Styles of Knowing: A New History of Science from Ancient Times to the Present

11. Science in the Twentieth Century

252 One might not exPect a hierarchy to exist for the six styles of knowing , since it is not as if any one style forms the foundation for any of the others. Yet through much of the twentieth century, there was, in fact, a hierarchy of styles, with the deductive style at the apex. This bolstered the status of physics as standing at the apex of the disciplines.1 Nevertheless, much of what was presented as theoretical and deductive science consisted of relatively modest middle-level theories. In other cases, supposed premises or first principles involved a concealed analogy, a hypothetical assumption underlying the deductive framework. It was in the decades that followed the Second World War that the deductive style held the greatest prestige, even in sciences that seemed far removed from physics. Textbooks in chemistry, ecology, and many other fields bore titles beginning with “Fundamentals of” and “Principles of.” In the United States, the historical approach to geography lost ground to the expanding discipline of “new geography,” which developed a deductive framework for “geographical space” so that the spatial order could be interpreted as subject to general laws.2 Even the social sciences aspired to resemble physics, a phenomenon known as “physics envy.”3 There are counterexamples, such as schools of economics that focused´ 11 Science in the Twentieth Century I have to keep going, as there are always people on my track. I have to publish my present work as rapidly as possible in order to keep in the race. —Ernest Rutherford Science in the Twentieth Century ´ 253 on compiling large data sets and analyzing them statistically, and anthropologists who engaged in interpretative work. Taxonomy survived in private organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History and the Missouri Botanical Garden, and government institutions such as Kew, the British Royal Botanical Gardens, and the Dutch National Herbarium. Within the field of physics itself, the volume of experimental research outweighed that of theoretical physics. In retrospect, we cannot conclude that experiments served only to test theoretical ideas. Current historical reconstruction stresses the relative independence of experimental practice.4 At the time, however, a different view prevailed. It is no exaggeration to say that every scientist and social scientist was aware of the cultural prominence of high theory. Even engineers accepted the view that technology was derived from theoretical science by way of “applied science.” Karl Popper, arguably the most influential philosopher of science of the twentieth century , said: “The theoretician puts certain definite questions to the experimenter , and the latter, by his experiments, tries to elicit a decisive answer to these questions, and to no others. All other questions he tries hard to exclude. . . . Theory dominates the experimental work from its initial planning up to the finishing touches in the laboratory.”5 Starting around 1980, however, the deductivist ideal came under a great deal of criticism. This shift took place even within physics, and in closely related disciplines such as chemistry, whose practitioners went on paying lip service to physical chemistry and quantum mechanical explanations for some time, but worked with a chemical theory of the atom that had many pragmatic features and few strictly deductive ones.6 Moreover, several philosophers of science identified strict limits to the applicability of deductive thinking.7 At the universities, and certainly in society at large, technology now enjoys a status equal to that of science.8 Several sciences seem to have moved to a seemingly one-sided focus on the acquisition of data, to such an extent that some have expressed a fear of “drowning in data.” Although it is tempting to be nostalgic for a healthy dose of theory, the current data revolution in the sciences poses interesting challenges of a new kind. Shifts in the relationships between the styles of science during the nineteenth and twentieth century show some correspondence to changing conceptions of the “utility” of scientific research. The Humboldtian view was that pursuing research for its own sake, “in solitude and freedom” (Einsamkeit und Freiheit), fostered a higher form of utility and contributed to the formation of individuals in the service of the state. In the period just prior to the First World War, utility was identified with technological progress and other societal payoffs, and although clearly separated from science, this changed the very meaning of “research.” The post-1945 period saw these 254 ¨ Science in the Twentieth Century new concepts gain strength, even...