ScienceWeek

ON THE DANGERS OF INTELLECTUAL SPECTACLES

There is only one way of seeing one's own spectacles clearly: that is, to take them off. It is impossible to focus both on them and through them at the same time. A similar difficulty attaches to the fundamental concepts of science. We see the world through them to such an extent that we forget what it would be like without them: our very commitment to them tends to blind us to other possibilities. Yet a proper sense of the growth and development of our ideas will come only if we are prepared to unthink them. We are justified in placing the trust in them that we do only because -- and to the extant that -- they have proved their worth in competition with alternatives: if earlier men had never thought in other terms than we do, than we ourselves would simply be carrying on a traditional habit. We shall understand the merits of our own ideas, instead of taking them for granted, only if we are prepared to look at these alternatives on their own terms and recognize why they failed.

The invisibility of our intellectual spectacles may have a further effect. It may lead us to misunderstand, not only the specific ideas and doctrines put forward by earlier thinkers, but also the general character of their enquiries. This effect is easily illustrated: for example, from the scornful third-hand accounts one reads of intellectual history in the days before the Scientific Revolution, questions are asked: "What were thinking men up to in all those years? And why did they shut their eyes to the merits of the experimental method? How could they have hoped to get genuine scientific results from mere argument, without leaving their studies, unless it was through a mixture of prejudice, muddle-headedness, and metaphysics?"

Such questions as these often criticize the "pre-scientists" for /failing/ to do things that it was not their business to attempt. For those earlier enquiries in natural philosophy that are swept aside as "pre-scientific" were in fact indispensable. Their effect was to clear the ground and collect many of the girders and timbers out of which the structure of science as we know it was in due course constructed.

Adapted from: Stephen Toulmin: Foresight and Understanding: An Enquiry into the Aims of Science. Harper and Row 1963, p.101. More information: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061305642/scienceweek