e hear from teachers of science that students who are devoted to serious research in science will not

bother with idle philosophical problems. However, one of the most creative men in twentieth-century
physics, Albert Ein- stein, writes:² I can say with certainty that the ablest students whom I met as a
teacher were deeply interested in the theory of knowledge. I mean by “ablest stu- dents” those who
excelled not only in

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2. Patterns of Description By collecting and recording a large stock of common-sense
experience in a cer- tain field, we may produce long lists of pointer readings or descriptions of
dancing colored spots. But by mere recording, accurate and comprehensive as it may be, we do
not obtain the slightest hint as to how to formulate a theory or hypothesis from which we may
derive in a practical way the results of our recording. If we sim- ply set as the problem the
finding of an hypothesis which would be in fair agree- ment with our records, it does not seem
possible for us to obtain an unambiguous result. As early as 1891, C. S. Peirce³ wrote: If
hypotheses are to be tried haphazard, or simply because they will suit certain phenomena, it will
occupy the mathematical physicists of the world say half a century on the average to bring each
theory to the test, and since the number of possible theories may go up into the trillion, only one
of which can be true, we have little prospect of making further solid
additions to the subject in our time.⁴ If we make an attempt to set up a theory or hypothesis on
the basis of recorded observations, we soon notice that without any theory we do not even know
what we should observe. Chance observations usually do not lend themselves to any gen-
eralization. It is perhaps instructive at this point to peruse a passage from
Auguste Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy.⁵ Comte has been regarded as the father of a sch
ool of thought known as “Positivism.” According to an opinion frequently held by philosophers,
he and his school have extolled the value of observations and minimized, or even rejected, the
formation of theories by creative imagination. However, he writes: If, on the one hand, every
positive theory must necessarily be based on observations, it is equally sensible, on the other
hand, that in order to carry
out observations our minds need some theory. If, in contemplating the phenomena, we did not
attach them to some principles, it would not be possible to combine these isolated observations
and to draw from them any conclusions. Moreover, we would not even be able to fix them in
our minds. Ordinarily these facts would remain unnoticed beneath our eyes. Hence, the human
mind is, from its origin, squeezed between the necessity to form real theories and the equally
urgent necessity to create some theory in order to carry out sensible observations. Our minds
would find them- selves locked within a vicious circle, if there were not, fortunately, a
natural way out through the spontaneous development of theological concepts.⁶ The theological
concepts are very near to common-sense experience. They inter- pret the creation of the world by
the gods as analogous to the making of a watch by a watchmaker. We shall see later that this
kind of analogy has been the basis of all metaphysical interpretations of science. At this point,
we must be distinctly aware of the fact that a mere recording of observations provides us with
nothing but “dancing spots,” and that “science” does not begin unless we proceed from
these common-sense experiences to simple patterns of description, which we call theo- ries. The
relationship between direct observations and the concepts that we use in “scientific description”
are the main topics with which any philosophy of science is concerned. Let us take a relatively
simple example, where this relationship is rather direct. Let us imagine that we launch a body
into the air—say, a remnant of cigarette paper—what does it do? If we do this many times—a
hundred, a thousand, hun- dreds of thousands of times—we shall find simply that the motion is
different every time. The accumulation of all these observations is obviously no science. And
this is not the way that the physicist works, unless it is in a field that is very
2. Patterns of Description
By collecting and recording a large stock of common-sense experience in a certain field,
we may produce long lists of pointer readings or descriptions of dancing colored spots.
But by mere recording, accurate and comprehensive as it may be, we do not obtain the
slightest hint as to how to formulate a theory or hypothesis from which we may derive in
a practical way the results of our recording. If we simply set as the problem the finding
of an hypothesis which would be in fair agreement with our records, it does not seem
possible for us to obtain an unambiguous result. As early as 1891, C. S. Peirce³ wrote:
If hypotheses are to be tried haphazard, or simply because they will suit certain
phenomena, it will occupy the mathematical physicists of the world say half a century on
the average to bring each theory to the test, and since the number of possible theories
may go up into the trillion, only one of which can be true, we have little prospect of
making further solid additions to the subject in our time.⁴
If we make an attempt to set up a theory or hypothesis on the basis of recorded
observations, we soon notice that without any theory we do not even know what we
should observe. Chance observations usually do not lend themselves to any
generalization. It is perhaps instructive at this point to peruse a passage from Auguste
Comte’s Course of Positive Philosophy.⁵ Comte has been regarded as the father of a
school of thought known as Positivism.According to an opinion frequently held by
philosophers, he and his school have extolled the value of observations and minimized,
or even rejected, the formation of theories by creative imagination. However, he writes:
If, on the one hand, every positive theory must necessarily be based on observations, it
is equally sensible, on the other hand, that in order to carry
out observations our minds need some theory. If, in contemplating the phenomena, we
did not attach them to some principles, it would not be possible to combine these
isolated observations and to draw from them any conclusions. Moreover, we would not
even be able to fix them in our minds. Ordinarily these facts would remain unnoticed
beneath our eyes.
Hence, the human mind is, from its origin, squeezed between the necessity to form real
theories and the equally urgent necessity to create some theory in order to carry out
sensible observations. Our minds would find themselves locked within a vicious circle, if
there were not, fortunately, a natural way out through the spontaneous development of
theological concepts.⁶
The theological concepts are very near to common-sense experience. They interpret
the creation of the world by the gods as analogous to the making of a watch by a
watchmaker. We shall see later that this kind of analogy has been the basis of all
metaphysical interpretations of science. At this point, we must be distinctly aware of the
fact that a mere recording of observations provides us with nothing but dancing
spots,and that sciencedoes not begin unless we proceed from these common-sense
experiences to simple patterns of description, which we call theories. The relationship
between direct observations and the concepts that we use in scientific descriptionare
the main topics with which any philosophy of science is concerned.
Let us take a relatively simple example, where this relationship is rather direct. Let us
imagine that we launch a body into the air—say, a remnant of cigarette paper—what
does it do? If we do this many times—a hundred, a thousand, hundreds of thousands of
times—we shall find simply that the motion is different every time. The accumulation of
all these observations is obviously no science. And this is not the way that the physicist
works, unless it is in a field that is very
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