The evolutionary development of natural science.

Abstract

around 1600 a.d. until a generation ago?all aspects of the world in turn came under the scientist's scrutiny : the stars and the earth, living creatures and their fossil remains, atoms and cells, chickadees and chimpanzees, primitive societies and mental disorders. I say all aspects, but it would be more exact to say nearly all. For, through out this period, one thing was generally exempted from the scope of scientific inquiry: although with the passage of time many aspects of human behavior came to be studied from different points of view?so giving rise to the new sciences of ethnology, anthropology, sociology, and abnormal psychology?the activities of the scientist himself were not normally considered a suitable object for scientific study and anal ysis. Right through the nineteenth century, any suggestion of a of would have struck men as a kind of l?se-raison. The business of science (it was thought) is to study the causes of phenomena; whereas science itself, as a rational activity, presumably operated on a higher level, and could not be thought of as a natural phenomenon. More recently, this self-denying ordinance has been somewhat relaxed. Twentieth-century science is less committed than the science of earlier centuries to explaining its phenomena in terms of rigid, mech anistic, cause-and-effect ideas. As a result, some of the restrictions earlier placed on scientific inquiries have been weakened, and the nature and working of science itself have been analyzed from various different points of view. Let me begin by reminding you about three of these lines of attack, which have up to now been followed largely indepen dently.