Pluralism and Responsibility in Post-Modern Science

Abstract

Stephen Toulmin: Having been, I suppose, the only living person to have studied at the feet of both Dirac and Wittgenstein, I retain a strong sense of the spirit of Aristotle's account of practical wisdom. That is, true progress in practical wisdom can only follow if one goes into a particular field and analyzes the nature of the problems that arise. Only in that way can one begin to understand what is mysterious, what needs explaining, and what needs investigating in the terms that are appropriate for that particular field. The idea that there is a single method for attacking scientific problems for scientists of all kinds does not get us much further than the notion that there is a single set of medical principles that will apply to all cases a physician may encounter, or a single set of moral principles that can give us answers to the human problems with which we find ourselves confronted. There is probably no one method appropriate even to inquiries in a given scientific field at different stages in its development. The recurrence of this case approach or pluralistic approach to practical wisdom as a motif in the history of philosophy is striking. Albert Jonsen of the University of California Medical School has pointed out that Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, draws a telling comparison between the tasks that a wise confessor and a prudent physician face when they seek to arrive at some moral or medical diagnosis. Aquinas says that the wise confessor, like the prudent physician, will suspend judgment until he has satisfied himself that he knows all about a particular case with which he is concerned. He will go astray if he goes into a situation with fixed ideas about what the case is and what he said about it. I find the Aquinas point of view linking moral judgment and technical (or clinical) judgment is still very much on the mark. In medicine, the question of how a physician sees a case and manages it, even in its technical aspects, requires that the human implications involved in following one course of treatment rather than another be weighed. So the practice of medicine, even in a technical sense, becomes a moral exercise. And the line between its moral and technical aspects becomes progressively blurred. I want to explore with you today how such considerations bear on differing concepts of scientific progress, why those concepts affect the question of social responsibility, and how they carry over into the activities you support at the National Science Foundation. I have been thinking about the intellectual foundations of science policy at least since Edward Shils commissioned and published a seminal series of articles in Minerva in the early 1960s.1 My concerns are not simply a by product of my interests in the philosophical aspect of the theory of science. For the question of scientific choice and the respective roles of the scientist, the administration, the electorate, and the electorates' representatives in Congress, is very much bound up with different ideas about the nature of scientific progress, and is therefore central to the mission and operation of the NSF. To understand something about how and why concepts of scientific progress have changed over the past 300 years, it is useful to reflect on some of the implications of the vast expansion in the scope of scientific inquiry since Laplace asserted at the end of the 18th century that natural philosophers could aspire to become omniscient cal-