FREE ESSAY ON SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE DIRECTION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE DIRECTION OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

CAN CHANGES BE MADE IN THE GOALS AND PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE BE EXPLAINED BY THE
SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS AT WORK DURING THAT TIME? 
Philosophical analysis and scientific practice: 
The arguments about these rival ontological and epistemological views cannot be safely
left or judged without first looking more closely at the complex relationship between the
general analytical interests of philosophers and the more specific intellectual concerns
of working scientists themselves. For the degree to which each view about the reality of
scientific entities and facts can carry conviction depends substantially on what branches
of science are at issue. As the focus of philosophical attention has shifted historically
from one scientific terrain to another, so, too, have the relative degrees of
plausibility of these rival positions varied. 
The formal structures of science: 
Scientific enterprise will be considered that which has dominated recent debate in the
philosophy of science, viz., the formal structures of scientific theory and the processes
of conceptual change. It will soon be clear that the philosophical problems to which
these two aspects, respectively, give rise are correlative and complementary--the one
being static, the other being dynamic. 
Since 1920, most analytical philosophers of science have explicitly based their program
on a presupposition inherited from Descartes and Plato, viz., that the intellectual
content of any natural science can be expressed in a formal propositional system, having
a definite, essential logical structure--what a leading American philosopher of science,
Ernest Nagel, concisely called the structure of science in his book of that title (1961).
One immediate inspiration of this program was the work of David Hilbert, a late
19th-century mathematician. To make the methods of mathematical proof more explicit and
more perspicuous and thus more rigorous, Hilbert employed the techniques of
formalization, a reduction to relations while disregarding the nature of the relata, and
axiomatization, a tracing of entailments back to accepted axioms.
The same techniques were taken over into the philosophy of mathematics by a pioneer
German logician, Gottlob Frege, and into symbolic logic by Bertrand Russell and his
collaborator Alfred North Whitehead; and, from 1920 on, the Viennese Positivists and
their successors attempted to employ them in the philosophy of science also, hoping to
demonstrate the validity of formal patterns of scientific inference by the
straightforward extension of methods already familiar in deductive logic.
According to the resulting program, the primary task for the philosophy of science was to
repeat in quite general terms the kind of analysis by which, in the science of mechanics,
Heinrich Hertz, the formulator of electromagnetic wave theory, had already sorted out the
formal aspects of science from its empirical aspects. The program was founded on the
expectation that it would be possible, first, to demonstrate the existence of formal
structures that were essential to any science, properly so-called, and second, to
identify the nature of scientific laws, principles, hypotheses, and observations by their
characteristic logical functions. Once this had been done, rigorous formal definitions
could then be given of validity, probability, degree of confirmation, and all of the
other evidential relations involved in the judgment of scientific arguments. 
Looking beyond the internal structure of inductive logic, the dubious equation of
scientific laws with empirical generalizations has also been criticized on the ground
that it treats the content of those laws as matters of happenstance, far more accidental
or contingent than those expressed in any genuine law of nature. In the opposing view,
the explanatory force of, say, the physicist's law of inertia is totally different from
that of such a generalizing statement as All swans are white; and one can learn nothing
about the validity of actual physical arguments unless his philosophical analysis
respects that crucial difference. It has not proved easy, however, to analyze the formal
structure of the sciences in any less abstract manner than that of the Viennese
Positivists or to give a true representation of the working language and arguments of
science. In his Essay on Metaphysics (1940), R.G. Collingwood, a British philosopher and
historian, made one striking attempt, in which the formal structure of intellectual
systems was explained in terms not of direct entailments between more or less universal
propositions but rather of mutual presuppositions between more or less general concepts.
In this account, the principle of inertia was not the most universally true assertion in
dynamics but was, rather, the most generally applicable presupposition, or principle of
interpretation. Such an account has the merit of explaining why, within a particular
science, certain formal patterns of argument carry the apparent necessity that they do;
but at the same time it lays itself open to the charge of yielding too much to relativism
and so of destroying the objectivity of scientific knowledge by giving the impression
that the conceptual structures of science are imposed on phenomena by the arbitrary
choice of the scientific theorist himself.
Processes of intellectual and conceptual change.
Conceptual change and the development of science 
The problem of conceptual change has recently come back to the fore. The crucial question
it poses is: What is a concept? In the heyday of Logical Empiricism, that question had
largely been disregarded. Following the example of Frege, the Viennese Positivists had
condemned any tendency to regard the philosophy of science as concerned with scientific
thinking--which was in their view a matter for psychologists--and had restricted
themselves to the formal analysis of scientific arguments. This preoccupation with logic
was also reflected in their view of concepts. To interpret a concept such as force as
referring either to a feeling of effort or to a mental image could lead, they argued,
only to confusion. Instead, the philosopher must equate concepts with the terms and
variables appearing in the propositional systems of science and define them, in part by
reference to their roles in the formal structures of those propositional systems--thus
fixing their systematic import--and in part by reference to the specific events and
phenomena they are used to explain--thus fixing their empirical import. In the 1920s and
1930s, accordingly, all substantive philosophical questions about the concepts of science
were dealt with summarily: they were simply translated into logical or linguistic
questions about the formal roles and empirical references of technical terms and
mathematical variables.
Viewed from this alternative standpoint, the philosophy of science will begin by
identifying the different styles of explanation characteristic of different sciences or
of different stages in a given science and will recognize how those differences in
explanatory style reflect the characteristic problems of different scientific fields and
periods. So considered, empirical generalizations and descriptive classifications will
serve to organize the empirical data of science in a preliminary way; but serious
theoretical interpretation can begin only after that point. The central philosophical
task now is to analyze, clearly and explicitly, (1) the standards by appeal to which
scientists have to decide whether or not some interpretation is legitimate, justified,
and conclusively established and (2) the considerations that justify giving up one
currently accepted interpretation in favour of an alternative, novel one.
The first of these questions is one that the Logical Empiricists set out to answer in
their own manner. They treated the empirical data and the theoretical principles of
science as being connected by purely logical relations and attempted to define the
required standards in terms of a formal theory of confirmation, corroboration, or
falsification. The second question is one that they never seriously tackled. Instead,
they assumed that one could, first, work out a quantitative index of acceptability for
individual theories taken separately and, afterward, use this as a scale for measuring
and comparing the merits of rival theoretical interpretations. By now, however, it is
evident that, when biophysicists, say, abandon one theoretical approach in favour of
another--as being more fruitful from the standpoint of biophysics--the considerations
that lead them to do so are by no means analyzable in formal terms alone. On the
contrary, the ability of a biochemist, say, to judge whether or not such a change in
approach will effectively help to solve his theoretical problems is one of the most
severe assessments of his substantive grasp of what biochemistry is about.
In this way, the shift of attention from the propositions of science to its concepts is
making philosophers more aware of the extent to which theoretical understanding involves
the reinterpretation of empirical results, not merely their formal transformation.
Similarly, the problem of conceptual change is raising questions about the processes by
which theoretical interpretations succeed one another and about the procedures of
conceptual judgment that are applied in the rational development of a science. These
questions are currently under active discussion, and several lines of attack are being
considered, none of which has finally established itself.
At one extreme, there are some who still regard theoretical concepts and principles as
organized into compact, logical systems and who attempt to define the alternative
standpoints of different sciences as the consequences of different basic premises or
presuppositions. Having adopted this systematic approach, the investigator then discovers
that conceptual change at a fundamental level finds adequate scope only through the
replacement of one complete formal system by another, distinct and separate successor
system. As a result, fundamental theoretical change is, in this view, intelligible only
as the outcome of thoroughgoing intellectual revolutions, in which one entire theoretical
system--axioms, principles, criteria of relevance, standards of judgment, and all--is
swept aside in favour of another.
Whichever alternative is adopted, one point must be kept in mind: the moment that
problems about the changing theoretical organization of science begin to be treated in an
authentically developmental manner, philosophical inquiries are given a quite new
direction. This step compels one to view all questions about the logical structure and
propositional systems of science against a broader historical background. In this new
context the natural sciences are seen not as static formal structures but as rational
enterprises characterized by certain typical intellectual procedures or movements. 
Bibliography
REFERENCES:
1) Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (1961).
2) M.W. Wartofsky, Conceptual Foundations of Scientific Thought (1968).
3) Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser (eds.), Philosophy of Science (1962).
4) Samuel B. Rapport and Helen Wright (eds.), Science: Method and Meaning (1964).
5) W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science (1981).