220
PARTISAN REVIEW
question of what we can have knowledge about. Answers to this
question are supplied by individual discoveries in the various sciences.
Such humility does not assert that the experience of knowledge ex–
hausts
all
modes of experience or that scientific knowledge is
all–
knowing. It does not deny that there may be mysteries, but it ap–
proaches all alleged mysteries as if they were
gaps
in knowledge
instead of unfathomable and unbridgeable abysses. It does not iden–
tify scientific method with the particular methods of physics, but
rather with the pattern of hypothetico-deductive-experimental ob–
servation exhibited in the different sciences in different ways, de–
pending upon the specific subject matter. We can study an indi–
vidual's neurosis or a nation's history scientifically even if we can–
not put it into a test tube.
Broadly speaking there is no opposition between common sense
knowledge and scientific knowledge as knowledge, but only a dif–
ference in their objects and problems: direct use and enjoyment
of things in the realm of common sense, and the winning of new
facts, new laws, and a synthesis independent of present, or even of
ultimate, use and enjoyment, in the scientific realm.
That the opposition between the two cannot be sustained is
apparent from the fact that all scientific procedures that are well
grounded take note of common sense identifications, distinctions and
generalizations. There is no science whose language can be formalized
to a point where it can dispense with everyday language. The scien–
tific entities of theoretical physics could not be discovered, formulated
or applied without referring ultimately to the gross objects and quali–
ties of common sense experience. This is not to say that scientific
entities are necessarily describable in terms of the qualities of com–
mon sense experience. We move from the vague and inexact toward
the less vague and more exact. It was necessary to be able roughly
to differentiate between colors in use before we could develop a
scientific theory of color that would enable us to make finer and
subtler differentiations.
If
we had no perceptions we could not
dis–
cover the conditions of perception.
If
we could not distinguish be–
tween brain and mind what earthly use would the concept of brain–
state have?
As
Susan Stebbing once put it (in
Philosophy and the
Physicists):
"It is only because they (the scientists) are able to per–
ceive the solidity of a piece of iron that they are able to discover
