If Watson and Crick hadnot discovered the nature

of DNAone can be virtually

certain that other scientistswould eventually have

determined it.

With art – whether painting, music

or literature –it is quite different.

If Shakespearehad not written Hamlet,

no other playwrightwould have done so.

Wolpert L 1993 The unnatural nature of science

… the city which is composed of middle-classcitizens is necessarily best constituted in respect ofthe elements of which we say the fabric of the statenaturally consists. And this is the class of citizenswhich is most secure in a state, for they do not, likethe poor, covet their neighbours' goods; nor doothers covet theirs, as the poor covet the goods ofthe rich; and as they neither plot against others, norare themselves plotted against . . . . those states arelikely to be well-administered, in which the middleclass is large, and stronger if possible than both theother classes, or at any rate than either singly; forthe addition of the middle class … prevents eitherof the extremes from being dominant. . . large states are less liable to faction than smallones, because in them the middle class is large;;whereas in small states it is easy to divide all thecitizens, into two classes . . . And democracies aresafer and more permanent than oligarchies, becausethey have a middle class which is more numerousand has a greater share in the government

Aristotle

Epistemology

“Epistemology is one of the core areas ofphilosophy. It is concerned with the nature,sources and limits of knowledge. There is avast array of views about those topics, butone virtually universal presupposition isthat knowledge is true belief, but not meretrue belief. For example, lucky guesses ortrue beliefs resulting from wishful thinkingare not knowledge. Thus, a central questionin epistemology is: what must be added totrue beliefs to convert them intoknowledge?”

Ontology

“The word ‘ontology’ is used to refer tophilosophical investigation of existence, orbeing. Such investigation may be directedtowards the concept of being, asking what‘being’ means, or what it is for somethingto exist; it may also (or instead) beconcerned with the question ‘what exists?’,or ‘what general sorts of thing are there?’ “

“Statements are:

tt analytically trueor

tt empiricallydisconfirmableor

tt meaningless”

Gallileo Gallileiand thefalling cannon-balls

The text-books say:classic experimentaldisconfirmation(leaning tower of Pisa . )

BUTit was primarily a thought

experiment …

Aristotle says that a hundred-pound ballfalling from a height of one hundred cubitshits the ground beforea one-pound ball has fallen one cubit.I say they arrive at the same time.You find, on making the test, that the largerball beats the smaller one by two inches.Now, behind those two inches you want tohide Aristotle's ninety-nine cubits and,speaking only of my tiny error,remain silent about his enormous mistake.

Galileo Galilei c1612

❶ A➤B➤C

❷ B➤C➤A

❸ C➤A➤B

'Burning isthe

releaseof

phlogiston'

Premises

òò

Detailed predictivestatements

ôô

Milton Friedman

“Individuals producing in a society,and hence the socially determined production ofindividuals,is of course the point of departure.The solitary and isolated hunter or fisherman,who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as astarting point,is one of the unimaginative fantasies ofeighteenth-century romances à la RobinsonCrusoe; …They saw this individual not as an historicalresult,but as the starting-point of history;not as something evolving in the course ofhistory,but posited by nature,becausefor them this individual was in conformity withnature,in keeping with their idea of human nature.This delusionhas been characteristic of every new epochhitherto.”

Marx, K. Introduction To A Critique Of Political EconomyI. Production, Consumption, Distribution, Exchange (Circulation)

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs,from the most casual matters of geography and historyto the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even ofpure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabricwhich impinges on experience only along the edges.Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field offorce whose boundary conditions are experience. Aconflict with experience at the periphery occasionsreadjustments in the interior of the field. Truth valueshave to be redistributed over some of our statements.Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation ofothers, because of their logical interconnections -thelogical laws being in turn simply certain furtherstatements of the system, certain further elements of thefield. Having reevaluated one statement we mustreevaluate some others, which may be statementslogically connected with the first or may be thestatements of logical connections themselves. But thetotal field is so underdetermined by its boundaryconditions, experience, that there is much latitude ofchoice as to what statements to reevaluate in the lightof any single contrary experience. No particularexperiences are linked with any particular statements inthe interior of the field, except indirectly throughconsiderations of equilibrium affecting the field as awhole.

If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of theempirical content of an individual statement -especially if it is a statement at all remote from theexperiential periphery of the field.

Quine 42-3

… one of the things a scientific community acquires witha paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that …can be assumed to have solutions.To a great extent these are the only problems that thecommunity will admit as scientificor encourage its members to undertake.Other problems, including many that had previously beenstandard, are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern ofanother discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic tobe worth the time.A paradigm can … even insulate the community fromthose socially important problems that are not reducible tothe puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in termsof the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigmsupplies. Such problems can be a distraction, a lessonbrilliantly illustrated by several facets of seventeenth-century Baconianism and by some of the contemporarysocial sciences.One of the reasons why normal science seems to progressso rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problemsthat only their own lack of ingenuity should keep themfrom solving.

Kuhn T S The Structure of Scientific Revolutions p37 (1962 1st ed, quote from 2nd ed 1970)

‘recallHumphrey Lyttleton’s

rejoinderwhen someone asked him

where jazz was going:

“If I knew wherejazz was going

I’d be therealready.”’

(Winch, 1958:93-4)

“It is not true that tounderstand the concepts of asociety (in the way its members do)is to understand the society.Concepts are as liable tomask reality as reveal it,and masking some of itmay be part of theirfunction.”

E Gellner

I consider extremely fruitful thisidea that social life should beexplained,not by the notions of those whoparticipate in it,but by more profound causes whichare unperceived by consciousness,and I think also that these causesare to be sought mainly in themanner according to which theassociated individuals are grouped.Only in this way, it seems, canhistory become a science, andsociology itself exist.

Durkheim

Interpretation, in the sense relevant tohermeneutics [Dilthey, Gadamer,Habermas], is an attempt to makeclear, to make sense of an object ofstudy. The object must, therefore, be atext, or text-analogue . . .

Charles Taylor

The very terms in which the future willhave to be characterised if we are tounderstand it properly are not allavailable to us at present. …..We see the rise of Puritanism, forinstance, as a shift in mans stance tothe sacred … it would be unthinkablethat a medieval Catholic could havethe conception …

… such radically unpredictable eventsas the culture of youth today, thePuritan rebellion of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, the developmentof Soviet society, and so forth …..

Human science looks backward. Itis inescapably historical.