JEAN-FRAN(:OIS REVEL
57
who have no experience of scientific reasoning. There is in his internal
makeup no necessary osmosis between the mental activity to which he is
constrained by his discipline - to make no assertion without proof - and
his opinions on current affairs and everyday matters, where he is subject
to the same enthusiasms and prejudices as any other man. Like him and in
just as unforeseeable a way, he can incline toward common sense or ex–
travagance and turn his back on the evidence when it counters his beliefs
or preferences or sympathies.
To live in an age modeled by science does not, consequently, render
any of us much more likely to behave in a scientific manner - outside of
those fields and conditions in which the constraint of scientific proce–
dures reigns supreme. When he has a choice, man is today neither more
nor less rational and honest than he was in the epochs designated as pre–
scientific. To return to the previously mentioned paradox, one can even
argue that intellectual incoherence and dishonesty are more alarming and
serious nowadays since, in the case of science, we have before us a model
of what rigorous thinking can be . But the scientific researcher is not by
nature a more honest man than the ignoramus. He is someone who has
voluntarily locked himself inside rules that condemn him, so to speak, to
honesty. A particular ignoramus may temperamentally be more honest
than such-and-such a scientist. In disciplines that cannot by their very na–
ture provide total demonstrable constraint, imposing itself from outside
on the researcher's subjectivity - for example, the social sciences and his–
tory - we often see, alas, the flourishing of lightheadedness, insincerity,
the ideological manipulation of £lcts, and the tendentiousness of clan ri–
valries, which occasionally take precedence over the pure love of truth by
which such researchers are supposedly consumed.
It
is well to recall these dementary caveats, for we shall understand
nothing of the torments of our supposedly scientific age unless we realize
that when we speak of "scientific behavior" we should not refer exclu–
sively to those mental procedures that are, strictly speaking, the properties
of scientific research. To behave scientifically - that is, by combining ra–
tionality and honesty - means not to express an opinion about a ques–
tion without considering all of the information at one's disposal, with–
out deliberately eliminating anything, without deforming or expurgating
a single element, and after reaching as best and as honestly as one can the
conclusions that seem called for. Nine times out of ten the available in–
formation will not be complete enough or its interpretation sufficiently
rigorous to lead to a certainty. But if the final judgment rarely has a
completely scientific character, the attitude leading toward it can always
have this character. The Platonic distinction between opinion and science
- or, to put it better (in my opinion), between conjectural judgment
(doxa)
and certain knowledge
(episteme)
-
is based on the raw material
