Two Cultures of Science: The Limits of Positivism Revisited

On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture . . . a new way of living together among men.

—Ignazio Silone,
The God that Failed—concluding remarks (1949)

Were it not linguistically awkward, I would be inclined to entitle these remarks a discourse on what went wrong with the love affair of policy-makers, academic pundits, and hard-core positivists with the world of science. In the nineteenth century, science was as identified with progress as bacon is with eggs. This optimism has given way to a pandemic mistrust of science by all sorts of elites. Popular displeasure became transparently evident in the waning decades of the twentieth century. Mistrust of science has only deepened in the first years of the new millennium. The ease with which scientific products are converted into destructive weaponry only partially accounts for the new skepticism about conventional claims. Unanticipated negative human consequences of actual discoveries in areas ranging from genetic engineering to wireless communication are at least as important an element in popular concerns. Nonetheless, professional assertions about the benefits of science continue unabated. Peter Watson in his fine recent survey, The Modern Mind, in which he asserts science as such "provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived," typifies these claims.¹ The limitation in this by no means unusual formulation is that few people are actually involved in the life of science, while many are affected by applications of scientific work that often have indeterminate or, even worse, destructive consequences.

Despite popular unease, scientists themselves seem to have retained a lively sense of optimism about the work they do and the products their work yields. In her new book, Making Sense of Life, Evelyn Fox Keller speaks about how biologists work: "Often we want more: we want the sense that we have understood a process or phenomenon, the feeling that we have brought it within our conceptual grasp. And for many it is just this sense of cognitive mastery that computability has traditionally promised."² In an equally exquisite book on the history of chemistry, Paul Strathern details the search for principles as such. "Darwin had discovered that all life forms progressed by evolution. And two centuries earlier Newton had discovered that the universe worked according to gravity. The chemical elements were the linchpin between the two. The discovery of a structure here would do for chemistry what Newton had done for physics and Darwin for biology. It would reveal the blueprint of the universe."³ Strathern goes beyond Darwin and Newton alike in his claims for the universal impact of such admittedly extraordinary discoveries.

Social reformers have been quick to follow suit. Marx envisioned doing for society what Newton had done for physics, what Darwin had done for biology, and what Mendeleyev had sought to achieve in his Periodic Table for chemistry: providing a blueprint for the social universe. The early history of socialism, like capitalism before it, was tied directly to the rise of science as a purposive goal, a Western way of life, and not simply a series of formal operations. Indeed, this utopian vision of science as a blueprint for society lasted deep into the twentieth century. Scientism displaced science as a working code of radical analysis. The foremost Marxist journal in the United States was entitled (although it is no longer identified with Marxist principles) Science & Society. In its early years, the journal gave considerable space to problems of social structure and scientific advancement. All sorts of discourse on supposed bases and super-structures found their way into a journal dedicated not simply to reflecting upon but also to fostering the place of science in society. Indeed, it envisioned dialectical materialism as the core science of society, much as relativity theory was thought of as the basis of the science of physics. What the pioneers of communist theory did not appreciate in modern science is the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation, the difference between the similar, even uniform, outcomes of experimentation...