Extract From: Scheffler, I. (1967/1982). "Objectivity Under Attack" (pp. 1-19). In Science and Subjectivity. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill.

A FUNDAMENTAL FEATURE of science is its ideal of objectivity, an ideal that subjects all scientific statements to the test of independent and impartial criteria, recognizing no authority of persons in the realm of cognition. The claimant to scientific knowledge is responsible for what he says, acknowledging the relevance of considerations beyond his wish or advocacy to the judgment of his assertions. In assertion he is not simply expressing himself but making a claim; he is trying to meet independent standards, to satisfy factual requirements whose fulfillment cannot be guaranteed in advance.

To propound one's beliefs in a scientific spirit is to acknowledge that they may turn out wrong under continued examination, that they may fail to sustain themselves critically in an enlarged experience. It is, in effect, to conceive one's self of here and now as linked through potential converse with a community of others, whose differences of location or opinion yet allow a common discourse and access to a shared world. It is accordingly to lay oneself open to criticism from any quarter and to acquire an impersonal regard for the judgments of others; for what matters is not [p. 2] who they are, but whether they properly voice the import of controlling standards. Assertions that purport to be scientific are, in sum, held subject to control by reference to independent checks.

Commitment to fair controls over assertion is the basis of the scientific attitude of impartiality and detachment; indeed one might say that it constitutes this attitude. For impartiality and detachment are not to be thought of as substantive qualities of the scientist's personality or the style of his thought; scientists are as variegated in these respects as any other group of people. Scientific habits of mind are compatible with passionate advocacy, strong faith, intuitive conjecture, and imaginative speculation. What is central is the acknowledgment of general controls to which one's dearest beliefs are ultimately subject. These controls, embodied in and transmitted by the institutions of science, represent the fundamental rules of its game. To devise fair controls for new ranges of assertion, and to guarantee the fairness of existing controls in the old, constitute the rationale of these rules. The cold and aloof scientist is, then, a myth.

It must be emphasized that the function of scientific controls is to channel critique and facilitated evaluation rather than to generate discoveries by routine. Control provides, in short, no mechanical substitute for ideas; there are no substitutes for ideas. The late Hans Reichenbach [1938] drew a sharp distinction between the "context of discovery" and the "context of justification,"[1] and he was right to do so. For the mechanical scientist is also a myth.

Now, the ideal of objectivity, as thus far described, characterizes not only the scientist, but also the historian, the philosopher, the mathematician, the man of affairs -insofar as all make cognitive claims in a rational spirit. A parallel ideal is relevant for the moral [(a.k.a., ethical)] person as well. The ideal of objectivity is, indeed, closely tied to the general notion of rationality, which is theoretically applicable to both the cognitive and the moral spheres. In both spheres, we honor demands for relevant reasons and acknowledge control by principle. In both, we suppose a commitment to general rules capable of running [p. 3] against one's wishes in any particular case. In neither sphere is personal authority decisive; as S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters [(1959)] have put it,

The procedural rules of science lay it down... that hypotheses must be decided on by looking at the evidence, not by appealing to a man. There are also, and can be, no rules to decide who will be the originators of scientific theories.

In a similar way... a rule cannot be a moral one if it is to be accepted just because someone has laid it down or made a decision between competing alternatives. Reasons must be given for it, not originators or umpires produced. Of course, in both enterprises provisional authorities can be consulted. But there are usually good reasons for this choice and their pronouncements are never to be regarded as final just because they have made them. In science and morality there are no appointed judges or policemen.[2]

There is thus no ground for restricting the applicability of the ideal of objectivity to de facto science, as contrasted, for example, with history, philosophy, or human affairs.

Nevertheless, de facto science articulates, in a self-conscious and methodologically explicit manner, the demands of objectivity over a staggering range of issues of natural fact, subjecting these issues continuously to the joint tests of theoretical coherence and observational fidelity. "It takes its starting points outside the mind in nature," writes C. C. Gillispie [(1960)], "and winnows observations of events which it gathers under concepts, to be expressed mathematically if possible and tested experimentally by their success in predicting new events and suggesting new concepts."[3] This it does in a logically deliberate and progressively more general manner, thereby providing us with a comprehensive model of the ideal of objectivity itself, stretching our earlier conceptions of its potentialities, and pointing the way to new and as yet undreamed of embodiments in a variety of realms.

What I am saying may be put summarily as follows: Current science is continuous with other areas of life, and shares with them [p. 4] the distinctive features of the rational quest. However, in institutionalizing this quest so as to subject an ever wider domain of claims to refined and systematic test, science has given us a new appreciation of reason itself. Since reason is, moreover, a moral as well as an intellectual notion, we have thereby been given also a new and enlarged vision of the moral standpoint -of responsibility in belief, embodied not only in a firm commitment to impartial principles by which one's own assertions are to be measured, but in a further commitment to making those principles ever more comprehensive and rigorous. Thus, though science has certainly provided us with new and critically important knowledge of man's surroundings and capacities, such enlightenment far from exhausts its human significance. A major aspect of such significance has been the moral import of science: its dynamic articulation of the impulse to responsible belief, and its suggestion of the hope of an increased rationality and responsibility in all realms of conduct and thought.

Such moral import has surely been too little appreciated. Yet it is, I think, true to say that the main twentieth-century scientific philosophies, in their rejection of post-Kantian speculative idealism, all celebrated this moral aspect of science in their varying idioms. Realism to begin with, counterposed the simple stubbornness of perceived particulars to the attempt to spin a metaphysical yarn that would tell the tale of the universe, the latter attempt being fundamentally impatient with humble truths and hence irresponsible with regard to the Truth. The idealistic metaphysic, which construed the world as essentially mental, seemed to realists a piece of egotism founded on wishful thinking, and made possible only by the idealist's high-handedness with detailed realities independent of the will.

Pragmatism emphasized not the brute hardness of things transparently evident to consciousness, but rather the control of an organism's conceptions by its actions and their connected consequences in experience. It demanded that speculative abstractions be rejected as meaningless unless they could be reconstrued as predicting differential sensible outcomes of specified operations. It insisted, further, that truths acquired their warrant through publicly verifiable anticipations of the course of experience, contingent upon [p. 5] human transformations of the environment. To propound as true a belief protected from the hard test of experience flowing out of action is, from the pragmatist's standpoint, willful self-assertion or self-deception, and only secondarily irresponsible in dissipating the power to remedy avoidable evils and to render more lovely the scene of human life.

Logical positivism, finally, stressed the special place of language, logic, and system in mediating the control of our beliefs by observed phenomena. For the logical positivist, statements are cognitively meaningful if, and only if, they are verifiable -if, and only if, that is to say, it is clear from the language of these statements how observations might conceivably make a difference to their warrant. The observational import of a statement need not, of course, be borne on its face, but may accrue to it indirectly, through appropriate logical links with other relevant statements. However, a statement which lacks even indirect observational bearing can, for the positivist, have no cognitive meaning at all. To assert such a statement is irresponsible; it is to put forward for acceptance what one could never, even conceivably, have any experiential reason for holding true.

The cultural storm raised by positivism stemmed from its purported negativism, from its relegation of metaphysics, poetry, religion, and ethics to the limbo of the cognitively meaningless. What went largely unnoticed in the general indignation was the underlying moral impulse of positivism, the conviction that our assertions impose upon us the responsibility to satisfy relevant independent controls. The unity of science doctrine, urged by positivists, had, I should suggest, a similar moral motivation: to affirm the responsibilities of assertion no matter what the subject matter, to grant no holidays from such responsibilities for the humanities, politics, or the social sciences in particular, despite their strong capacities for arousing emotion and stimulating partisanship.

These twentieth-century scientific philosophies all had their special problems, to be sure. Realism, for example, had particular difficulty in accounting for errors and illusions -that is to say, for all those cases in which the stubbornness of particulars is not a sign of truth but rather a mask of falsehood. It seemed able to accommodate [p. 6] error only by admitting mediate ideational processes to separate realities from illusions, thus diluting its forthright appeal to the brute being of things as grasped in awareness. Pragmatism, in stressing from the beginning such mediate ideational processes construed in terms of the organism's biography of action and experience, ran the opposite risk -that of losing altogether the hard reality of independent things, and the simple vision of simple truths concerning them. Finally, logical positivism found the formulation of precise criteria of meaning to be a tantalizing business: set the criteria too high and you exclude perfectly respectable areas of natural science; set them too low and you include pseudo-science and superstition. The ironic course of positivism was, in fact, one of progressive liberalization to the point where virtually nothing could be denied cognitive meaning by reference to its criteria of observational control; its acid negativism had turned to water.

But if these philosophies all faced grave problems in the development of their several views of objective control over assertion, they never wavered on the fact of such control, nor on its central significance for the understanding of scientific knowledge and procedure. And they found post-Kantian idealism wanting precisely because it failed to give adequate acknowledgment to such control, and, consequently, failed to provide an adequate interpretation of the actuality of science. The general points were well put by C. I. Lewis:

If the mind were the only condition of the thing as know, then the nature of the mind being specified, objects in general would be completely determined.

Idealism has often boggled over the fact that it could not deduce the particular content of experience and knowledge. The questions, "Why do I have just this experience? Why do I find just this reality and no other?" must have an answer.... The post-Kantian idealists... have either neglected this problem or, like Fichte, have said that it is no part of the business of philosophy.... [p. 7]

Unless the content of knowledge is recognized to have a condition independent of the mind, the peculiar significance of knowledge is likely to be lost. For the purpose of knowledge is to be true to something which is beyond it. Its intent is to be governed and dictated to in certain respects. It is a real act with a real purpose because it seeks something which... it may miss. If knowledge had no condition independent of the knowing act, would this be so?[4]

....

The insistence on independent and controlling conditions which define standards of responsibilities for the "knowing act" unifies, indeed, the main scientifically oriented philosophies of the present century. Despite their individual variations, these philosophies have been inspired by the moral example of science in the realm of belief; in their several ways they have exalted the ideal of responsible control over assertion. In so doing, they have fed into and strengthened a common philosophy of science with independent roots as well, as philosophy which has attained the status of a standard view, largely shared by reflective scientists, technical philosophers, and the educated public alike, and laying great emphasis upon the objective features of scientific thought. It is to the prospects of this standard view that I wish mainly to address myself, for I believe that it is coming increasingly under fundamental attack.

The philosophical scene is, in this respect, undergoing a radical change indeed. For the standard view has not only been widely entrenched and long taken for granted; it has also, as we have seen, enjoyed the staunch support of the dominant scientifically oriented philosophies of our day. The current attacks thus challenge not only a firm set of habitual attitudes, but also the very opposition between science and speculative idealism, from which the scientifically minded philosophies have sprung. The attacks threaten further the [p. 8] underlying moral motivation of these philosophies, their upholding of the ideal of responsibility in the sphere of belief as against willfulness, authoritarianism, and inertia. The issues are fundamental, indeed more fundamental than is generally realized, precisely because a powerful moral vision had implicitly been called into question. Nor is there any reasonable alternative to a critical confrontation of these issues, in the knowledge that enormously much is at stake. We must now seriously ask ourselves whether scientific objectivity is not, after all, an illusion, whether we have not, after all, been fundamentally mistaken in supposing empirical conceptions capable of responsible control by logic and experience. The question before us becomes in short: How, if at all, is scientific objectivity possible?

In approaching this question, we shall begin by elaborating what has above been described as the "standard view" of science. Fundamentally, as we have seen, this view affirms the objectivity of science; more specifically, it understands science to be a systematic public enterprise, controlled by logic and by empirical fact, whose purpose it is to formulate the truth about the natural world. The truth primarily sought is general, expressed in laws of nature, which tell us what is always and everywhere the case. Observation, however, supplies the particular empirical facts, the hard phenomenal data which our lawlike hypotheses strive to encompass, and for which it is the ultimate purpose of such hypotheses to account.

Laws or general hypotheses may be ordered in a hierarchy of increasing generality of scope, but a basic distinction is, in any event, to be drawn between observational or experimental laws on the one hand, and theoretical laws on the other. Generalizing upon the data accessible to the senses, observational laws are couched in the language of observation and make reference to perceived things and processes. Theoretical laws, by contrast, are expressed in a more abstract idiom and typically postulate unobservable elements and functions; unlike observational laws, they cannot be subjected to the test of direct inspection or experiment. Their function is not to generalize observed phenomena, but rather to explain the laws which themselves generalize the phenomena. This they do by yielding such laws as deductive consequences of their own abstract postulations. [p. 9] They are, of course, indirectly testable by observation, for should one of their lawlike consequences break down on the level of experiment, such failure would count against them. However, they serve primarily to help relate diverse observational laws suitably within a comprehensive deductive scheme, and they are evaluated not only by their empirical yield but also by their simplicity, their intellectual familiarity their accessibility to preferred models, and their manageability. They are, to be sure, also applied in the explanation of particular occurrences and in the solution of problems of prediction and control.

Any two theories of the same domain of phenomena may be compared to see if either is superior in accounting for the relevant empirical facts or if equivalent on this score, if either surpasses the other in simplicity or convenience, etc. A hypothesis that does not itself clash with experience may yet be given up in favor of an alternative hypothesis that explains more facts or is simpler or easier to handle. A given law may be absorbed into another, more general law by a process of reduction, through which it is shown to follow deductively from the more general law under plausible auxiliary assumptions.

When one hypothesis is superseded by another, the genuine facts it has purported to account for are not inevitably lost; they are typically passed on to its successor, which conserved them as it reaches out to embrace additional facts. Thus it is that science can be cumulative at the observational or experimental level, despite its lack of cumulativeness at the theoretical level; it strives always, and through varying theories, to save the phenomena while adding to them. And in the case of reduction, a reduced law is itself conserved, in toto, as a special consequence of its more general successor. Throughout the apparent flux of changing scientific beliefs, then, there is a solid growth of knowledge which represents progress in empirical understanding. Underlying historical changes of theory, there is, moreover, a constancy of logic and method, which unifies each scientific age with that which preceded it and with that which is yet to follow.

Such constancy comprises not merely the canons of formal deduction, [p.10] but also those criteria by which hypotheses are confronted with the test of experience and subjected to comparative evaluation. We do not, surely, have explicit and general formulations of such criteria at the present time. But they are embodied clearly enough in scientific practice to enable communication and agreement in a wide variety of specific cases. Such communication and consensus indicate that there is a codifiable methodology underlying the conduct of the scientific enterprise. It is a methodology by which beliefs are objectively evaluated and exchanged, rather than an organon of discovery or theoretical invention. Yet it is this methodology which makes possible the cumulative growth of tested scientific knowledge as a public possession.

Now the public character of scientific procedure is not simply a matter of the free interchange of ideas. It is intimately related to the critical testing of beliefs, in the following way: If I put forward a hypothesis in scientific spirit, I suppose from the outset that I may be wrong, by independent tests to which I am prepared to submit my proposal. I suppose, in other words, that my present hypothesis is not to be prejudged as correct during the process of testing; I thus acknowledge that disagreement with respect to my proposal is no bar to further communication, nor indeed to agreement on the test itself. Indeed, from the latter sort of communication and agreement, consensus on my proposal may eventually grow. Further, insofar as testing involves an appeal to facts disclosed in common observation of things, I suppose that the same things can be observed from different perspectives, and consensus on observation reached without presupposing agreement on relevant theory. In sum, I acknowledge that possibility of common discourse with those who may differ with me in opinion, and assume shared access to an observed world with others who may be differently located or otherwise constituted than I. The methodological publicity of science involves the assumption that differing persons may yet talk intelligibly to one another, that they may observe together the phenomena bearing critically on issues which divide them, and that they may thus join in the testing of disputed conceptions in an effort to seek resolution.

And, indeed, it seems undeniable that resolution often occurs. In [p. 11] the free community of scientific discourse, untrammeled by doctrinal bounds, convergence of opinion yet takes place. It seems, in fact, often to be conserved and progressively expanded, at least on the experimental level, if not on the higher level of theoretical ideas. With no attempt to shape opinion to advance specifications, with free access to evidence and no prior limitation on the community of discourse, opinion nevertheless forms and crystallizes. Does this not provide reasonable grounds for assuming that reality itself, that is to say, a world independent of human wish and will, progressively constrains our scientific beliefs? An interpretation of this sort has been colorfully expressed by Charles Peirce [(1878)]:

Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.[5]

The reality thus revealed under the methodological publicity of scientific method is, moreover, a reality in which we are ourselves but limited natural elements. Our wishes and perceptions have not made this reality, but have sprung up within it as functions of organic development in a small corner of the universe of nature. Objectivity is not only, as we have seen, a fundamental feature of scientific method; the ontological vision in which it culminates is the vision of a universe of objects with independent existences and careers, within which scientific inquiry represents but one region of connected happening and striving. In short, for the standard view I [p. 12] have been describing, objectivity is the end, as well as the beginning, of wisdom.

Recent attacks against this standard view have been launched from various directions. They have varied also in scope and precision, and their larger strategic import has not always been evident, even to the combatants themselves. Yet, taken together, these attacks add up, in my opinion, to a massive threat to the very possibility of objective science. Uncoordinated as they are, they have already subtly altered the balance of philosophical forces, exposing to danger the strongest positions of the objectivist viewpoint.

In dealing with this general situation, I shall divide the field into three main sectors, embracing, respectively, issues of observation, of meaning, and of scientific change....

Consider then, first, the idea that observation supplies us with hard data independent of our conceptions and assertions, data by which, indeed, our conceptions and assertions are controlled. C. I. Lewis [(1929/1956)] has expressed the point in terms of "the given," but the underlying notion is quite widespread and is embedded in the standard view. "The given" he writes, "... is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive."[6] Conception, thought, and interest may produce varying interpretations of the given, but they cannot create or change it. Strip away all interpretation contributed by the mind and you will find underneath a somewhat which is what it is as presented to sense, and which must be accepted as such, though estimates of its import may differ. Interpretation [p. 13] must, in short be interpretation of something, and that something must itself be independent of interpretation if the interpretive process is not to collapse into arbitrariness.

Now it is clear that such a view promises the advantage of providing an external standard for the testing and evaluation of our thought, but is it a tenable view, and can it fulfill the promise? Can we, to begin with accept the supposition that an unalterable observable somewhat underlies all conceptualization, interpretation, and valuation in experience? .... [p.14]....

Now consider that, on the standard view, people with different theoretical beliefs may observe the same things; shared access to a common world is taken for granted. Yet, unless this common world is to be construed as pure formless given, hence too fluid to yield shareable objects, it must be conceived, on the contrary, as structured by particular categories of thought.... A small child, for example, sees a hard, table-shaped object resistant to his push, and capable of supporting small items placed on it, whereas a physicist sees a peculiar swarm of electrons obeying complex physical laws. More importantly, scientists with different theories categorize the objects of their observation in correspondingly different ways, and must therefore, in a critical sense, be said to see different things.

N. R. Hanson has suggested a view of this sort in certain passages of his Patterns of Discovery [(1958)], in which he stresses the dependence of seeing upon theory, and argues against the notion that theoretical differences in a given domain must be attributed simply to differing interpretations of the same observational data. "There is a sense, then," he writes, "in which seeing is a 'theory-laden' undertaking. Observation of x is shaped by prior knowledge of x."[7] The visitor to the physicist's laboratory "must learn some physics before he can see what the physicist sees.... The infant and the layman can see: they are not blind. But they cannot see what the physicist sees; they are blind to what he sees."[8] To suppose "that Kepler and Tycho see the same thing at dawn just because their eyes are similarly [p. 15] affected is an elementary mistake. There is a difference between a physical state and a visual experience."[9] Controversy in scientific research is too deep-seated, argues Hanson, to be explained simply by appeal to differing interpretations of the same data; divisions at the theoretical level cut down through the level of data as well. "It is the sense in which Tycho and Kepler do not observe the same thing," he writes, "which must be grasped if one is to understand disagreements within microphysics."[10]

Such a line of thought seems again, however, from the perspective of the standard view, to lead to paradox. For if seeing is indeed theory-laden in the sense described, then proponents of two different theories cannot observe the same things in an effort to resolve their differences; they share no neutral observations capable of deciding between them. To judge one theory as superior to the other by appeal to observation is always doomed, therefor, to beg the very question at issue. We may call this the paradox of common observation. It has the effect of isolating each scientist within an observed world consonant with his theoretical beliefs.

It cannot be denied, of course, that scientists who differ theoretically may yet share a common observational or experimental vocabulary. This is indeed the basis for the differentiation made, in the standard view, between observational and theoretical levels of scientific discourse. It might thus be argued that even if theoretical differences prevent observation of common things yet such differences allow for a shared discourse based on communication of common meanings. But can this be so? To adopt a new theory is, after all, to employ it not only in rethinking the phenomena, but also in reassigning the roles of relevant descriptive terms and in recasting familiar definitions and explanations. Even where there is no explicit revision of the latter sorts, a newly adopted theory alters the background of assumptions by reference to which every relevant term must be located. A new theory thus, in effect, provides new senses for old observational terms by incorporating them within a new framework of assumptions and meanings.

Thomas S. Kuhn [(1962)], discussing the possible derivation of Newtonian [p. 16] from relativistic dynamics argues that such derivation is, strictly speaking, impossible, for the meanings of critical parameters such as space, time and mass undergo change under alteration of theory, so that the ostensibly Newtonian formulas derived from relativity theory are actually Einsteinian correlates of such formulas, with differing meaning....[11]

Such conceptual displacement, if it is conceived as affecting observational as well as theoretical notions, means that the ostensible sharing of observational terms by theoretical opponents is really a delusion. There are perhaps common sounds but no common meanings. There can thus be no intelligible converse between scientists of differing theoretical persuasions. To understand another's apparently observational or experimental references we must first enter into his theoretical thought-world.

It seems to follow, further that we cannot literally speak of alternative [p. 17] theories of the same domain, nor of comparing these theories to see which gives a better account of the empirical facts within this domain. For there is not, and there cannot be, a neutral account of the domain in question... Nor can one law really be absorbed into another through a process of reduction, nor observational content passed on from one theory to its successor, for crucial meaning changes have occurred in the process of transfer. We have here another paradox the paradox of common language, and its upshot is that there can be no real community of science in any sense approximating that of the standard view, no comparison of theories with respect to their observational content, no reduction of one theory to another, and no cumulative growth of knowledge, at least in the standard sense. The scientist is now effectively isolated within his own system of meanings as well as within his own universe of observed things.

The breakdown of observational community and of community of meaning, and the consequent rejection of cumulativeness seem to remove all sense from the notion of a rational progression of scientific viewpoints from age to age. If contemporary theoretical alternatives cannot be compared and evaluated with respect to their factual accuracy and comprehensiveness neither can succeeding theoretical alternatives be thus compared and evaluated. The genesis of a new theory cannot be backed up by an established methodology of justification, such as is presupposed by the standard view; indeed the very distinction between justification and discovery breaks down as well.

.... Kuhn thus argues, on the basis of historical examples, that before the proponents of differing scientific paradigms "can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience." [p. 18] [12] ....[13] And Michael Polanyi [(1958/1962)] emphasizing the "intuition of rationality in nature,"[14] argues, on the basis of his interpretation of scientific history, that knowledge in science is personal committing us "passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality. Of this responsibility we cannot divest ourselves by setting up objective criteria of verifiability -or falsifiability, or testability, or what you will."[15] The general conclusion to which we appear to be driven is that adoption of a new scientific theory is an intuitive or mystical affair, a matter for psychological description primarily, rather than for logical and methodological codification.

The categories of logic and methodology indeed do give way to those of psychology, and even of politics and religion, in certain recent historical accounts of science. Kuhn thus speaks of the "gestalt switch"[16] and Polanyi of "passionate personal, human appraisals of theories."[17] Kuhn has also employed a political vocabulary in his descriptions: he speaks of crisis and revolutions, and of the victory which results in a rewriting of history so as to make progress seem inevitable. And we have already noted the reference to conversion; we now learn that converts to a new theory are made through persuasion, that the light is eventually seen, or, if not, that the new theory gains ascendancy when the opposing generation dies in the wilderness. ....[p. 19]....

Finally, with cumulativeness gone the concept of convergence of belief fails, and with it the Peircean notion of reality as progressively revealed through scientific advance. For there is no scientific advance by standard criteria only the rivalry of theoretical viewpoints and the replacement of some by others. Reality is gone as an independent factor; each viewpoint creates its own reality. Paradigms for Kuhn, are not only "constitutive of science"; there is a sense, he argues, "in which they are constitutive of nature as well."[19]

But now see how far we have come from the standard view. Independent and public controls are no more, communication has failed, the common universe of things is a delusion, reality itself is made by the scientist rather than discovered by him. In place of a community of rational men following objective procedures in the pursuit of truth we have a set of isolated monads within each of which belief forms without systematic constraints.

I cannot, myself, believe that this bleak picture, representing an extravagant idealism, is true. In fact, it seems to me a reductio ad absurdum of the reasonings from which it flows. But it is easier of course, to say this than to pinpoint the places at which these reasonings go astray. The latter task is what I shall undertake in the following three lectures. ....

[1]. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1938), chapter 1, sec. 1.

[2]. S. I. Benn and R. S. Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. 1959), p. 22.

[3] C. C. Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 10.

[4]. Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order, republication of first edition with corrections by the author (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,, 1956), pp. 189-192. First published, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929.

[5] Charles S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," Popular Science Monthly, XII (1878), 286-302. Reprinted in Charles S. Peirce, Essays in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Vincent Tomas. "The American Heritage Series" no. 17 (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1957) pp. 31-56; for the passage cited, see Tomas, pp. 53-54.

[6] Mind and the World Order, p. 52.

[7] Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge at the University Press, 1958), p. 19.

[8] Ibid., p. 17.

[9] Ibid., p. 8.

[10] Ibid., p. 18.

[11] Reprinted from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 101.

[12] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 149.

[13] Ibid., p. 77.

[14] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1958; revised edition, 1962), p. 16. Reissued, Harper Torchbook edition (New York and Evanston: Harper & Bros., 1964).

[15] Ibid., p. 64.

[16] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 149.

[17] Personal Knowledge p. 15.

[18] Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Tr. Frank Gaynor (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), pp. 33-34, cited in Kuhn, p. 150.

[19] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 109.