Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 15:51:18 -0700
Subject: BHA: rts2-34


The Logic of Scientific Discovery 185


4.  THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE BY MEANS OF
KNOWLEDGE


The basic conception of scientific activity that I have
been concerned to advance here is that is (consists in or
involves) *work*.  Science, I have argued, must be conceived
as an ongoing process of transformation, continually or
essentially in motion, in an attempt to capture
(i.e. penetrate and describe) the stratification of the
world.  The logical structure of work is Aristotelian.  It
depends, in particular, upon the co-presence in any given
productive episode of both a material and an efficient
cause.  Science operates on given materials, including
pre-existing theory and antecedently established facts,
with given materials, i.e. by means of an ensemble of
intellectual and technical tools (including among the
former paradigms, models, metaphors and analogies),
producing new theories and facts.


     Science is produced by the imaginative and
disciplined work of men on what is given to them.  But
the instruments of the imagination are themselves
provided by knowledge.  Thus knowledge is produced by
means of knowledge.  The objects from, and by, which
knowledge is generated are thus always themselves social
products (as is the knowledge generated).  Thus science
as a process is always entirely intrinsic to `thought'.
However, by perception and experiment access to objects,
viz. things and causal structures, existing independently
of thought may be obtained.58  And of such objects
knowledge may be achieved.  Science is not an
epiphenomenon of nature, for knowledge possesses a
material cause of its own kind.  But neither is nature a
product of man, for the intelligibility of the scientific
activities of perception and experiment presupposes the
intransitive and structured character of the objects of
knowledge, viz. that they exist and act independently of
the operations of men and the patterns of events alike.


 58 As the immediate objects of perception are normally
assumed to be short events or momentary states,
perceptual access to things presupposes a resolution of
the problem of induction (to be discussed in paragraph 6
below).


186 A Realist Theory of Science


       Thus science, I have argued, presupposes the
ontological independence and the possible disjuncture of
the domains of the real, the actual and the empirical at
every stratum or level of reality.  At each stratum
scientists attempt to identify the entities responsible
for what happens at the less fundamental stratum (their
point of departure) and describe *their* normic behaviour.
But knowledge of existence, I have argued, cannot be
identified with demonstration of it.  Causal powers, for
example, can only be known, not shown to exist.  Hence
if, as I have suggested there are grounds for supposing,
the ultimate entities in any one branch of science are
bare powers, they must necessarily be undemonstrable.
However, under certain conditions, some states of things
may be perceived, unaided or with the help of
sense-extending equipment; and some causes may be
demonstrated indirectly, i.e. through the ostension of
their effects.  But for an existential or a dispositional
claim to be confirmed or corroborated the states (or
effects) and behaviour must be recognised or identified
as being of the asserted type.  Hence in general two
kinds of criteria, viz. demonstrative and recognitive,
must be satisfied for such a claim to be granted.
Because the theoretical and technical conditions under
which such claims are made (and criteria elaborated) are
themselves developing, our knowledge may be extended; and
because they may be falsified if the criteria are not met
(or revised) our knowledge may be corrected.


     The paradoxical air of talking of the correction of
knowledge vanishes once the demand for extra-theoretical
truth and intertheoretical synonymity is rejected.
Progress, I shall contend, can be shown to have occurred
but only from some particular position, some specific
vantage point, as it were, in theoretical time.


     Science is explanatory, not simply descriptive.
Explanation is achieved by reference to enduring
mechanisms.  Such mechanisms exist as the powers of
things and act independently of the conditions that
enable us to identify them.  Thus there is a direct link
between the dynamic realist thesis that the things and
causal structures of nature not only exist but act
independently of men and the conception of science as a
social activity sui generis in which both the facts and
the conjunctions that, when attainable, provide the
empirical grounds for causal laws are


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 187


seen as social products.  In classical empiricism, in a
subtle interchange, these ideas are crossed: so that
facts and their conjunctions appear as naturally given
and things and causal structures as experiences of men.
(In transcendental idealism, the former is seen as in
part imposed by, and the latter as unknowable to, men.)
Now the identification of the conditions of (knowledge
of) being with the conditions of experience in empirical
realism leaves `theory' with a very uncertain status.  For
it must be either reduced to, or grounded a priori in
some necessary condition of, experience; so that it is
either reducible or immutable.  For transcendental
realism theory is both irreducible and mutable.  It is
always there and liable to change, as part of our
socially innate intellectual endowment.  It is this
endowment that we must draw upon as we attempt to deepen
our knowledge of the way things are and act in the world;
and in so doing we can continually add to and modify it.
The existence of this stock, as a layered structure, is a
necessary feature of any human cognitive situation; so
knowledge can never be seen as a function of individual
sense-experience.


     The necessity for a scientific training shows that
knowledge is a social product and cannot be conceived as
purely individual acquisition.  For it always stands to
the individual as something that must be acquired to be
used (for scientific work).  That science is ongoing
implies that some individuals do so.  Knowledge shares a
feature common to many social products then: namely that
though it exists only in virtue of human activity, it is
irreducible to the acts of men.  For any cognitive act to
be possible there must be a material cause; some
knowledge established, given to us, already produced.  No
sum of individual cognitive acts can yield knowledge, for
the first member of the series would already presuppose
it.  Experience is, on the other hand, susceptible to a
purely individualistic analysis; `mass experience' is
clearly derivative and analysable as `the experiences of
masses of individuals'.  It can thus be seen that
underpinning empirical realism is an epistemological
individualism.  That knowledge is not analysable in terms
of individual experiences does not imply that it is not
analysable in terms of experience.  But that the latter
is the case can be seen by reflecting upon the
consideration that the antecedent cognitive situation of
the individual would have at the very least to contain
one theoretical


 188 A Realist Theory of Science


conjecture, viz. that there were experiences of others.
Assuming that the category of experience was allowed to
apply intersubjectively, if all terms were explicitly
(ostensively or operationally) defined all truths would
be analytic and all falsehoods contradictory, as a claim
about the facts would be implicit in the meaning of every
theoretical conjecture, so that the point of appealing to
experience would be lost; and theory would be incapable
of growing and developing.  In short, if antecedently
established knowledge is to be capable of functioning as
a material cause, the layered stock must contain some
terms not completely definable in terms of experience;
i.e. it must consist of a web of empirical and
theoretical ideas.


     Recent work establishing that science has a
transitive (or sociological) dimension and some facts
about its nature has been widely regarded as
shocking.  That science is a social activity which shares
many of the characteristics of, and does not exist in
isolation from others; that it depends upon a whole
complex of institutions, some of which have little
interest in knowledge `for its own sake'; and that in
particular circumstances its fortunes can depend upon the
accidents of particular men raises serious moral and
political questions.  Moreover there are some
particularly disturbing features about current science.
One need only invoke, from the recent literature, the
epithets of entrepreneurial science and shoddy science,
reckless science and dirty science,59 government
science60 and mob science,61 repressive science,
Stalinist science and their anodyne anarchist science62
to appreciate this.  However these problems do not flow
from the social character of science per se, i.e. the
mere existence of a transitive dimension, but from the
present character of its social character.  The
realization that science has social problems could only
be shocking if one had been tacitly viewing it, in the
style of Hume, as a kind of behavioural


 59 J. R. Ravetz, op. cit., esp. pp. 47-59.


 60 N. Chomsky, `Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship',
*American Power and the New Mandarins*, pp. 23-129.


 61 K. R. Popper, `Normal Science and Its Dangers',
*Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge*, eds. I. Lakatos
and A. Musgrave, pp. 51-8.


 62 P. K. Feyerabend, `Against Method', *Minnesota Studies
in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. IV*, eds. M. Radner and
S. Winokur, pp. 17-130.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 189


response to the stimulus of given facts and their
conjunctions.  This is the positivist concept of
behaviourist or automatic science.  It is a concept which
can itself be used to disguise embarrassing facets and
rationalize the practice of a science.


     Recognition of the transitive dimension implies that
scientific beliefs can no longer be distinguished by
their content.  For experiences and the facts they
generate must now be viewed as socially produced and what
is socially produced is socially changeable.  There are
no absolutely privileged statements.  The application of
the category `empirical' becomes relative and
theory-dependent.  Hence it cannot be used, without a
degree of circularity, to establish the scientificity of
one class of statements with respect to another.
Knowledge, viewed as a transitive process, has no
foundation - only a structure in time.  The sciences have
histories, which like all histories are characterized by
both continuity and change; and in which, as in all
histories, certain events stand out retrospectively as
especially significant, e.g. the discovery of oxygen, the
publication of *The Origin of the Species*, the
Michelson-Morley experiment.  (Later we shall have to
inquire into the grounds for their significance.)


     Now the fact that scientists do not possess a
special attitude or a superior morality does not mean
that science does not have a rationality of its own.  Nor
does the fact that scientific beliefs cannot be
distinguished by their content imply that scientific
activities cannot be distinguished by their structure or
their aim.  There are two errors here: the first is to
suppose that science is not a social activity in the
fullest sense (exactly what this entails we have yet to
see).  The second is to suppose that it is not equally a
social activity, quite unlike any other, sui generis:
namely a social activity whose aim is the production of
the knowledge, with the cognitive tools at its disposal,
of the enduring and transfactually active mechanisms of
the production of phenomena in nature.


     In paragraph 3 I described science as the systematic
attempt to capture the stratification of the world.  Only
the concept of a real stratification allows us to sustain
the idea of scientific progress, in a way which is both
non-inductivist and consistent with the possibility of
scientific change.  Knowledge of new strata does not
dissolve, though it may occasion a correction of,
knowledge of old strata.  Nor does it render the less
fundamental strata


 190 A Realist Theory of Science


illusory.  We do not need the metaphor to which so many
writers have found it necessary to resort in order to
reconcile progress with change: viz. that of an
asymptotic approach to the truth.


     Two fallacies must be most assiduously avoided.  The
first is to suppose that science grows but does not
change.  The second is to suppose that science changes
but does not grow.  It is the fact that science grows,
i.e. that in the transitive process of science new strata
and dimensions (or branches) of reality are discovered,
that means that scientific change can be accommodated as
a fact of history without sacrificing the idea of
scientific progress.  But progress can only be shown to
have occurred from some substantive theoretical
standpoint or position.  There is no Archimedean point
outside theoretical time.  But knowledge changes as it
grows.  For knowledge at a new level may lead to a
revision, correction or modification of knowledge at the
previous level.  For what is explained is never the
`pure' phenomena, but always the phenomena read in a
certain way: i.e. facts.  The scientist seeks to describe
the mechanisms generating the phenomena; but the results
of his activity belong to the social world of science,
not the intransitive world of things.  Does this mean
that it is wrong to talk of the scientist explaining
events describing mechanisms, etc.?  No: provided we
remember that what is explained in any concrete
scientific episode is always the event known under a
particular description.  This does not mean that the
event is, or that we must think of it as if it were its
description.  On the contrary, the ontological
independence of the event is a condition of the
intelligibility of its description.  But here, as
elsewhere, it is the task of philosophy to analyse
concepts, such as that of an event, which can only be
used syncategorematically in science.


     Scientific activity is continuous.  This has meant
that `refutations' have normally taken the form of
`replacements'.  Now it has been pointed out that cases
of both `inconsistency' and `meaning-change' can be drawn
from the history of the sciences.  For example, Newtonian
physics corrected Kepler's and Galileo's laws;63 and the
concepts of `mass' employed in classical dynamics and the
theory of relativity are radically


 63 See e.g. P. Duhem, op. cit., Chaps. 9 and 10, or
K. R. Popper, `The Aim of Science', Objective Knowledge,
Chap. 5.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 191


different.64  Now given that these are the most obvious
ways in which scientific changes occur, great care must
be taken about the way in which they, and their
relationship, are formulated.  Kuhn, Feyerabend, and
others, have claimed that theories may be so radically
different in meaning as to be literally
`incommensurable'.  To this there is the obvious
objection that if they were literally incommensurable,
i.e. shared no elements of meaning in common, it is
difficult to see how scientists could have had grounds
for preferring one to another.  It is clear that at the
moment of `falsification', when one theory is replaced by
another, some elements of meaning must be shared in
common.65  But that the subsequent divergent development
of the theories may result in their eventually becoming
`incommensurable'.  So that `inconsistency' and
`incommensurability' refer to distinct moments of the
scientific process.66  (Something similar must be true of
the normal process of education.)


     Theory without experiment is empty.  Experiment
without theory is blind.  But in the historical
development of the sciences experiment and theory are
often out of step.  Michelson and Morley did not see
their experiment as a refutation of the other, and
Michelson never in fact relinquished his belief in it.67
On the other hand Prout's hypothesis could not be
vindicated until the invention of physical techniques of
chemical separation, a


 64 See P. K. Feyerabend, `Problems of Empiricism',
op. Cit., pp. 168-71, and T. S. Kuhn, op. cit.,
pp. 100-1.


 65 I have already suggested in paragraph 3 above the
role that the concept of powers might play here.


 66 It is his failure to see this that I think leads
Feyerabend into error.  For he wants to say (a) that
there is bound to come a time when the `alternatives' do
not share a single statement (including observation
statement) in common, yet (b) we could still `choose'
between the theories, viz. in terms of the uninterpreted
sentences that the scientists testing them would be
motivated to produce in observational contexts, op. cit.,
pp. 214-5.  Now what is objectionable about this
suggestion is not only that such uninterpreted sentences
could never provide *grounds* for a choice
(cf. e.g. D. Shapere.  `Meaning and Scientific Change',
Mind and Cosmos, ed. R. G. Colodny, p. 61) but also the
idea that we could ever be in a position to make such a
choice.  For this involves the hypostatisation of a whole
historical process of meaning-change and its
encapsulation in a single notional moment of
judgement.  In this way it involves a relapse back to the
pre-relativistic notion that we can make judgements
outside some particular theory and some particular
position in theoretical time.


 67 Cf. I. Lakatos, op. cit., pp. 159-65.


 192 A Realist Theory of Science


century after its formulation.  It is not just the
experimental results but what is done with them that
counts.  On the other hand, the nonfulfilment of
experimental expectations can always be explained in
terms of the deficiency of experimental techniques.


     Scientific activity is itself differentiated into
periods or better `phases' (so as not to identify them
with chronological time): viz. into (a) phases of
discovery and/or change and (b) phases of r
application.  Both are necessary.  I use these
characterizations in preference to the emotive and
somewhat misleading terms `revolutionary' and
`normal'.  (a) consists in the production of the knowledge
of a new stratum or level and/or the radical revision of
knowledge at the current one.  This is often preceded by
the hint or glimpse of a new level or by a crisis induced
by the proliferation of anomalous facts of a particularly
disturbing kind.  The discovery of X-rays illustrates
both these facets.  Indeed Lord Kelvin initially thought
that Roentgen had devised an elaborate hoax.68  (b)
consists in the application of the discovery and/or
change to account for (and perhaps correct) currently
established facts and generate new ones.


     Needless confusion has been engendered by the
failure to distinguish models, theories, paradigms, etc.
Very roughly, a theory is a model with existential
commitment; that is, a model conceived, and meant to be
taken, as true; i.e. a model in which the entities
posited and mechanisms described are conceived as real.
It is relatively easy for the scientist to invent models,
but much more difficult for him to construct theories.
There were several models of the aether, but never a
satisfactory theory of it.  Diagram 3.7 illustrates a
schema for the development of science.  A general
conceptual scheme (abbreviated here to G.C.S.) or
metaphysical framework, such as that provided by atomism,
`begets' (logically, not temporally) a research
programme, such as that associated with the attempt to
explain phenomena by reference to the primary qualities
of matter.  The research programme in turn generates a
theory and/or a sequence of theories either intended for
different fields (or different strata) and/or in
competition with and replacing each other.  At the centre
of theory-construction is the process of model-building
and technical innovation required for the empirical
testing of


 68 Cf. T. S. Kuhn, op. cit., p. 59.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 193


the various models.  These levels are never in complete
harmony.  Some hypotheses, seemingly necessitated by the
facts, are always out of line with the theory generating
the facts.  Gravity, for example, could never be
assimilated to the corpuscularian metaphysical paradigm.


     Puzzles or problems are the concrete working data of
the scientist.  His immediate task is their clarification
and resolution.  For this he must use the tools he has at
his disposal: established results, facts, and theories,
promising hypotheses and half-tried


Diagram 3.7.  The Internal Structure of Science

C.G.S.________________________________________________________
  |                                                   ^
  |                                                   |
  v                                                   |
  Research Programme_________________________________ | ______
              |                                       |
              v                                       |
        Sequence of                                   |
        Theories   ................._________________ | _______
                          ^                 ^         |
                          |                 |         |
         (a) `non-normal'_|                 |         |
              science                       |         |
                         (b) `normal'_______|         |
                             science                  |
                                               Critical Science


Nb. so called `non-normal' science corresponds to phase
(a) viz. of discovery and change: in it models are
invented and subjected to empirical tests with the aim of
theory construction.
    so called normal' science corresponds to phase (b)
viz. of application: in it puzzles generated by phase (a)
are resolved.
    the structure of theory-construction:
models + facts + theories + techniques [within G.C.S. +
Res. Prog.] --> new theories.
    the structure of
puzzle-solving: facts + theories + techniques +
methodological (and heuristic) paradigms --> resolution
of puzzles.
    critical science has no formal structure but
may call into question any level, including established
theories, successful research programmes and even the
G.C.S. or metaphysical framework, leading to the
replacement or development of theory, research programme
or G.C.S. (e.g. Mach, Einstein).


 194 A Realist Theory of Science


(or forgotten) ideas, the available formal and technical
equipment and usually some methodological (or heuristic)
paradigm, concretely embodied perhaps in some exemplary
piece of work.  It is because such paradigms are shared
that there are intersubjective criteria for assessing
the scientific adequacy of his work.  The scientist's
work normally takes place within a definite institution,
a disciplinary matrix and is governed by what some
continental writers have called the problematic of his
science (that is, roughly the structured field within
which alone meaningful questions can be asked or problems
posed, expressing the dominant theoretical concerns of
the time).  The research programme may have its own
methodological paradigm, such as Newton's *Principia* or
Durkheim's *Suicide*.  Now if the problems generated by
work at phase (a) cannot be resolved by the material
available to the scientist in his own field he must
necessarily draw on another.  This provides the rationale
for paramorphic model-building, a role for analogies and
metaphors (the models of discursive thought), leading to
existential novelty (e.g. `what are the punctuation marks
in a genetic code?').  Incidentally, this also helps to
explain why theoretical innovations are often made by
individuals originally working in fields adjacent to the
field they innovate, as in the case of Dalton (a
meteorologist); or with a strong `prejudice' taken from
an adjacent field, as in the case of Pasteur who was
convinced, in opposition to orthodox opinion at the time,
that fermentation could not be caused by chemical agents
alone but had to be explained by dissymmetrical forces
associated with the activity of living organisms.69


     Conceiving science as work readily lends itself to
Aristotelian schematization.70  The material cause is
antecedently established knowledge, facts and theories;
the efficient cause is the methodological paradigm or
generative theory at work in the theoretical and
experimental activity of men; the formal cause new
knowledge, facts and theories; and the final cause
knowledge of the enduring and transfactually active
mechanisms of nature.  Now from the perspective advanced
here an event, such as the discovery of oxygen, is
significant not just because it refuted the


 69 See e.g. M. J. Mulkay, The Social Process of
Innovation, p. 12.


 70 This has been noted by J. R. Ravetz, op. cit.,
pp. 116-18.  But his use of Aristotle's schema differs
substantially from mine.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 195


phlogiston theory of combustion, but because it
constituted a decisive moment in the transformation from
one way of doing chemistry, viz. that associated with the
theory of elective affinity, to another, viz. that
represented by post-Daltonian atomic chemistry; that is,
because it constituted a transformation in the ongoing
activity of chemistry.


     Knowledge does not exist in a third world.71  Rather,
it exists in our world, embedded in the scientific
community.  Without men there would be no knowledge, only
its traces.  In this sense it depends upon men.  But
though it exists only in virtue of the thoughts and
actions and products of men, it is irreducible to them.
For though it would not exist without the activity of
some men, its pre-existence is a necessary condition of
the activity of anyone.  It is a public mix that always
antedates the individual.  Now it is not necessary that
science should continue, i.e. be ongoing.  It is
contingent that it is.  But given this men must reproduce
(or more or less transform) the knowledge that is given
to them.  Men do not construct their knowledge: they
reproduce or transform it.  This is another way of saying
that any knowledge that there is must possess a material
cause.  Now in general for scientific activity to be
continuous all levels depicted in Diagram 3.7 must be
represented.  The trouble with social science, for
example, is not that it has no (or too many) paradigms or
research programmes; but rather that it lacks an adequate
general conceptual scheme.


     I said in 1.6 that an adequate philosophy of science
would depend not only upon the development of an adequate
philosophical ontology, but upon the development of an
adequate philosophical sociology too.  This must consist
in an answer to the question: what must society be like
if science (as a specific kind of social activity) is to
be possible?  It must satisfy the desiderata of being a
structure irreducible to but present only in its effects.
Society can only be known, not shown, to exist.  It
exists only in virtue of the intentional activity of men
but it is not the result (or the cause) of their
intentional activity.  Sociology and psychology thus
constitute distinct branches of science, in the sense of
the criterion developed in paragraph 3 above.  Sociology
is not concerned with masses of individuals or mass
behaviour; but with the persistent relationships between


 71 See K. R. Popper.  Objective Knowledge, esp. Chaps. 3
and 4.


 196 A Realist Theory of Science


individuals.  Such relationships would not exist without
their relata but they do not depend for their efficacy
upon any particular relata, any particular named
individuals.


     Now the autonomy of sociology and psychology accords
well with our intuitions.  Thus we do not suppose that
the reason why the war is fought is the soldier's reason
for fighting it, just as the reason why the bar of
chocolate is wrapped need not be the chocolate wrapper's
reason for wrapping it (though it depends upon the
latter).  I do not have to know the laws of supply and
demand to buy a mackintosh or to know the deep structure
of language in order to use it.  The deep structure of
language may indeed impose limits (like natural
structures) upon the kinds of speech acts I can perform
but it does not determine what I say.  This conception of
social science thus preserves the status of human agency,
but does away with the myth of creation (logical or
historical), i.e. the possibility of a methodologically
individualist reduction.  It is not necessary that that
society should continue.  But if it is to do so then men
must reproduce (or more or less transform) the structures
(languages, forms of economic and political organization,
systems of belief, cultural and ethical norms, etc.) that
are given to them.  The Newtonian revolution in sociology
consists in coming to see that it is not necessary to
explain society as such; but only the various structures
responsible for different societies and their changes.
The problem of how men reproduce any particular society
belongs to a linking science of social psychology.  As so
conceived, society may be regarded as an ensemble of
powers which exist, unlike other powers, only as long as
they are exercised; and are continually exercised via
(i.e. in the last instance through) the intentional
action of men.72


     Established facts are social products.
Understanding their logic may help us to clarify the
relationships between men and society and men and the
world.  Here the metaphor of a reading may be used.  Its
adequacy depends upon the existence of both a given
language and an independent text.  (But the metaphor is
misleading in one way: in that the text of nature exists
independently of any language.)  It is this that makes
possible talk of a correct, rather than just
commutatively successful,


 72 For the concept of powers continually exercised we
have of course groomed the concept of tendency.


 The Logic of Scientific Discovery 197


reading.  Men never create this language.  For it always
preexists them.  But it exists as an actual,
i.e. `living', language only in virtue of, and changes
with, their uses of it.  Thus if society is represented
by the model of a language it may be regarded as a
structure which is always there; which men must reproduce
or partially transform; but which would not exist without
its `functionaries'.  It is methodologically incorrect to
search for an efficient cause of society, though society
depends necessarily upon the efficient activity of men.
But a reading depends upon antecedent social activity;
the acquisition of a language by the reader.  It is in
this sense that the facts always depend upon social
activity.  In experience the skilled scientist reads the
world as if it were a text in an attempt to understand
the mechanisms of the production of phenomena in nature.
But his own reading depends upon the mechanisms of the
reproduction and transformation of language, of knowledge
and of society.


     To return now to science: it is contingent that
science is continuous but given that it is men must
reproduce (or more or less transform) the knowledge that
is given to them.  The condition that science be
continuous is equivalent to the condition that all
knowledge possesses a material cause.  Hence the
criterion of adequacy in the transitive dimension of the
philosophy of science is that the account of science
should be capable of sustaining the concept of it as an
ongoing social activity.  It is here that dyadic theories
of falsification, that is, theories that conceive
falsification as consisting in a confrontation between a
single theory and a set of facts fail.  If science is to
be continuous, refutations must be replacements; which
means that always more than one theory must be
involved.  But, related to this, is an even more basic
objection to fallibilism as such.  For the refutation of
any theory presupposes the acceptance of the refuting
observation statement.  If everything is conditional
nothing can be.  If all knowledge is (equally)
conjectural, no statement can be refuted.  Of course it
is always possible that the scientist is mistaken in any
particular belief (and a good scientist is continually
alive to this possibility).  But in order to demonstrate
a mistake some proposition must be asserted (some theory
accepted and framework worked within).  In order to learn
from our mistakes we must know that (and when) we are
mistaken.  Lacking from fallibilism, as from classical
empiricism,


 198 A Realist Theory of Science


is the key concept of knowledge necessarily possessing a
material cause: antecedently established knowledges;
science's means of production.  It is not necessary that
a scientist works within an particular framework or
accept any particular theory; but it is necessary that he
works within (accepts) one.


     Underpinning empirical realism is a model of man in
which men are seen as sensors of given facts and
recorders of their constant conjunctions: passive
spectators of a given world rather than active agents in
a complex one.  This model plays a role at least as
important as that played by the classical paradigm of
action and the celestial closure discussed in Chapter 2.
Together they form a complementary triangle (see Diagram
3.8)

                    Classical Paradigm
                        of Action
                            /\
                           /  \
                          /    \
                         /      \
                        /        \
                       /          \
              Model   /___________ \  Celestial
              of Man                  Closure

      Diagram 3.8. Three Sources of Empirical Realism


Implicit in empirical realism is a conflation between a
ground of knowledge, viz. experience, and the world.  If
experience is to be capable of playing the role
traditionally assigned to it of grounding our knowledge
(in whole or in part) then the items of which it is
composed must be perfectly simple and atomistic;
i.e. insusceptible to further analysis or justification.
But if it is to define the world then the world must be
similarly composed: of atomistic and discrete events (or
momentary states) independent of each other.  If
knowledge is to have its foundations in experience and
experience is to define the world then both the ultimate
items and objects of knowledge must be atomistic and
independent of each other.  This creates the problem of
what grounds we can have for moving from the observed to
the unobserved, or from the actual to the possible (and
thence to


The Logic of Scientific Discovery 199


the counter-factual).  Fallibilism, which shares this
model, can no less escape this problem.  For the
refutation of theory T at time t_1 by an observation
statement is consistent with its corroboration by that
statement after t_1 unless we are justified in moving
from the observed to the unobserved, and from the actual
to the possible.  (Unless induction is justified or nature
is uniform we can never know that a `mistake' is a
mistake; so we can never put our mistakes behind us.)


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