Public knowledge. An essay concerning the social dimension of science. [First ed.] 9780521095198

Table of contents :
Preface
1 What is Science?
2 Science and Non-Science
3 Scientific Method and Scientific Argument
4 Education for Science
5 The Individual Scientist
6 Community and Communications
7 Institutions and Authorities
8 Summing up

Citation preview

NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

TRENT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/publicknowledgeeOOOOzima

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE AN ESSAY CONCERNING THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF SCIENCE

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proved. R. P. FEYNMAN

PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE AN ESSAY CONCERNING THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF SCIENCE

BY

J.M.ZIMAN, F.R.S. Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Bristol

CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1968

Published by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press Bentley House, P.O. Box 92, 200 Euston Road, London, N.W. 1 American Branch: 32 East 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

© Cambridge University Press 1968

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 68-10691

Printed in Great Britain at the University Printing House, Cambridge (Brooke Crutchley, University Printer)

IN MEMORY OF A GAY AND GALLANT PHILOSOPHER AND FRIEND

NORWOOD RUSSELL HANSON 1924-1967

106993

CONTENTS Preface

page ix

1

What is Science?

2

Science and Non-Science

13

3

Scientific Method and Scientific Argument

30

4

Education for Science

63

5

The Individual Scientist

77

6

Community and Communications

102

7

Institutions and Authorities

127

8

Summing up

J43

Index

i

I49

PREFACE A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another.

adam smith

Cleopatra’s Nose, in the guise of Einstein’s Cerebral Cortex, is now somewhat discredited as the causative agent for the events of intellectual history. Explanations in terms of movements, climates of opinion, the Zeitgeist, are now prescribed. Natural Science, whose internal development for three cen¬ turies is so uniform, well-documented and relatively self-genera¬ ting, is an obvious candidate for such treatment. And having noticed the intellectual connections between the ideas of various scholars, we must surely pass on to an investigation of the social relations through which those connections are established. How do scientists teach, communicate with, promote, criticize, honour, give ear to, give patronage to, one another? What is the nature of the community to which they adhere? Surprisingly enough, when I first began to be interested in these questions, some eight years ago, I found that almost nothing had been written on the subject. There were, indeed, occasional articles in historical, sociological or professional scientific journals, but it was not until 1962 that the publication of such a collection gave the field a self-conscious identity as the Sociology of Science * Since then, it has been taken over and developed by a small group of professional scholars, mainly historians and sociologists, and the ‘literature’ is expanding at the familiar exponential rate. Nevertheless, this literature often lacks the authenticity of per¬ sonal witness. The scholarly life is sophisticated and subtle, the would-be student of sociology approaching it with notebook and tape-recorder can no more capture its flavour than a European adult can feel his way into the psychological world of the Chinese family or, for that matter, a Confucian mandarin discover the * Edited by B. Barber and W. Hirsch (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962). IX

PREFACE

inwardness of the Catholic Church. So much is unwritten, even unspoken, and follows its own rules. The original plan, therefore, conceived in the spring of 1964 as a joint work with Professor Jasper Rose, now at the University of California at Santa Cruz, was to describe the scholarly world in multifarious aspects, as we saw it in our own experience. That book is mapped out in some detail; but each of us has become so deeply involved in more specialized professional activities that we have not been able to push ahead with it as fast as we had hoped. And in the course of planning the larger work, we ran into the problem of defining the whole subject matter of our investigation; to describe ‘Science’ we had to have some notion of its essential character. My own thoughts naturally turned in the direction of a social definition, such as I had expressed in a brief essay* some years before: this was to provide the ideological basis of our argu¬ ment and the key to many explanations. But then it seemed that the unity and consistency of this somewhat novel point of view would be lost if it were deeply embedded in a grander account of academic and scientific life; as often happens even in physics, it is convenient to separate a purely theoretical, abstract and specu¬ lative line of argument from the empirical material which it exem¬ plifies and from which it is derived. It should be much easier to indicate the significance of many of the phenomena that we shall note in the larger book if we can refer specifically to the general theory set out in the present work. It also seems to me that several recent attempts at a general analysis of the social system of Sciencef have lacked just such a point of view. In order to understand how scientists interact socially, we must surely have a clear conception of what they are trying to do. Scientific research is an intensely self-conscious, de¬ liberate and rational activity, the antithesis of those traditional, semi-rationalized, almost unconscious patterns of behaviour which are the conventional objects of anthropological and sociological Science is Social’, The Listener, 18 Aug. 1960. KT tJU?' Hag^.rom’ The Sci