What Makes Sciences “Scientific?”

Abstract

The first serious difficulty raised in the titular question of this chapter is that there does not seem to be a unified "science," in the singular. At least, "unity" ought to be operationalized as a variable, not fixed, in advance and a priori, as a constant property of the "nature" of science. Empirical research on the sciences suggests a manifest cultural, structural, and organizational disunity (Galison, 1997). There also are considerable differences between the frontiers of a science and its more routine or normal areas. Sciences change over time as well, and some of them, such as the locations where rapid discoveries are being made, change very quickly, with little respect or eye toward philosophical definitions, criteria, or rules of method. The evidence supports the suspicion that the unity of science is a myth and exaggeration. Significantly, the mythical properties of logic and rationality also are a core theme in neo-institutionalist theories of organizations (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). They find widespread loose coupling between formal and informal systems. Similar loose coupling exists between logic and practice of a science. There are many sciences now, and new sciences or specialties emerge all the time. Worse for unity, within a science there are specialties, clusters, and research fronts that behave in ways not necessarily consonant with unity. The sciences look more like a patchwork quilt than a logically unified pyramid. To say the sciences are historical, social, and cultural is true, but only the beginning of a problem, not its solution. Logic is a poor predictor for what an actual science does, in the here and now of its occurring and happening. What a science does is the result of its own previous operations, not its philosophy. Most active scientists are too busy to pay much attention to philosophical puzzles and enigmata. They might become more involved in philosophy once their active careers are over, or when an outside observer, such as postmodernism, appears to be saying there are no truth and objectivity in science. Major upheavals in a culture, including revolutions, also tend to generate so much uncertainty and novelty that it is hard to separate "science" from "metaphysics." A major metaphysical controversy during the Scientific Revolution opposed natural philosophers to scholastics and humanists on the question of whether any "contrived" experiments, that is, "the experiment as such," could ever be true to the essence of nature. The sciences do have philosophical dimensions, but once they become "normal," they no