INFORMAL RATIONALITY

Informal scientific rationality was clearly depicted in the works of those proponents of the revolutionary advancement of science, like Kuhn and Feyerabend. This view of scientific rationality claims that standards of rationality change over time. Such standards are mutable. They change with the change of scientific beliefs. In fact, no standard or method in science is insulated from the periodic changes that occur in science. Hence, it is not logical to accept the existence of super scientific standards which survive the revolutions in sciences, and consequently permit continuity within science. Neither are there such standards which demarcate genuine science from pseudo-science. Most critics of this view of scientific rationality have often tagged it as irrationalistic and predominately heretical conception of the scientific rationality.

The most interesting thing about the informal scientific rationality is that it provides for methodological pluralism in science unlike the methodological monism that is implicit in formal scientific rationality. In order to understand this view of science rationality, one must also understand the distinction between methodology and meta-methodology.

In the parlance of the history and philosophy of science, a methodology for scientific rationality is a theory of rationality: it tells us what is rational and what is not in specific cases. Thus, the rule ¨Always accept the theory with the greatest degree of confirmation¨ would count as (part of) a methodology. On the other hand, a meta-methodology provides us with the standards by which we evaluate the theories of rationality that constitute our methodologies (be it falsifiability or confirmability).

Informal scientific rationality is, primarily, defined by the meta-methodology. It accepts the claim that a good theory of rationality must fit the history of science. Invariably, the

best theory of rationality is the one that maximizes the number of rational episodes in the history of science (subject to some filtering out of sociologically infected episodes).

This tendency to define scientific rationality by appealing to history of science is generally denoted as historicism.

3.2.2.1 HISTORICIST THEORY OF SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY

Thomas Kuhn´s (1970) work effects three major great changes in the study of scientific rationality. First, it brought history to the fore. This is, in fact, the most important aspect of the transformation he brought, though following a path already established by Alexandre Koyré and Herbert Butterfield. The vital revelation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that a respectable theory of rational scientific procedure must conform to the greater part of actual scientific procedure. Unarguably, scientists do their work in the context of groups of various sizes, from the research teams in their own laboratories to community of scientists working on similar projects, and to the overall scientific community.

Scientists operate within the context of a wider community with shared societies, journals, and conferences. Therefore the question of the rationality of science can be raised for groups as well as individuals: What is it for a group of scientists to be collectively rational, and are such groups generally rational? Second, instead of assuming that scientific theories were the units of rational evaluation, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was based on a unit that could persist through minor theoretical changes. Hence, it could distinguish between revisions and wholesale rejection. Kuhn called this unit ¨the paradigm¨. This unit is subsequently identified as the research programme, the research, the global theoretical unit etc. as one could find in the historicist theories of scientific rationality by Imre Lakatos and Larry Laudan. Third, the work highlighted the real problems that historically conscious accounts of rationality face: when all is said and done, there may be no trans-historical rule for rational scientific procedure. For Kuhn, scientific change—from one ´paradigm´ to another—is

a mystical conversion which is not and cannot be governed by rules of reason and which falls totally within the realm of the (social) psychology of discovery.²⁶³

It is at this extreme that historicism most times descends into triviality, as the Marxist historiography of the scientific revolution has been accused of. In such situation scientific explanations are viewed as social events, speech acts, which take place in a certain social context. For instance the Hermeticist and Puritan reinterpretation of the scientific revolution tend to focus on the complex social interactions that inevitably surround and infuse the generation of scientific knowledge. Hence, ´instead of looking at scientific theories as abstract objects, historians examine how science changes, revealing the human dimension of science.´²⁶⁴Steven Shapin wrote thus,

If we want ultimately to understand the appeal of mechanical metaphors in the new scientific practices (referring to the science that ensued from the events of the scientific revolution)…we shall ultimately have to understand the power relations of an early modern European society whose patterns of living, producing, and political ordering were undergoing massive changes as feudalism gave way to early capitalism.²⁶⁵

Traditionally, scientific rationality was structurally construed on appeal to mechanical metaphors in science. Such metaphors alludes that the physical realities contain ´matters of fact´ which exhibit some regularities that can be properly represented in theories.

These theories represent the laws of nature derived from a number of facts. Nature was like a clock: man could be certain of its effects, of the hours shown by its hands; but the mechanism by which these effects were produced, the clock-work, might be various.²⁶⁶ This type of scientific reasoning shows that theories are confronted with facts; and one of the central conditions of scientific reasoning is that theories must be supported by

263 Imre Lakatos, ¨Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,¨ in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. Imre Lakatos & Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1970) p. 93

264Thomas Hardy Leahey, A History of Psychology, 6^th ed. (New Jersey: Pearson) 2004[1980], p. 14 265Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 33

266 Steven Shapin, ¨¨Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle´s Literary Technology, ¨ in The Scientific Revolution. ed. Marcus Hellyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) p. 76

facts. However, any genuine scientist can easily demonstrate today that there can be no valid derivation of a law or nature from any finite number of facts. Isaac Newton claimed to have deduced his laws from the ´phenomena´ provided by Kepler. He even boasted not to be uttering mere hypotheses: ¨hypotheses non fingo¨ ( I feign no hypothese).²⁶⁷ He himself thought that he proved his laws from facts. But this was false, since according to Kepler, planets move in ellipses, but according to Newton´s theory, planets would move in ellipses only if the planets did not disturb each other in their motion. We know that planets do that. This is why Newton had to devise a perturbation theory from which it follows that no planet moves in an ellipse.

History of science, therefore, shows that it is implausible to base the justification of scientific rationality on the mechanical metaphors. It means another platform for such justification has to be sought. But then, if scientific rationality does not derived from those mechanical metaphors it means that the structure of the early modern science was absolutely not different with its predecessor. In fact, it is one of the more profound ironies of the history of thought that the growth of mechanical science, through which arose the idea of mechanism as a possible philosophy of nature, was itself an outcome of the Renaissance magical tradition.²⁶⁸

3.2.2.2 HISTORY AND SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY

The major insight the theses of scientific revolution in the previous chapter proffer is that a comprehensive theory of scientific rationality is lacking in the traditional conception of scientific progress. Rationality itself has a history and it is constituted by that history. They imply that in our way up from the dark, from man´s first stumbling experiments with artefacts to its most sophisticated instruments of listening to the

267 The passage occurs in the final General Scholium of Newton´s Principia (1687). The English translation by Francis Motte (1729) states it thus, ¨Hitherto we have explained the phenomena of the heavens and of our sea by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power…I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses [hypotheses non fingo]; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis;

and hypotheses whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy¨. Culled from Toni Vogel Carey (2012) ¨Hypothese Non Fingo¨, in Philosophy Now, 20-23, p.20

268Francis Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2010[1972]), p.150

rumblings of remote galaxies, our species homo sapiens has reached out into its environment and moulded through its praxis the complex cognitive apparatus that many today take as given. But the unfolding of history at every stage entered into and decisively shaped the scientific and philosophical thought process itself. There are no non-contextual, ahistorical norms. Nor is there any need for any. There is no truth standing above history or beyond history. History is all there is. There is nothing in any of this that should undermine our confidence in scientific rationality. Quite the contrary!

The fact that our canons of rationality are historically forged should not make us conclude that they are groundless, but should highlight for us how well grounded they actually are. This is for the reason that they represent the embodiment of centuries of striving, of trial and error, of continuous refinement of our cognitive apparatus.

Definitely, scientific knowledge has its base in this process.

Historicity does not imply irrationality, arbitrariness, groundlessness, discontinuity, incommensurability, deconstruction or hyper-reflexivity. It most certainly does not rule out differential assessment of conflicting claims to knowledge, of rival theories and paradigms. Rather it requires it. The historical process by which our embodied knowledge and our criteria for what is to count as knowledge have come to us has been one marked by constant differential assessment of alternatives and continual testing of alternative methods of differential assessment of alternatives. It is to the test of this embodied experience, socio-historically evolved, that we bring every new experience and move our own thinking and even the history of ideas onward. Generally, controversies on the nature of scientific rationality are motived by its implicit justification of scientific truth.