Arguments from Natural Science

Abstract

The successes of the natural sciences are not in doubt; our pattern of life is structured by the pursuit of science; our ordinary lives are suffused with its achievements, the cities and suburbs in which we live could not be sustained without routines and machineries built on the knowledge of natural science. The sciences are central to our form of life, they do not exist off to one side, feeding in novelties; their products underpin our form of life, their habits of thought suffuse our thinking and they provide the common paradigm of knowledge. Yet it remains a contingent historical cultural achievement. Norman Davies1 has reminded us of the nature of the world before the rise of science: the key intellectual, moral and institutional mechanism was the Church; the world was constituted in theistic terms, and the shift to our world, centrally materialist in the philosophical sense, was long drawn out, not simply a debate about ideas but a conflict about power and livelihood, the business of implanting mercantile agrarian capitalism from the sixteenth century onwards. The sciences have a place within our society and the depth of their reach within our form of life is an important issue; but it is not enough to say that science is central, the benefits obvious;because, in particular, for us, there is the question of the nature of a social science.