MALICIOUS PHILOSOPHIES
41
partially driven underground during periods of fair social weather,
are then insolently proclaimed as panaceas for public and private
ills. And the assured methods of scientific control and understand–
ing, because they effect no wholesale resoiution of problems and
because they yield no conclusions beyond the possibility of error
and correction, are then declared to be unsuitable guides for
rational living.
The mounting economic and political tensions of our own age
have not failed to produce a literature of this type. From various
quarters-from men of science, historians of ideas, as well as
outspoken representatives of theological systems-there has come
a flood of criticism of modern science and of the secular natur–
alism which has accompanied its growth. The criticism has been
neither uniform nor consistent. But the common objective of much
of it has been the limitation of the authority of science, and the
institution of methods other than those of controlled experimen–
tation for discovering the natures and values of things. Many
recent evaluations of science have thus had ari obviously malicious
intent ; and the present essay will seek to determine briefly to
what extent, in the case of several influential types of philosophies
of science, good sense has been sacrificed to such malice.
Undoubtedly the most solidly intrenched intellectual basis
for the current disparagement of science is a well-known but
nonetheless questionable theory of knowledge upon which experi–
mental method is made to rest. This type of critique starts with
the familiar f;1ct that in many theories of the natural sciences,
especially physics, the various sensory qualities (such as colors
and sounds) receive no
explicit
mention, and that it is only the
quantifiable traits of things (such as mass and length) which are
noticed. The immediate conclusion which is then drawn is that
sensory qualities are not properties of objects in their own right,
but are dependent on the activity of an
immaterial mind.
The re–
mainder of the argument may then proceed along either of two
lines of interpretation. According to one of them, more common in
earlier centuries than in our own, the traits studied by the natural
sciences are the only genuinely real things, while the directly expe–
rienced qualities are only a passing appearance. The sights and
