Telling the Truth about History (Norton Paperback) by Joyce Appleby & Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob

Author:Joyce Appleby & Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob [Appleby, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-13T19:00:00+00:00

The Philosophical Armor of Heroic Science

Historians and scientists of the generation of Conant and Butterfield institutionalized the history of science in American universities because they believed that its history, as they understood it, underwrote the Enlightenment’s vision of science. They also possessed a powerful moral armor in academic philosophy as it was taught from the 1940s onward. Its positive approach to science stressed that science, alone among the various forms of human inquiry, worked because of an inherent rationality. At the core of science lay logical rules upon which a few of the early geniuses of science had first managed to stumble. Right into the 1980s, in some quarters of public and academic opinion the legend of science had it that “successive generations of scientists have filled in more and more parts of the Complete True Story of the World.”9 It had been that simple and that positive.

The roots of a positive philosophy of science go back to Comte and the early nineteenth century, but more immediately to Vienna during the 1920s. There, one of the most influential philosophers of science in this century, Karl Popper, first published on the logic of scientific discovery. Forced to flee Austria and Germany in the 1930s because of Nazi persecution, Popper and his philosophical associates went to major English-speaking universities on both sides of the Atlantic. From those institutional bases their positive vision of how science works influenced historians, many of whom had been combatants against the evil that Popper and his colleagues had fled.

Buoyed by Popper and his associates, the latter sometimes called logical positivists, these philosophers taught that only a positive—and we would argue an essentially ahistorical—understanding of science could reinforce the barrier of reason in a century where reason had been in short supply.10 Popper emphasized that cooperation among disinterested scientists makes for objective knowledge. If it cannot be falsified, this knowledge is true forever. In Popper’s telling, the job of the philosopher was to understand how the game of science is played, how the scientist probes “into the unknown reality behind the appearances, and [is] anxious to learn from mistakes.”11 Allied to science, the philosopher explicates the philosophical logic working in it. The logic of science is distinctive, and the discipline provided by scientific experimentation and mathematical reasoning rivets the mind on nature. The positive, unrelenting logic of science, the armor that girds Western truth-seeking, stands as the model for the methods of all other disciplines.

Popper’s faith in the logic of science had been forged amid a bitter reality. Throughout much of this century the assault on rationality has been associated, quite rightly, with totalitarian political systems. Popper and his fellow refugees from Nazism saw its irrationalities as further support for their belief in the intimate link between the neutrality of science and the possibility of rational thought and action. Only the Nazis, they believed, had sought to manipulate science, and they of course were the great enemies of both reason and objectivity. The point was not lost on British and American intellectuals of the 1940s.

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