| Imagine
that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.
A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general
public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories
are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments
are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes
power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools
and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.
Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement
and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they
have largely forgotten what it is. But all that they possess
are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any
knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance;
parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces
of theory which they possess or to experiment; instruments whose
use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages
from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred.
Nonetheless all these fragments are embodied in a set of practices
which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry, and
biology. Adults argue with each other about the respective merits
of relativity theory, evolutionary theory and phlogiston theory,
although they possess only a very partial knowledge of each.
Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic
table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid.
Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes what they are doing is not
natural science in a proper sense at all. For everything that
they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and
coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense
of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably.
This imaginary
possible world is very like one that some some science fiction
writers have constructed. We may describe it as a world in which
the language of natural science, or parts of it at least, continues
to be used but is in a grave state of disorder. We may notice
that if in this imaginary world analytical philosophy were to
flourish, it would never reveal the fact of this disorder. For
the techniques of analytical philosophy are essentially descriptive
and descriptive of the language of the present at that. The
analytical philosopher would be able to elucidate the conceptual
structures of what was taken to be scientific thinking and discourse
in the imaginary world in precisely the way that he elucidates
the conceptual structures of natural science as it is.
What is
the point of constructing this imaginary world inhabited by
fictitious pseudo-scientists and real, genuine philosophy? The
hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world
which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state
grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary
world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true,
are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now
lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We
possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many
of the key expressions. But we have—vert largely, if not
entirely— lost our comprehension, both theoretical and
practical, of morality.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, A study
in Moral Theory.
Notre
Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd. ed., 1984,
p. 1.
Because the unit of scientific achievement is the
solved problem and because the group knows well which problems
have already been solved, few scientists will easily be persuaded
to adopt a viewpoint that again opens to questions many problems
that had previously been solved. Nature itself must first undermine
professional security by making prior achievements seem problematic.
Furthermore, even when that has occurred and a new candidate for
a paradigm has been evoked, scientists will be reluctant to embrace
it unless convinced that two all-important conditions are being
met. First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding
and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way.
Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively
large part of the concrete problem-solving ability that has accrued
to science through it predecessors. Novelty for its own sake is
not a desideratum in the sciences as it is in so many other creative
fields. As a result, the new paradigms seldom or never possess
all the capabilities of their predecessors, they usually preserve
a great deal of the most concrete parts of past achievements and
they always permit additional concrete problem-solving besides.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Thomas S. Kuhn.
University of Chicago Press, 2nd. ed; 1970, p. 169.
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