Table of Contents

1. What Science Is from The Proper Study of Mankind, 1956

2.

http://www.towson.edu/~sallen/311/StuartChase.html

from Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow-Leavis Controversy, Daniel Cornelius, ed. (1964)

Ways of Knowing

The selections in this first section of Part III mainly concern science and the arts as modes of knowledge. In the first essay Stuart Chase explains what science is and what it does. The other spokesmen for science, John R. Baker and Bertrand Russell, discuss the intrinsic values of science and in doing so tell us much about the ways of scientific thinking. Both insist that usefulness and material value are by no means the only or most significant values of science. They point to intrinsic elements: to the optimism and the cumulative character of scientific thought (elements they deny the arts) and to the aesthetic satisfactions derived from giving order and harmony to what was previously disordered. Still another value, developed by Russell, is the detachment or impersonality of scientific method in the search for truth.

Because of the dominance of scientific thinking in modern times, those who speak for the arts are concerned to establish the validity of the arts (especially poetry) by explaining how art has meaning. In doing this, they sometimes contrast the artistic way of knowing with the scientific way. Thus John Ciardi analyzes the difference between a poetic and a scientific knowledge of a horse. Archibald MacLeish argues that poetry, which presents the concrete, deals with knowledge equally as well as science - deals, indeed, with "a kind of knowledge of which science is not capable." Finally, Maxwell Anderson, with energetic optimism, points to the artist's 'faith in the human race and its gradual acquisition of wisdom." Contrary to Baker and Russell, he sees the arts as evidence of cumulative moral and intellectual progress.

Stuart Chase - WHAT SCIENCE IS

Stuart Chase (1888 - [1985]), an American economist of great energies and wide interests, has written numerous books concerning economic and social problems. In his first important work, The Tragedy of Waste (1925), he deals with the misuse of money, manpower, and natural resources, a theme which recurs in such works as Rich Land, Poor Land (1936) and Idle Money, Idle Men (1940). In The Proper Study of Mankind (1948; rev. ed. in consultation with Edmund de S. Brunner, 1956) and Roads to Agreement (in collaboration with his wife, Marian Tyler, 1951) he has concerned himself with the field of social science. Chase has also dealt with the problems of semantics in The Tyranny of Words (1938) and The Power of Words (with Marian Tyler, 1954).

from The Proper Study of Mankind, rev. ed., in consultation with Edmund de S. Brunner (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956)

What Is "Science"?

The scientific method tells us not how things ought to behave but how they do in fact behave. Today it is universally applied to problems connected with matter and energy, and occasionally applied to many other sorts of problems is we shall see. It is the only method yet discovered which produces knowledge that stays put, at least until a closer fit to reality is found One can think of scientific achievement as a storehouse with many well filled shelves, their contents neatly classified and ready for use by any qualified student. An engineer could not build a bridge without going to the storehouse for the equations of stress and strain. A doctor could not write a prescription without referring to carefully tested knowledge on the shelves. Engineers in a dozen countries are now drawing on recent deposits of knowledge to build their first atomic power plants.

"Some people ... say that social science isn't science. Some say that astrology is a science, and so is dowsing. Some speak of the science of boxing; while if you call a person a "scientist" in certain of our sunnier states, he may think you mean a Christian Scientist.

"Science" is a roomy term, covering a wide range of subject matter and behavior. There is no one proper meaning. For instance, Webster's New World Dictionary, 1953, gives six different meanings:

1. Knowledge as opposed to intuition.
2. Systematized knowledge derived from observation and experiment.
3. A branch of knowledge-as the science of music.
4. A branch of natural science-as physics or chemistry.
5. Skill, based on training-as the science of boxing.
6. Christian Science.

The two-volume Oxford Dictionary explains how "science" formerly applied to philosophy, and was often synonymous with the "seven liberal arts" of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. About 100 years ago the concept of the "exact sciences" came in, referring to astronomy, physics, and the natural sciences; but the other meanings still have plenty of life in them.

If we select "exact science," and add the idea of the "scientific method" or the "scientific attitude" in approaching a given problem, we shall come close to what is meant by "science" in this book. 1. The American College Dictionary defines social science as: "The group of studies seeking to establish a science of the social life of human groups." Increasingly one hears the term "the behavioral sciences."

Morris R. Cohen, in his Logic and Scientific Method, examines the various techniques for discovering truth, and finds none but the scientific method free from human caprice and wishful thinking. None of the others, he says, is flexible enough to admit an error. "What is called the scientific method differs radically from these, by encouraging and developing the utmost possible doubt, so that what is left after such doubt is always supported by the best available evidence." As new evidence comes in, new doubts may arise and must be taken into account. "It is the essence of the scientific method to make them an integral part of the knowledge so far attained."

Science as thus defined-corresponding to Webster's second definition-is dynamic, open at the top, and thus able to come ever closer to the truth. It has abandoned absolutes in favor of relationships and probabilities. Nothing in modern science can be dogmatically taken as 100 percent true, though quite a few things may be 99.999. . . . For a long time physicists regarded Newton's laws of gravitation as 100 percent true of Absolute Space, Absolute Time, Absolute Motion. Einstein's principles of relativity shattered these absolutes. Newton was not wrong in terrestrial areas, but his laws did not always apply in astronomical areas. Einstein found a closer fit to the space-time world. Presently some genius may discover a still closer fit.

Einstein's work gives us a clear idea of three cardinal steps in exact science:

First, he was worried and curious about the relation between matter and energy, and got together the knowledge already available.

Second, he assembled his thoughts in the language of mathematics and came out with a startling hypothesis governing the conversion of matter into energy.

Third, he proposed various experiments to verify the hypothesis, such as the bending of light rays as they passed the sun in an eclipse.

The experiments were performed and in due course relativity was put in the storehouse of knowledge, later to be abundantly verified by the Manhattan Project. If the experimental results had been persistently negative, the theory would have gone into the wastebasket, together with thousands of other brilliant theories which have not survived the test of verification.

Human emotions are excluded as far as possible from scientific discipline. Alone among man's activities, science can resolve problems independently of or desires and wills. Scientific method, as Morris Cohen said, is systematic doubt. To fudge an experiment, to slant a conclusion, to report anything but the whole truth as one knows it alone in the night, brings ignominy and oblivion. There can be no secret processes, no patent medicines, no private understandings or payoffs on the side. The calculations must be laid on the table, face up, for all the world to see. In this sense, science is perhaps the most moral of all man's disciplines. It will be corrupted and debased if ever its direction falls permanently into the hands of national governments and ideologists. It is as international as the north wind.

One comforting thing about adopting the scientific attitude is that you no longer need try to save face when you find that you are wrong. You expect to be wrong a good part of the time. Ehrlich was wrong 605 times before he found the famous specific "606" for venereal disease.

A rough test of science is the amount of argument a conclusion generates. Men used to argue violently about the composition of water, and about the nature of heat. Today they know /7/ the answers and arguments are stilled. All argument may answer a debater or a politician, but it will never answer an experiment. An experiment can be answered only by a more careful experiment.

Finding a Pattern

Another broad definition of science is finding a pattern in a set of phenomena. Once the pattern is determined, prediction becomes possible. Failing prediction, we are still in the pre-scientific stage. One of the earliest scientific patterns was the movement of the stars across the heavens. For millennia men had watched them in wonder and perplexity; but some 5,000 years ago a few of the watchers began to trace their paths and to predict when they would return.

Nlettdeleev's Periodic Table is another revealing example of finding a pattern, this time determining the atomic weights of the various elements, and with it predicting new elements which no one had ever found on earth. Presently they were found, each in its proper place. Another pattern is the Reproductive Index whereby future population curves can be predicted.

Observation, whether in astronomy or sociology, identifies the pattern and checks it. Prediction then becomes possible. The magnetic compass, for instance, can be relied on to tell us which way is north. Next we invariably inquire: Why? Finding an answer is the next long step in science. The planets move so and so, we can plot them to the second. Why do they move that way? This is a much harder question. Nobody even suspected why planets moved the way they did until Newton worked out the laws of gravitation. Nobody yet knows much about the magnetic field governing the compass.

Patterns of Human Behavior

A good deal of natural science, and more social science, is still in the prediction stage. If this occurs, then that will follow. The understanding stage, finding the why, is far advanced in physics,just beginningin sociology. But the difference is in degree, not in kind. Scientists can find patterns in the behavior of people as well as in the behavior of electrons. On this level, there is no difference between social science and natural science. On this level we define social science as the use of the scientific method to answer questions about human behavior. Science goes with the method, not with the subject matter.

If the whys are carried far enough, they take us into the realm of unanswerable questions, where no operations can be performed to obtain an answer. Some questions, formerly supposed unanswerable, have yielded to new techniques of investigation, which themselves have uncovered still newer and more baffling problems. Many are likely to remain forever closed to human understanding. We shall have more to say about this later.

"The social realm," said the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, "is a natural realm which differs from the others only by a greater complexity. Now it is impossible that nature should differ radically from itself in this case and in regard to which is most essential. The fundamental relations that exist between things . . . cannot be essentially dissimilar in the different realms."

The informal picture I carry around in my mind of a social scientist is that of a man with a notebook watching people behave. He may be watching a town meeting in New England, a religious riot in India, a nursery school in Pasadena, a Japanese internment camp. Perhaps my most vivid picture is of the man with the notebook at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company, finding out in a world-famous experiment what makes workers work.

The scientific investigator puts down what he sees, not what he wants to see. He puts it down in such a way that other observers can verify his findings. Without a situation where the finditigs of one observer can be checked by other competent observers and agreement reached, we must surrender the idea of the scientific method.