The nature of science - What science is - part three

THE NATURE OF SCIENCE - PART THREE

WHAT SCIENCE IS 

Looked at in this light the ideas of science wear a new aspect. We find that the importance of a scientific idea depends, frequently enough, upon its value rather than on its truth. This applies, e.g., to the concept of the reality of an external world or to the idea of causality. With both the question is not whether they are true or false, but whether they are valuable or valueless.

Planck's distinction between value and the truth of scientific ideas is not absolutely exclusive; truth, too, is a value, and in science it is the ultimate value. But there are other scientific values and they are not inconsistent with truth. If we distinguish between science as a product and science as a process, we can see that as a product-as a body of propositions about the world-what we value are answers, and we want them to be true. But as a process, what we value are questions and methods, with their attendant insights and new concepts. And the truth of the presuppositions on which questions are based may be irrelevant to the value of the questions themselves, or of the concepts that go with them. Here the chief values are those of stimulating and guiding further inquiry.

The cumulative character of science becomes clearer in contrast with art, which does not necessarily improve. We know more about art and artistic technique than artists of the past did, but our poets, playwrights, sculptors, and musicians are not superior to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Beach. The reasons are simple. Every artist, no matter what he has learned from his masters, really stars from scratch. He may not only refuse to build on past artistic achievements-which make up no single body of work anyway-but he may have to reject much of the past for the sake of his own vision.

The scientific novice, however, starts his thinking with the conclusions of past science. Although he may correct some of it, he accepts most of it and goes further. And he enters a laboratory complete with instruments which his predecessors did not have, instruments making new a more exact observation and measurement possible. The artist has no such aid from instruments, for a typewriter will write no better sonnets than a quill.

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