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  • Introduction
  • Kenneth Prewitt (bio)

the brief essay by jeremiah p. ostriker, written from the vantage point of a National Medal of Science awardee, packs an unexpected punch. Three years short of four centuries after Francis Bacon helped launched modern science by insisting on its proper methodological principles (Instauratio Magna, 1620), Ostriker, citing Galileo (as befits an astronomer) summarizes these principles. The reader nods in agreement with what is now so familiar and widespread that to imagine otherwise is not even available to us.

So far so good. But read on.

A"phenomenally successful" scientific enterprise of four centuries is at risk of losing contact with "its (perhaps too simple) methodological origins." Some will no doubt wish to dig deeply into Ostriker's parenthetical phrase, but not, I think, differ with his conclusion that "methodological introspection" is less than it was and less than it should be. He cites reasons that merit close attention, as certainly does his conclusion: the scientific enterprise needs to deliberately, self-consciously attend to "the logical basis for the scientific method."

If we are departing from Bacon, Galileo, and their seventeenth-century fellow geniuses, what will replace what is being set aside? The question is made difficult when scholarly knowledge, not just physical science (Ostriker's focus), is brought into view. We have to inquire across the Wissenschaft landscape with its methodological and theoretical pluralism.

What is the logical basis for methods attuned to our complex times? Is it robust to our self-inflicted wounds? Is it robust to the rising wave of externally imposed performance metrics? Is it robust to the privately controlled and commercially shaped information platforms [End Page 723] now changing disciplines across the scholarly landscape, platforms more attuned to patterns than causes? Whatever the "future of scholarly knowledge" means, it confronts these and many similar questions.

We seek insight from two other contributors, starting with Wolfgang Rohe. His focus on science policy more than science practices nevertheless parallels Ostriker in a critical way. Rohe too sees erosion of long-established and widely accepted beliefs that had their start two centuries after modern science got underway. Early nineteenth-century leaders gave birth to institutional and policy innovations, the better to accelerate science and scientific training alert to demands of growing industrialization. Rohe cites Wilhelm von Humboldt (1809) on the new German university:

On the whole, the state must not demand from the universities anything that relates directly and straightforwardly to the state itself, but must nurse the inner conviction that when they [the universities] achieve their final purpose, they will also fulfill the states' purposes, namely from a much more elevated perspective, one from which much more can be brought together and very different forces and levers can be applied than the state itself is capable of setting into motion.

In the same decade, but on another continent, a similar sensitivity provoked Jefferson's state sponsorship of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The curiosity of exploration should be set free, but not simply to satisfy itself. Exploration would certainly result, argued Jefferson, in discoveries beneficial to the commercial ambitions of a new America poised to conquer a continent.

The history since is well known, and carries forward (in the United States) to a freshened-up and powerfully asserted claim by Vannevar Bush on the Humboldtian principles. Bush, too, focuses on the research university and especially on federal funding for science [End Page 724] in the aftermath of World War II. Rohe carefully unpacks Bush's Science, the Endless Frontier, documenting the interconnectedness embedded in it. The "free play of free intellects" is the surest and quickest route to "national defense, economic growth, and social welfare" (see page 762). But dwell on the term "interconnectedness." Rohe observes that when science funders are especially demanding, "it is possible to soothe them with the utility narrative" (764). But if pressure is excessive, science defends itself "by recalling the curiosity narrative" (764). Rohe's insight is compelling: "we have to understand curiosity and utility as terminology employed by science itself, not as conflicting terms. The scholastic quarrels over the difference between 'use-inspired basic research' and 'pure basic research' are in fact needless" (765).

We again reach...

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