SCST/HSCI 101 Class #2

Bronowski 1 & 2

• Truth is the daughter of time, relativistic, yet still "objective"
• (yet) "Truth emerges more readily from error than confusion."
• Veneration of past scientists, despite their errors
• Controversy notwithstanding
• Knowledge is power: Francis Bacon
• Principle of Parsimony: Occam's razor; the Primer Syndrome
  • both Methodological and Metaphysical
• Epistemology: how we know what we know
• creativity as the discovery of unity in variety or diversity, or the discovery of hidden likenesses
  • [set inclusion / exclusion]. The Joke as model.
• Science = the organization of knowledge so as to command more of the hidden potential of Nature.
• Comment: Why "potential"? "hidden"? implications for method? metaphysics?
• also "all science is the search for hidden likenesses" [13]
• metaphysics - define? give examples?
• objectivity and intersubjective verifiability;
• Multiplicity of responses to art vs. relatively restricted range of responses to scientific creativity
  • [connotative vs. denotative??].
• Newton and the apple.
• Intellectual [scientific] property vested by sharing, not hiding.
• context of discovery; context of justification
• Question: Do scientists "invent" or "discover"?
• logical positivism and operationalism
• Central proposition of book?
  • the practice of science compels formation of a fundamental set of universal values.

  Question: "To abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards" what? What might this answer indicate about B's opinion of scientific literacy?

Bronowski 3

• Does the practice of science require certain values, and inculcate them in the scientist?
  What connection do ethics and science have?
  Problems and values derive from what? [55]
  B's concept of values? [55]
  • [join persons, preserve individuals]
• [p. 60: inescapable conditions for science's practice]
• What is positivism? analytic philosophy?
  • [true only if physically testable; context and use dependent meaning]
• What fallacy limits the positivist and analyst? [57]
  • [knowledge is not essentially communal - B believes that all knowledge is communally constructed.]
• What social axiom is implied in positivist and analyst methods? [58]
  • [OUGHT act to make IS verifiable]
• What holds scientists together? [59]
• Which values does B. argue spring from practice of science?
  • [60ff] [independence, originality, dissent; free inquiry/speech, tolerance, freedom, respect, justice, honor]
• Must the society of scientists be a democracy? [62]
• Is B's picture of science static [knowledge, mechanism] or dynamic [process, search]? [63]
• Bronowski seems to think that a virtue of science is that it has done away with the distinction between ends and means.
  • What do you think are the relative virtues or negatives of :maintaining the ends-means distinction?
  • eliminating the ends-means distinction?
• What's B. think of the idea of the ethical neutrality of science? [64]
  • [facts are, activity is not] - What do you think?
• Is it true that "Science honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares?" [68]
• Is it true that ethics have stopped since Spinoza?
• Has science humanized our values? [70]
• Has science "created the values of our intellectual life"? [73]