‘‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’

And new philosophy calls all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out,

The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit

Can well direct him where to look for it.

And freely men confess that this world’s spent,

When in the planets and the firmament

They seek so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out again to his atomies.

’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,

All just supply, and all relation;

Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,

For every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that then can be

None of that kind, of which he is, but he.

(John Donne, (1572- 1631)).

Seventeenth-century England, a changing culture, a time of momentous upheavals, of pioneering scientific inventions, of revolutionary theories, particularly in the empirical sciences. Empedocles, (c. 490 BC– c. 430 BC), had explained the nature and complexity of the material world in terms of four elements, earth, water, air and fire, but ‘the element of fire is quite put out’ by the new philosophy, influenced as it is by the empirical methods propounded by Sir Francis Bacon, (1561–1626). And Aristotle’s, (384 BC — 322 BC), geocentric model of the universe is contradicted by the heliocentric theory that proffers an earth journeying around the sun, and so ‘the sun is lost, and th’ earth’; and humankind is lost, displaced from the centre of creation. The inherited medieval world picture begins to fall apart, threatened by scientific rationalism, by the emergence of a modern experimental science; and this is reflected in the scepticism and uncertainty in the poetry issuing from John Donne’s perturbed Renaissance mind.

‘Donne’, said Douglas Bush, (1896–1983), ‘is wandering between two worlds, that of cosmic unity and that of meaningless disorder and decay, and he cannot resolve the conflict’. ‘One of the most convenient Hieroglyphicks of God, is a Circle’, said Donne, in one of his sermons, ‘and a Circle is endless’; for medieval philosophy had taught that the concepts of the circle and of circular motion are divine. ‘God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’, said Nicholas of Cusa, (1401–1464). And yet, in 1609, Johannes Kepler, (1571–1630), publishes a work in which he demonstrates that the planets orbit the sun in ellipses, not in circles, as Nicolaus Copernicus, (1473–1543), had supposed. But the restless, sceptical mind of Donne, familiar as it is with the old and new philosophy, alternating between one opinion and another, at times advances views in favour of Copernicus, at other times against him:

And new philosophy arrests the Sunne,

And bids the passive earth about it runne,

So wee have dull’d our minde, it hath no ends;

Onely the bodie’s busie, and pretends.

Donne’s perspective on the new struggles and anxieties engendered by a rapidly transforming world is both anguished and ambivalent: ‘’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’; it is suffused with heartache for a world that has gone; and with exultation and apprehension for a world that has taken its place. And yet, with the new philosophy comes a new spirit of inquiry, a passion for science, a rejection of previous dogmas that were shackling scientific progress. And far from ‘all coherence gone’, this rigorous spirit of enquiry has yielded results; any errors commited by science can be corrected by science itself. Kepler was correct, planets do orbit the Sun elliptically. Galileo Galilei, (1564–1642), was correct to advocate heliocentrism; the Earth does orbit the Sun. And, since Donne’s time, science has proven to be a remarkably successful enterprise, of which philosophers can only be envious.

Which is why it is rather disquieting to find Paul Feyerabend, (1924–1994), philosopher of science and epistemological anarchist, lamenting the fact that science, which once promised a liberation from dogmatic modes of thought, is now itself, despite its successes, a dogmatic, oppressive ideology, on a par with religion, having usurped its groundless authority, using its despotic appeal to reason to determine the direction that society should take. Concerning the scientific revolution, that prime examplar of scientific progress, Feyerabend observes that not one of its identifiable principles of scientific method has not been contravened by some esteemed scientist, at some time or another:

‘There is no one ‘scientific method’, but there is a great deal of opportunism; anything goes — anything, that is, that is liable to advance knowledge as understood by a particular researcher or research tradition. In practice science often oversteps the boundaries some scientists and philosophers try to put in its way and becomes a free and unrestricted enquiry’.

Instead of bewailing ‘‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone’, Feyerabend welcomes it. If there is to be a scientific method, let it be anything goes; science thereby not so much a rigorous mode of enquiry, but an anarchic one; for theoretical anarchy promotes progress more than rigour. And Galileo was not so much a scrupulous scientific rationalist as an unscrupulous irrational dogmatist, according to Feyerabend; his support for heliocentrism appealed to rhetoric, misleading information, and social and psychological factors having little to do with any deference to reason:

‘Galileo prevails because of his style and his clever techniques of persuasion, because he writes in Italian rather than in Latin, and because he appeals to people who are temperamentally opposed to the old ideas and the standards of learning connected with them’.

So what is this thing called science? What demarcates science from other disciplines? Are its pretensions to superiority over other systems of thought, (witchcraft, magic, scientology, etc.), unwarranted? The problem of demarcation, this, for Karl Popper (1902–1994), is the central problem in the philosophy of science; what distinguishes a science from a non-science? It may be supposed that scientific reasoning from observation to theory exemplifies a kind of inductive reasoning, of inductive inference, whereby a conclusion, in some manner, is supported by its premises, though not deduced from them. David Hume, (1711–1776), however, contended that an argument that proceeds from what is observed to what is unobserved is granted its legitimacy through the cause and effect relation, and our knowledge of this relation derives from experience; but, alas:

‘All inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past… if there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future, since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance’.

Popper is prepared to acknowledge the epistemological worries that induction engenders, but, he merrily asserts, they are of no concern to the scientist; for there is no methodology exclusive to science; and certainly not that of induction. Sir Francis Bacon was misguided in his supposition that unadulterated observation was the primary initial step in the formation of theories; all observations are discriminatory and already laden with theory; we cannot distinguish science from non-science on the basis of a putative inductive methodology. Scientists engage in problem-solving, not in making inferences from anterior recurrences to posterior occurrences. The scientist advances audacious generalizations and then endeavours to falsify them, for how untroublesome it is to acquire evidence in favour of any theory that takes our fancy; but if the theory is scientific it is vulnerable to falsification; and one demonstrable counter-instance is enough to falsify the theory.

It is clear from this account, then, that Sigmund Freud’s, (1856–1939), theory of resistance, (whereby an individual exhibits defensive behaviour as the illicit thoughts buried in his or her subconscious are under threat from a probing exterior source, and at risk of being brought to the surface), is non-scientific. Granted that much of this kind of analysis may be metaphorical rather than specifically to do with a cause and effect relation, nonetheless if a scientific hypothesis is to have any real content it must, at least in principle, be falsifiable. In the case of the empirical hypothesis, all swans are white, we can at least imagine a case in which a black swan is observed, and the hypothesis is falsified. But imagine yourself on the psychoanalyst’s couch, your therapist is approaching the truth, and encounters resistance on your part. What he is seeking from you is a self-avowal: ‘Yes, it is true, I do want to sleep with my mother’. At that moment you are happily cured. And yet, the hypothesis of an Oedipal complex may very well be incorrect: ‘Look, how many times must I tell you?’ you protest, ‘I do not want to sleep with my mother! You’re the one in need of therapy!’ But the therapist will merely interpret this as resistance, in accordance with his theory; you are too ashamed to confront the truth. How can such a hypothesis ever be refuted? There are no conceivable circumstances in which it is falsifiable.

Popper is, of course, putting forward a view about how science ought to be, about how it ought to develop; this heroic enterprise, its rapidity of progress precipitated by a great scientist now and then, but it is a progress that is always assured, by the scientific method. Thomas Kuhn, (1922–1996), on the other hand, developed an account of what, he thought, science is really like; what happens as science progresses. There is no smooth development, but an exchange between normal and revolutionary phases of science. Normal science resembles Popperian science as essentially problem-solving, the difference is that it operates within familiar territory, among a community of like-minded individuals; with shared theoretical beliefs, values, techniques, otherwise known as a disciplinary matrix, or paradigm. Normal science is dogmatic, not a disinterested search for truth, because commitment to the paradigm by the successful scientist is essential to it. But, anomalies arise that an existing paradigm cannot solve, and once there are enough of them a crisis ensues; and a scientific revolution is initiated; existing beliefs and practices are revised in the search for a new paradigm.

A paradigm shift can result in what Heinz Post, (1918–1992), labelled as Kuhn-loss; that is, the new paradigm forfeits some of its precursor’s capacity to deliver solutions for certain quandaries; which is to say, scientific knowledge is not cumulative; contrary to the general view of science, a successful theory does not necessarily preserve all of its precursor’s successes. An example is offered by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, (1946 — ); the Newtonians lost the Cartesians’ capacity to explain gravitation. René Descartes’, (1596–1650), adduced a theory of vortices that postulated space to be entirely filled with matter, in various fluid states, gyrating about the sun, the resulting vortex providing the force that pushes the planets towards the sun. But with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, (1642–1727), the medium for gravitational attraction is lost, substituted by an occult notion of action at a distance, an invisible force actingacross the vast vacuum of space.

According to Popper, an anomaly generates a logical requirement for the revolutionary overthrow of a theory. According to Kuhn, there are no rules for deciding on the significance of a particular quandary; or for evaluating one, together with its solution, against another, also together with its solution. Opting for a particular revision of a paradigm is not the product of a rational compulsion; and the outcome of a revolutionary phase is truly open; differing ideas are in competition with each other, and even factors extraneous to science may guide the direction taken, the nationalities or personalities of the principal antagonists, for example; though Kuhn himself disowns such a thought; the potentiality of the competing ideas to settle a quandary is the ultimate deciding issue.

There is a general view whereby the scientific method is governed by the rules of scientific rationality, (though this in itself is unable to account for the scientific conceptual imagination that can produce new hypotheses); this is the context of discovery; but, according to this general view, the rules of scientific rationality do decide whether a new hypothesis should, in the light of the available evidence, be admitted into the repository of approved theories; this is the context of justification. Kuhn rejects such a distinction, for the context of discovery implies that the philosophy of science can only be mute on the topic of the operation of the creative imagination in science. Au contraire, mes amis. Kuhnian paradigms do partially explain how a scientist, tutored in the established solutions within a paradigm, which Kuhn terms exemplars, when confronted with a new quandary can approach it in the light of those with which he or she is already familiar; and is henceforth facilitated in recognizing a possible answer to it. And, against the context of justification, what determines the acceptability of a proposed solution to a quandary is its similarity to a paradigmatic exemplar.

But does not this play into the hands of Feyerabend? Is not science in effect bidding a farewell to reason? For a perception of a similarity, in this case the similarity between a potential exemplar and an existing exemplar, is certainly not reducible to rules, and not to rules of reason. And yet, Kuhn would object, to repudiate the notion of a particular cognitive process being the consequence of the application of rules of rationality is not to imply that it is in itself an irrational process. For it is not a prerequisite of my perceiving a similarity in appearance between two members of the same family that I have to apply certain rules of rationality to the process. But, it is certainly a provocative conclusion within Kuhn’s philosophy of science, that the pivotal ingredient in scientific cognition functions in a similar way to the perception of similarity.

It certainly provoked Popper, and Imre Lakatos, (1922–1974). Popper was an absolutist as far as truth is concerned, scientific knowledge is knowledge independent of a knowing subject; science contributes to the growth of knowledge as it progresses towards truth. And Popper accuses Kuhn of being a relativist, under the sway of Michael Polyani’s, (1891–1976), fideism, (a reliance more on faith than on reason); that is, Polynani theorized that a scientist has to have faith in a theory he is proposing; however formalised knowing may become, it is always dependent on commitment; (is Polyani’s theory itself reliant more on faith than on reason?). Kuhn, according to Popper, characterizes scientific revolutions as ideological revolutions, discounting ‘the many purely scientific revolutions that are not connected with ideological revolutions’. And Lakatos too accuses Kuhn of irrationalism, likening his philosophy of science to ‘mob psychology’:

‘For Kuhn scientific change — from one ‘paradigm’ to another — is a mystical conversion which is not and cannot be governed by rules of reason and which falls totally within the realm of the (social) psychology of discovery. Scientific change is a kind of religious change’.

So is science reason, or is it religion? Is a rational philosophy of science possible, or must we be satisfied with psychological explanations of the advancement of science? Lakatos prefers to reinstate the context of discovery, that there is something to be said for Popper’s criterion of falsifiability; but it is too confining, condemning much quotidian scientific practice to an irrational or unscientific status. For scientists often persevere, and with good reason, with theories that by the Popperian criterion ought to be rejected as having been refuted; theories that, together with other assumptions, have resulted in falsified predictions. Copernican heliocentric astronomy was refuted from the moment of its birth; for if the earth orbits the sun then the apparent position of the closest of the fixed stars should vary with respect to the more distant ones as the earth moves with respect to them, (stellar parallax); but no such differences were observed in Copernicus’ day, and, as we now know, with good reason; for the stars are so far away.

But then, if scientists persevere with refuted theories, either they are being unscientific or Popper is mistaken about what constitutes good science, and about what scientists ought to be doing. Lakatos, therefore, develops a criterion of demarcation founded on principles corresponding more closely to scientific practice. It is a revision of the falsifiability criterion, in effect, for rather than conceiving of a single falsifiable theory being rejected as soon as it is refuted, we should instead think of a succession of falsifiable theories characterized by a communal and steadfast collection of centralized theses that are appraised as being irrefutable by a kind of divine decree; a sequence of theories that constitutes a research programme. They are unfalsifiable in that the scientists are not going to relinquish them without a fight; and unfalsifiable in that they are bereft of empirical consequences. Newton’s three laws of mechanics, together with his law of gravitation, cannot inform us about what we can expect to see in the night sky; to derive empirical predictions from them we need extra hypotheses; the position, mass, relative velocity, and so on, of the earth, as well as of the celestial objects.

This relates to under-determination; a scientific theory is always under-determined by the evidence; there will always be a conflicting theory that is supported by the same evidence. Descartes, for instance, proposed (albeit for the sake of argument) that the world is an illusion generated by an evil demon ‘as clever and deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading [us]’. As Pierre Duhem, (1861–1916), noted, theories are never to be favoured simply with their own empirical consequences; only a complex of theories are granted those. I observe a ship disappearing over the horizon, consequently, I hypothesize that the Earth is round. But then, I also have to hypothesize that light travels in a straight line. This is an auxiliary hypothesis, which is necessary ‘to save the phenomena’, as Pierre Duhem puts it. Neither theoretical propositions, nor sets of theoretical propositions, can ever be conclusively falsified by experimental observations; for they can only predict what we should observe, (given the truth of the theory), in conjunction with auxiliary hypotheses. And faced with an anomaly, a scientist may modify his or her theory, or introduce an auxiliary hypothesis to save the theory; although there is,of course, a limit on the number of times a scientist can get away with that.

At the heart of the evaluation of science then is not an individual theory but a research programme, a succession of theories; the question for the philosophy of science to address is this: is the research programme scientific or non-scientific; does it constitute good science or bad science? For Lakatos it is good science if it is progressive, bad science if it is degenerative. And to be progressive it must be theoretically progressive; every new theory in the succession must be richer in empirical content than its predecessor; and be able to predict the unexpected and surprising, rather than what we already know. And it must be empirically progressive, the new and surprising facts that are postulated by the theory must turn out to be true. As Lakatos says, a research programme ‘is progressive if it is both theoretically and empirically progressive, and degenerating if it is not’.

For instance, Halley’s comet was predicted to return on the basis of observations of its trajectory combined with Newtonian mechanics with which the elongated ellipse in which it moved was able to be calculated. The comet duly obliged by showing up when and where it was supposed to; it was Newton’s theory that generated this singular fact, for prior to that, assuming that one comet could even be distinguished from another, it would have been noticed that the comet put in an appearance every seventy-two years; but it would have been impossible to have been so precise about the time and place of its reappearance. Newton’s theory delivered far more precise predictions than Descartes with his vortices ever could. Now as for Marxism, on the other hand, though it began as theoretically progressive yet empirically degenerate, (its singular predictions systematically falsified), it became theoretically degenerate also; the singular predictions became less and less, and what was unpredicted but nonetheless came about was explained away in an attitude of desperation; it is therefore bad science. (But then, in the light of recent events, perhaps Marx was right all along; could a bad science ever be reinstated as a good science?).

All of which just goes to demonstrate, as Alan Sokal, (1955 — ), and Jean Bricmont, (1952 — ), have said, (in ‘Intellectual Impostures’, in which the thoughts of Feyerabend, and others, about science are subjected to a sustained assault), ‘it is extremely difficult to codify the scientific method, though this does not prevent the development of certain rules, with a more-or-less general degree of validity, on the basis of previous experience’. Historical examples may show ‘the limitations of any general and universal codification of the scientific method’; we may observe correctly that all methodologies have their limitations, but this does not allow us to then draw the conclusion that anything goes: ‘There is no unique method of criminal investigation, but this does not mean that all methods are equally reliable (think about trial by fire). The same is true of scientific methods’.

Besides which, when I think on the vast and intricate philosophical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), of the genius and learning behind it, and the work that went into its devising, not to mention the time and intellectual energy spent by myself in endeavouring to engage with it, I cannot but resent the implication that it is all on a par with some theory that a particular individual has merely pulled out of his or her fundament, as it is sometimes put. Perhaps Feyerabend exemplifies Donne’s point, that ‘every man alone thinks he hath got / To be a phoenix, and that then can be / None of that kind, of which he is, but he’.

But, contrary to Feyerabend, the way to truth is laborious and troublesome to navigate; and in these uncertain times the notion of coherence in theory, and among theories, (I have not even touched on the topic of the incommensurabilty of scientific theories), has at least to serve as a regulative notion; we must regulate our theoretical practices on the supposition that coherence, and consistency, is achievable, whether or not we can know that it is. And so to conclude, as I began, with John Donne:

… On a huge hill,

Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will

Reach her, about must, and about must goe.