4
PARTISAN REVIEW
Philosophy and the Assault Against Scientific Method
The primary evidence of the new failure of nerve is to he
found in an attitude underlying all of the views and movements
enumerated, and many others as well. It exhibits itself as a loss of
confidence in scientific method, and in varied quests for a "knowl–
edge" and "truth" which, although they give us information about
the world, are uniquely different from those won by the processes
of scientific inquiry. Often, with no great regard for consistency,
these uniquely different truths are regarded as "superior" to the
common garden variety truths of science and good sense. They are
the self-proclaimed governors of the moral and theoretical
economy. Their function is to point to man's natural and super–
natural end and to prevent science, competent to deal only with
means, from stepping out of bounds.
This distrust of scientific method is often concealed by state–
ments to the effect that science, of course, has a certain validity
in its restricted sphere and that only the pretensions of scientific
philosophy, naturalism, empiricism, positivism-not to speak of
materialism,-are being criticized. Yet it is not to the actual
procedures of scientific inquiry that such critics go to correct this
or that formulation of scientific philosophy. Instead they invoke
the claims of some rival method to give us knowledge of what
is beyond the competence of scientific method. Occasionally they
boldly assert .that their substitute method gives a more reliable
and completer knowledge of the matters that the sciences
:ceport
on, particularly about the behavior of man and the hist.(lry of
society. . What an eloquent revelation is contained in R€;jnhold
Niebuhr's words: "Science which is only science cannot he scien–
tifically accurate."*
Distrust of scientific method is trans£ormed into open hostility
whenever some privileged, "private" truth pleads for exemption
from the tests set up to safeguard the intelligence from illusion.
The pleas for exemption take many forms. They are rarely open
and direct as in the frenzy of Kierkegaard who frankly throws
overboard his intelligence in order to make those leaps of despair–
ing belief which convert his private devils into transcendent
absolutes. Usually these pleas are presented as corrolaries of
special
theories
of knowledge, being, or experience. There are
some who interpret science and discursive knowledge generally
*The Nature and Destiny of Man,
Vol. I,
p.
73, N, Y. 1941.
