Never Pure by Steven Shapin

Author:Steven Shapin [SHAPIN, STEVEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2010-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART V

The World of Science and the World of Common Sense

Adistinguished scientist has recently asserted, with serene confidence, that the very idea of science is opposed to that of common sense: if something fits with common sense, he says, then it just isn’t science, and that’s one way you can tell what is science and what is not. This sort of claim has a long history: one of the characteristic gestures of the Scientific Revolution was the assertion that the ultimate physical and causal structure of the world was inaccessible to common experience and common modes of accounting, while emergent notions of a special and powerful Scientific Method juxtaposed that method to the faulty reasoning of the common people. Science was one thing; the Errors of the People were quite another. That sentiment is pervasive, and it is, therefore, an object worthy of serious historical attention, even if few scholars see the need to spell out what is to be taken as common sense and what as science. How did it happen that scientific knowledge was set in opposition to lay knowledge? With what consequences for conceptions of reliable knowledge and the roles of those possessing it? Who could have that reliable knowledge and how could one recognize its authentic possession? Could, indeed, the distinction between science and common sense be rejected? A historical study of proverbs—short linguistic genres circulating among the common people—is one way of thinking seriously about the science/common sense distinction. What are proverbs, and how do their generalizations and applications compare to those of expert science? Another way of putting some new historical life in the science/common sense distinction is to take a close look at practices in which scientific expertise—abstract and fundamental knowledge of nature’s processes—is brought to bear upon specifics, in the example of medicine, particular sick and suffering bodies. Is it, as Galileo’s Simplicio critically suggested, that the abstract lives in the ideal world and the concrete in the real world? If so, medicine—in its aspects as science and art—is a perspicuous site in which we might concretely address the relations between scientific expertise and whatever counts as common sense, once again transforming resource into historical topic.

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