; it cannot build up a new universe in terms of mathematical symbols. When scholars retreat into the thickets of subjective and objective realism, they are no longer scientists. When they begin to question the direction of time, they folget that its direction is primarily given in the order of events imposed on us all, and that on this basis they devised experi- ments, searching for isolated systems. Their doubt was born by granting to the absolute isolate, a figment of the scientist's imagination, a prior reality to the empirical isolate. When they question whether aggregating together " isolates " would reconstitute the original and unique whole, of which these isolates are parts, they forget that each part, too, is a unique system, but unique only " in the fact of what it is observed to possess, in the unique manner in which it operates, and in no other sense." The parts are chosen for study because of the observed fact that they are parts of a more embracing isolate. That is their fundamental " property." If their own characteristics do not seem to explain those of the wider isolate, so much the worse for them, as Professor Levy writes. After all the finest isolates of science, electrons, protons, genes, are not necessarily its final isolates. But from the scientific point of view it is in any case the whole which primarily describes the parts, and not the parts which describe the whole. Holism and emergent evolution are from this point of view philosophies based upon a misinterpretation of scientific method.
In argument of this kind Professor Levy whittles away the platform on which stand writers like Eddington and Jeans, Smuts and J. S. Haldane. But the exposition of the experimental standpoint is not the only purpose the author had in mind when he set out to write his book. It was one of his aims to sketch the background against which the scientific movement has to be seen. Briefly he indicates the essential links which hold science to its place in society ; the breadth of vision demanded of the scientific worker who by the integration of knowledge also wishes to become a student of " social culture " ; the kind of determinism on which all scientists effectively rely and on which depend modern civilization and modern culture.
But this part of Professor Levy's project is carried out all too briefly. Since science is a movement in society, he bad to isolate it from its background when explaining it, and almost the whole book is devoted to the exposition of the isolate. But Professor Levy clearly shows that the scientific movement cannot be completely isolated from its context, which in large part determines the spheres of its activity. It is the interrelation that still csvaits the application of the same penetrating light which he has directed on the scientific movement itself. Perhaps he himself will, in another work, treat of this aspect of the problem. Meanwhile his present book is a searching challenge to those who maintain that the idealistic approach offers a satisfactory interpretation of the findings of science.
S. ZL'CKEItMAN.
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