Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2019), 114-116.

The scientist as social animal

Naturally, what is true of thinking and perceiving subjects in general is true of scientists in particular. The scientist is essentially an embodied subject in a world of physical objects. When he entertains hypotheses, thinks through the implications of a theory, weighs evidence, and so forth, he is deploying concepts, rules of inference, etc. that are ultimately rooted in bodily capacities and dispositions. When he makes observations, conducts experiments, operates scientific equipment, reads books and journal articles, listens to lectures, and so on, he makes use of bodily sense organs, perceives things from a particular bodily perspective, manipulates the objects perceived using hands and other organs, etc.

Moreover, like other human beings, the scientist is someone for whom the corporeal world he occupies contains other embodied subjects. In particular, it contains other scientists. It is essential to the practice of the individual scientists that there be other scientists with whom he interacts. One reason for this is that the practice of science in part involves the mastery and deployment of an existing body of scientific knowledge, which includes not only book learning but also (as Polanyi emphasized) tacit knowledge that is embodied in ways of perceiving and acting, and becomes part of the scientist’s “local Background” (once again to deploy Searle’s expression), Neither the book learning nor the tacit embodied knowledge is spun out of whole cloth by the individual scientist himself, but rather is acquired from other scientists – in college and graduate school, in the laboratory, at academic meetings, etc.

One need not endorse the more extreme relativist conclusions of some sociologists of science to see that there really is such a thing as the sociology of science – that scientists, like members of any other profession, inhabit communities which inculcate certain assumptions, practices, and norms, and that these assumptions, practices, and norms and the nature of their social inculcation can be identified and studied. Thomas Kuhn’s analysis (1962) famously deploys the notion of a “paradigm,” i.e. a set of ruling assumptions and standards of inquiry associated with a scientific theory, reflected in standard textbooks, etc. The training of a scientist essentially involves his initiation into a dominant paradigm, and ordinary scientific practice or “normal science” essentially involves the application of a paradigm to new problems, the attempt to resolve its outstanding problems, and so forth. Even “revolutionary science,” by which a dominant paradigm is criticized and finally overthrown, is essentially a social enterprise insofar as it involves a shared judgment among a critical mass of researchers that a dominant paradigm is deficient and needs to be replaced, the organization of resistance to it, etc. Again, whether or not one agrees with all the conclusions Kuhn drew from this analysis (and I do not), there is obviously much truth in it.

Another respect in which interaction with other scientists is essential to the practice of the individual scientist concerns language. Obviously, it is by way of language that the existing body of scientific knowledge is transmitted to scientists in books, lectures, etc. Everyday scientific practice involves the deployment of technical terminology, mathematical equations, stock lines of argument, lists of elements or species, etc. and all of this is embodied in language. Now, language is an essentially social phenomenon, with scientific language being no different from any other sort in this respect. Moreover, it presupposes an objective world which different language users together occupy.

In an influential analysis, Donald Davidson (2001) speaks of a “triangulation” between the language user, other language users, and objects in their common environment. For one speaker to interpret another’s utterances requires, in the most fundamental case, noting what is going on in that common environment and attributing to the other speaker thoughts that would, given what is going on, be the sort that would naturally be expressed by way of such utterances. To take a trivial example, if someone says “That must be John” in a context in which there has just been a knock on the door, we would naturally interpret his utterance as an expression of the thought that John is the one who knocked on the door. Knowledge even of the meaning of one's own utterances is similarly grounded, insofar as one takes oneself to be expressing the sorts of thoughts people would normally express by way of the words one is using, given the way those words are typically used in one’s linguistic community. In this way, the very practice of using language presupposes that one is a thinking subject in a world of commonly accessible objects that is also occupied by other thinking subjects.

Of course, Davidson’s particular way of spelling out the social nature of language raises all sorts of questions, and the topic of language is in any case a large one. But one needn’t be a Davidsonian in order to acknowledge that language is essentially social. The point for present purposes is just to note that science presupposes not just that the individual scientist is an embodied subject, and not just that he inhabits a world of physical objects, but also that among the objects in that world with which he deals are other embodied subjects.

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Return to Lesson 13: The Role of Belief in Science