MALICIOUS PHILOSOPHIES
Nevertheless, the actual character of scientific method offers
warrant neither for such attempts to limit its authority, nor for
the radical dualism of the qualitative and the quantitative, the
mental and the physical, upon which those attempts thrive. A
brief mention of some obvious features of experimental procedure
will be sufficient to show how inadequate are the analyses on whose
basis the authority of scientific method is impugned.
In the first place, however "abstract" scientific theories may
be, those theories can he neither understood nor used except in
contexts of familiar qualitative discriminations. These contexts
are tacitly taken for granted in the explicit formulation of theories,
and are neither ignored nor contemned by the practicing scientist.
Consider, for example, some of the operations involved in even
so elementary a process as the measurement of spatial magnitude:
standards of magnitude must be constructed, requiring the use of
familiar bodies of daily experience; the
~elative
constancy of the
standards must be established, thus necessitating the noting of
qualitative changes such as temperature; and the mutual relations
of bodies must be discriminated, thus involving the identification
and distinction of bodies on the basis of such qualities as color
and the texture of surfaces. In general, no metaphysical opposi–
tion between the qualitative and the quantitative is forced upon
us in this process, since the institution of quantitative standards is
simply the ordering and the discrimination of qualitative continua.
The view that the subject-matter and the data of the physcist are
opaque pointer-readings is clearly a falsification of the scientist's
procedure-a falsification which becomes more evident the more
thorough is our examination of the full spectrum of scientific
operations.
In the second place, there can be no doubt that the colors,
sounds, and other characteristics we perceive in our every-day
it. A theory of imagination . . . is urgently needed as a foundation for ethics,
esthetics, philosophy of history and of religion, and even for metaphysics." (Richard
Kroner, in a paper read before the Third Conference on Science, Philosophy and
Religion, as quoted by
The New York Times,
August 29, 1942.)
"... It is an axiom of sound method that any experience is, in some manner and
to some degree,
intrinsically
cognitive. An experience of love . . . is at the
same
time an insight into the loveable nature of what is loved; an experience of moral
urgency . . . is an insight into the rightness of the action to be performed; an
experience of reverence . . . is an insight into the divinity of what is reverenced.
Every such experience is a growth in wisdom and the wisdom is not testable by
scientific techniques...." (Philip Wheelwright, "Religion and Social Grammar,"
Tk
Kenyon. Review,
vol. 4 (1942), pp. 203-204).
