SCIENCE AND THE QUEST FOR REALITY MAIN TRENDS OF THE MODERN WORLD General Editors: Robert Jackall and Arthur J. Vidich Propaganda Edited by Robert Jackal! Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Times Edited by Philip Kasinitz Social Movements: Critiques, Concepts, Case-Studies Edited by Stanford M. Lyman Science and the Quest for Reality Edited by Alfred I. Tauber The New Middle Classes: Life-Styles, Status Claims and Political Orientations Edited by Arthur J. Vidich Science and the Quest for Reality Edited by Alfred I. Tauber Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science Boston University Selection, editorial matter, Introduction and Epilogue © Alfred I. Tauber 1997 Series Preface© Robert Jackall and Arthur J. Viddich, 1995, 1997 For individual chapters, please see the Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-64633-5 ISBN 978-1-349-25249-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25249-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 109876 5 4 3 2 I 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 For Joel, Dylan, Benjamin and Hana Contents Series Preface by £..,;-l,ert Jackal/ and Arthur J. Vulich ix Preface xiii Acknowledgements XV Notes on the Contributors xvii Introduction Alfred l Tauber PART I SCIENCE AND ITS WORLD VIEW The Origins of Modern Science 53 Alfred North Whitehead 2 The Age of the World Picture 70 Martin Heidegger PART II THE PROBLEM OF SCIENTIFIC REALISM 3 The Strange World of the Quantum 91 P. CW. Davies and Julien Brown 4 The Development of Philosophical Ideas since Descartes in Comparison with the New Situation in QuantumTheory 125 J#rner Heisenberg 5 Explaining the Success of Science: Beyond Epistemic Realism and Relativism 137 Larry Laudan 6 Experimentation and Scientific Realism 162 Ian Hacking 7 The Paradox of Scientific Subjectivity 182 Evelyn Fox Keller PART III THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC CHANGE 8 Theories of Scientific Change 203 Robert Richards vii viii Contents 9 The Road Since Structure 231 Thomas Kuhn PART IV THE BOUNDARIES OF SCIENCE 10 Four Models for the Dynamics of Science 249 Michel Calion 11 Boundaries of Science 293 Thomas F. Gieryn PART V SCIENCE AND VALUES 12 Ethical Problems in Using Science in the Regulatory Process 335 Nicholas A. Ashford and Karin A. Gregory 13 Ethics and Science 347 Robert S. Cohen 14 Beyond the FactNalue Dichotomy 363 Hilary Putnam 15 Darwin and Philosophy 370 Marjorie Grene 16 Science as a Vocation 382 Max weber Epilogue Alfred L Tauber 395 Index Series Preface Main Trends of the Modern World is a series of books analyzing the main trends and the social psychology of our times. Each volume in the series brings together readings from social analysts who first identi­ fied a decisive institutional trend and from writers who explore its so­ cial and psychological effects in contemporary society. The series works in the classical tradition of social theory. In this view, theory is the historically informed framing of intellectual prob­ lems about concrete social issues and the resolution of those problems through the analysis of empirical data. Theory is not, therefore, the study of the history of ideas about society, nor the abstract, ahistorical modeling of social realities, nor, as in some quarters, pure speculation often of an ideological sort unchecked by empirical reality. Theory is meaningful only when it illuminates the specific features, origins, and animating impetus of particular institutions, showing how these insti­ tutions shape experience and are linked to the social order as a whole. Social analysts such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen and George Herbert Mead, whose works we now consider classics, never consciously set out to construct paradigms, models or abstract theories of society. In­ stead they investigated concrete social phenomena such as the decline of feudal society and the emergence of industrial capitalism, the growth of bureaucracy, the consequences of the accelerating specializa­ tion of labor, the significance of religion in a scientific and secular age, the formation of self and the moral foundations of modern society, and the on-going rationalization of modern life. The continuing reso­ nance of their ideas suggests the firmness of their grasp of deep-rooted structural trends in Western industrial society. Later European and American social thinkers, deeply indebted though they were to the intellectual frameworks produced by the re­ markable men who preceded them, faced a social order marked by in­ creasing disarray, one that required fresh intellectual approaches. The social, cultural and intellectual watershed was, of course, the Great War and its aftermath. The world's first total war ravaged a whole gen­ eration ofyouth. In Europe it sowed the seeds of revolution, militarism, totalitarianism, fascism and state socialism; in both Europe and Amer­ ica it signaled the age of mass propaganda. On both continents the aftermath of the war brought economic and political turmoil, cultural ix X Series Preface frenzies, widespread disenchantment and disillusionment, and social movements of every hue and description that led eventually to the con­ vulsions of the Second World War. These later social thinkers grappled with issues such as: • The deepening bureaucratization of all social spheres and the ascen­ dance of the new middle classes. • The collapse of old religious theodicies that once gave meaning to life and the emergence of complex social psychologies of individuals and masses in a rationalized world • The riddles posed by modern art and culture. • The emergence of mass communications and,propaganda as well as the manufacture of cultural dreamworlds of various sorts. • War, militarism and the advent of totalitarianism, fascism and state socialism. • The deepening irrational consequences and moral implications of the thoroughgoing rationalization of all life spheres. Emil Lederer, Hans Speier, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Burke, Ro­ bert Maciver, Harold Lasswell, Walter Lippmann, Robert Park, W.I. Thomas, Florian Znaniecki, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Blumer and Hans H. Gerth are only a few of the men and women who carried forward the theoretical attitude of the great classical thinkers in the course of working on the pressing issues of their own day. In this tradition, social theory means confronting head-on the social realities of one's own times, trying to explain both the main structural drift of institutions as well as the social psychologies of individuals, groups and classes. What then are the major structural trends and individual experi­ ences of our own epoch? Four major trends come immediately to mind, each with profound ramifications for individuals. We pose these as groups of research problems. BUREAUCRACY AS THE ORGANIZATIONAL FORM OF MODERNITY • What are the social and psychological consequences of living and working in a society dominated by mass administered bureaucratic structures? How do mass bureaucratic structures affect the private lives of the men and women exposed to their influences? Series Preface xi • What is the structure and meaning of work in a bureaucratic so­ ciety? In particular, how does bureaucracy shape moral conscious­ ness? What are the organizational roots of the collapse of traditional notions of accountability in our society? • What is the relationship between leaders and followers in a society dominated by a bureaucratic ethos? What are the changing roles of intellectuals, whether in the academy or public life, in defining, legit­ imating, challenging or serving the social order? THE TECHNOLOGIES OF MASS COMMUNICATION AND THE MANAGEMENT OF MASS SOCIETY • What role do public relations, advertising and bureaucratized social research play in shaping the public opinions and private attitudes of the masses? • What is the relationship between individuals' direct life experiences (with, for example, family, friends, occupations, sex and marriage) and the definitions that the mass media suggest for these individual experiences? What illusions and myths now sustain the social order? What are the ascendant forms of this-worldly salvation in our time? • What are the different origins, dynamics and consequences of mod­ ern political, social and cultural mass movements with their alterna­ tive visions of justice and morality? • What social, economic and cultural trends have made many great metropolises, once the epitomes of civilization and still the centers and symbols of modern life, into new wildernesses? THE ON-GOING SOCIAL lRANSFORMATIONS OF CAPITALISM