Philosophical Inquiries: An Introduction to Problems of Philosophy

Limits of Science

36 Conditions of Perfected science How far can the scientific enterprise advance toward a definitive understanding of reality? Might science attain a point of recognizable completion? Is the achievement of perfected science a genuine possibility , even in theory when all of the “merely practical” obstacles are put aside as somehow incidental? What would perfected science actually be like? What sort of standards would it have to meet? Clearly, it would have to complete in full the discharge of natural science’s mandate or mission. Now, the goal-structure of scientific inquiry covers a good deal of ground. It is diversified and complex, spreading across both the cognitive/theoretical and active/practical sectors. It encompasses the traditional quartet of description, explanation, prediction, and control, in line with display 3.1. The theoretical sector of science concerns itself with matters of characterizing, explaining, accounting for, and rendering intelligible —with purely intellectual and informative issues, in short. 3 limits of science rescher phil inq text.indd 36 3/1/10 3:15 PM lIMIts of scIence 37 By contrast, the practical sector is concerned with deciding actions, guiding expectations, and, in general, with achieving the control over our environment that is required for the satisfactory conduct of our affairs. The former sector thus deals with what science enables us to say, and the latter with what it enables us to do. The one relates to our role as spectators of nature, the other to our role as active participants. It thus appears that if we are to claim that our science has attained a perfected condition, it would have to satisfy (at least) the four following conditions: 1. Erotetic completeness: It must answer, in principle at any rate, all those descriptive and explanatory questions that it countenances as legitimately raisable and must accordingly explain everything it deems explicable. 2. Predictive completeness: It must provide the cognitive basis for accurately predicting those eventuations that are in principle predictable (that is, those that it recognizes as such). 3. Pragmatic completeness: It must provide the requisite cognitive means for doing whatever is feasible for beings like ourselves to do in the circumstances in which we labor. 4. Temporal finality (the omega-condition of ultimate finality): It must leave no room for expecting further substantial changes that destabilize the existing state of scientific knowledge. theoretical goals practical goals cognitive goals manipulative or pragmatic goals DESCRIPTION (answering what? and how? questions about nature) EXPLANATION (answering why? questions about nature) PREDICTION (successful alignment of our expectations regarding nature) CONTROL (effective intervention in nature to alter the course of events in desired directions) Display 3.1. Goal-Structure of Scientific Inquiry rescher phil inq text.indd 37 3/1/10 3:15 PM 38 lIMIts of scIence Each of these modes of substantive completeness deserves detailed consideration. First, however, one brief preliminary remark: it is clear that any condition of science that might qualify as “perfected” would have to meet certain formal requirements of systemic unity. If, for example, there are different routes to one and the same question (for instance, if both astronomy and geology can inform us about the age of the Earth), then these answers will certainly have to be consistent. Perfected science will have to meet certain requirements of structural systematicity in the manner of its articulation: it must be coherent, consistent, consonant, uniform, harmonious, and so on. Such requirements represent purely formal cognitive demands upon the architectonic of articulation of a body of science that could lay any claim to perfection. Interesting and important though they are, we shall not, however, trouble about these formal requirements here, our present concern being with various substantive issues.1 Issues of theoretical Completeness Erotetic completeness is surely an unattainable mirage. We can never exhaust the possibility of questions. The Kantian principle of question propagation means that inquiry—the dialectic of questions and answers—can never get to the ultimate bottom of things. Any adequate theory of inquiry must recognize that the ongoing progress of science is a process of conceptual innovation that always leaves certain theses wholly outside the cognitive range of the inquirers of any particular period. This means that there will always be facts (or plausible candidate facts) about a thing that we do not know, because we cannot even conceive of them. For to grasp such a fact calls for taking a perspective of consideration that we simply do not have, since...