One of the central projects of Anglo-American philosophy was reducing, or translating, scientific statements into observation statements. Russell, (the early) Wittgenstein, Carnap, Hempel – they all sought to discover the logical connections between these seemingly related orders of description.
However, not one of them was successful.
But why should this be so difficult? What did they miss? Why did each attempt result in failure?
I offer the following as a random aggregate of suggestions to be fleshed out more fully and with greater precision later:
Misguided epistemic and metaphysical paradigms
First, all of them relied upon the Appearance vs. Reality paradigm. Consider the following example from Arthur Eddington as a prime example:
I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me — two tables, two chairs, two pens.One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial…
Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned — that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness… (1)
Since scientific descriptions were obviously the true descriptions of reality, this paradigm demanded that they view whatever was designated as “appearance” as a kind of illusion that is different from and opposed to “reality”. This meant that observation statements were, in some sense, less adequate, less true, less real.
Second, but related, is the Primary vs Secondary quality distinction. In its beginnings, in Galileo and Locke, some descriptions of the world were taken as primary, meaning that they existed independent of our experience of them. These were the quantifiable descriptions of size, dimension, and mass. In contrast, the secondary qualities were those such as color, smell, and taste, qualities which it was thought at the time were merely subjective aspects of objects that existed only for an experiencer when he was present. As such, the secondary, qualitatively described qualities were less real than the quantifiable, primary qualities. This distinction was a more contemporary form of the Appearance vs Reality distinction, though they are used somewhat interchangeably.
Third, both of the ideas above depend upon a metaphor whereby knowing is understood as looking. On this analogy, to know something about the world is to “see” what is really there by cutting through what merely “appears” to be there. We set aside aspects of the world as experienced in order to “see” the really real aspects. So, we “look” past the color in order to “see” to measure the shape.
However, each of the thinkers mentioned above acknowledged that our conscious, subjective experience is fundamental. We experience the world as a collection of sense perceptions, qualities, meanings, feelings, and so on, all of which needs to be sorted and controlled properly in order to achieve the brilliant form of mastery that is scientific knowledge.
Additionally, scientific theories begin in human experience and observation, so surely we can reconstruct the logical apparatus that allows us to so easily and implicitly move from basic observations to scientific statements.
The errors of logicism
But, in addition to employing an incorrect foundational metaphor for their epistemology and a misguided metaphysical paradigm mentioned above, they made several more errors.
First, they placed far too much emphasis on the scientific “statement,” or proposition. Yes, the proposition is the bearer of truth-values, so it seems a reasonable object of analysis for logicists to build upon. However, propositions cannot bear the weight of the entire account of science. Propositions will be the proper object of analysis for complete and final science, as Aristotle described, but not for science still on its way. (I’ve taken notes on this subject here.)
Second, those elements of our experience which were messy and imprecise such as meanings, feelings, preferences obscured scientific objectivity and had be exorcised from the scientific method by analytic philosophers’ predecessors. However, our early twentieth century thinkers took the additional step of excluding the cognitive processes that generated scientific statements from consideration as proper science.
Science was the set of true propositions and formulations that thinking produced; the thinking itself was mere psychology, rendered as the “context of discovery”, and far too variegated to be included within proper discussion of the epistemic justification of scientific statements. Because as logicists they were concerned with evaluating only the truth and merit of science as product – a perspective which makes entirely transparent their logicist fixation on propositions as the sole meaningful element of science – they relegated science as process to the flames…of empirical psychology, along with any tools and insights that sort of analysis might provide.
Third, their philosophy of language treated all linguistic formulation as description. As the later development of ordinary language philosophy would demonstrate, we do many more things with language besides describe the world. This means that there are different kinds of linguistic meaning beyond mere description. Blinded to this fact, our thinkers treated observation statements and scientific statements as though they were attempting to convey the same kind of meaning, which is not the case.
Science as refiner of ordinary experience
Upon this linguistic model is built a kind of narrative about the development of science. In the beginning, so the story goes, man was solely concerned with survival, a goal for which ordinary observation was specifically and evolutionarily designed. Since we only engaged and described medium-sized objects with practical ends in mind, ordinary experience and commonsense language meets those needs. But as our methods of gathering information improved and we came to understand that those medium-sized objects were composed of increasingly smaller-sized components which, taken in aggregate, merely appear to us as medium-sized objects, we came to recognize that science laid bear actual reality, while before we had been content with mere appearance.
Science, then, is the great refiner of ordinary, everyday experience, providing a series of error filters that focus our glaze upon what is really there to be seen.
But let’s return to our original question: if all this is the case, why did every attempt to connect science with ordinary experience through reduction of scientific statements to observations statements fail?
I think I know the answer. Most of it is spelled out above. What I’m working to spell out here is an alternative.
Notes:
- Arthur Eddington, The nature of the physical world, pp. ix – x.
Dissertating Outloud 