Scientific Thought: Some Underlying Concepts, Methods and Procedures (review)

Leonardo, Vol. 7, pp. 269-282. Pergamon Press 1974. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to reconintend books to be reviewed. Only books in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Those who would like to be added to Leonardo’s panel of reviewers should write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests. Scientific Thought: Some Underlying Concepts, Methods and Procedures. Mouton/Unesco, Paris, 1972. 252 pp., illus. $15.00. Reviewed by Michael J. Apter* ‘Interdisciplinary concepts in contemporary science’ would have been a more helpful title to this book. It deals with a number of those exciting ideas, currently much in the air, which disclose formal similarities underlying a range of superficiallydissimilar phenomena across a variety of fields. In particular, it deals in the main with concepts that relate to complex systems and structures of the kind one finds in such fields as biology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, business management and computer engineering. The book consists of a set of essays, each specially written by a distinguished contributor and spirited together by an anonymous editor. The fundamental concept of structure is written about by Piaget and that of system by Mesarovic. The even more fundamental concept of sets is discussed in the introductory chapter by Mostowski. Other concepts dealt with are symmetry (Abdus Salam), sign (Tondl), information (Watanabe), model (Stachowiak) and optimation (Kaufmann). In addition there are chapters on game theory (Vorobyev), language (Bar-Hillel), management in cybernetic terms (Beer) and metatheory (Bunge). Between them these chapters throw light on each other in various ways and show something of the complex interplay of the concepts concerned-not only with each other but also with the various concrete situations they have been used to analyse and with approaches to a number of philosophical problems. Unfortunately, little guidance appears to have been given to contributors about the intended readership of the book and, therefore, there is some variation in the level of difficulty of the different chapters. Some chapters, for example, the chapter on signs, will be understood by any general reader of sufficient intelligence; others, like the chapter on models, are more specialised and will be impossible to understand without certain mathematical and logical skills. It must also be said that the chapters are not uniformly well written. Thus, Stafford Beer’s chapter is up to his usual high standard of lucidity, while Jean Piaget’s chapter is quite unnecessarily difficult to follow. A minor irritation is the absence of an index, particularly because many topics come back again and again and are treated from different perspectives and in different contexts throughout the book, e.g. homoestasis, theory of groups. However, this is an authoritative work that is much to be welcomed, especially since there is no other book of a comparable kind at present available. Although art is hardly mentioned at all as such, the perceptive reader will realize the relevance to art of many of the ideas discussed. Apart from this, the book may prove invaluable to those artists in all fields who feel that to function fully, they need to be sensitive to the intellectual forces shaping their time. Science as Metaphor: The Historical Role of Scientific Theories in Forming Western Culture. Richard Olson. Wadsworth, Belmont, Calif., 1971. 321 pp. Reviewed by Peter T. Landsberg* In an elegant sweep Richard Olson encourages his readers to move from physics to philosophy via psychology, politics, art, religion and the contemporary cult of antiscience . He achieves this notable feat by reprinting 25 essays, sections of books etc. that range over these fields but are classified into eight reasonably homogeneous sections to each of which he provides a brief introduction. Nothing with which the mind of man concerns itself has been untouched by scientific thought-of that one is reasonably convinced when one has finished the book. Olson does not attempt to give credit only to the better known living writers: he offers some Hobbes and some Zola and among recent studies seeks out some little known articles such as Hiebert on Thermodynamics and religion (Daedalus 95, 1046 (1966)). It is a very worthwhile book. A caricature of the message carried by the book is perhaps...