The third type of philosophy of science will require only brief exposition. It is professed, among others, by a number of scientists in this country and England, whose object is to show the social implications of theoretical research and thereby to rob modem theories of their air of mystery. They explain, frequently with admirable lucidity, the new sources of power opened up by science, the economies in human effort which it is capable of effecting, and the close interdependence of science and the technological arts. The dominant emphasis is thus placed upon scientific theories as engineers' "blue-prints for action," rather than as disclosures of some final reality.
There might be little to object to this approach to science if those who take it would not confuse their thesis by other claims: that scientific research ought always to be conducted with the social good in view, or that all significant research is in fact determined by the organization and practical needs of society. There is, however, no evidence for the proposition that a warm social conscience is the best guide for the conduct of research; there is no ground for assuming that everyone knows what is socially desirable, that what is not of immediate social value will never prove to be so, or that devotion to socially valuable results necessarily contributes to the fullest development of systematic knowledge. There is overwhelming evidence to show that the content and direction of theoretical research is in the main controlled by technical problems internal to the sciences, and that changes in the social economy do not in general constitute the sufficient conditions for the specific content of theoretical inquiries.
A number of writers in this group make the further claim that the methods as well as the conclusions of science conform to the triad of "dialectical principles" sacred to many followers of Hegel and Marx. For example, Levy has argued that the occurrence of a distinct type of wave produced by a ship after it reaches a critical velocity illustrates the law of abrupt change of quality with sufficient increase of quantity; and Haldane has borne witness to the inestimable value of all three laws in his own biological researches. Space is lacking to examine these and other claims for the virtues of the dialectic laws. It must suffice to recall Einstein's remark that philosophers are fortunate indeed in beingg always able to establish the agreement of the latest findings of science with their own metaphysical principles. The principles of dialectic can be guaranteed never the fail, because their terms have no fixed content; they can be stretched to cover any facts whatsoever, after the facts have been independently established.
Were it not for the mysterious profundity claimed for them, and did they not serve to check inquiry by the glib finality with which they resolve all problems, the laws of dialectic could be left unreproached as a curious verbal game. As instruments for disentangling the web of theoretical constructions, however, they are as barren as the purest of vestal virgins.--Ernest Nagel (1941) "Recent Philosophies of Science," Kenyon Review (Vol 8), reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954) 45-46.
I have quoted all of section 3, from a brief, critical "survey" of then prominent four philosophies of science by Ernest Nagel. Near the end of the paper, Nagel himself is forthright that he favors the fourth approach, which "does not aim at a compact system bt at painstaking analyses of the details of scientific procedure (46); but he associates it with names like "Mach, Poincare, Duhem, Campbell...Pierce....Russell, Wittgenstein, Tarkski...Carnap...James, Dewey, Cohen, Neurath, and Woodger;" (46) This approach frequently "goes under the somewhat unprecise and misleading of of "operationalism." (39) The two other approaches are associated with Whitehead (which gets a respectful critical treatment) and Eddington (which does not: his "philosophy of science consists of "outrageous puns."" (45))
The third type involves what we may call Marxist philosophy of science and Nagel's two exemplars are Haldane and Levy (surprisingly Bernal is not mentioned). I assume J.B.S. Haldane is somewhat familiar to readers of this blog. (And his work is due a rediscory given his interest in infectious diseases and pandemics.) I am pretty confident that most of my readers are less familiar with Levy. The index to Sovereign reason suggests this is a H. Levy. And with help of Google, I am pretty confident this is the author of (1938) A Philosophy for a Modern Man because it is also mentioned by Robert S. Cohen in "Marxism and Scientific Philosophy" a longer and more scholarly (and fascinating) review article in Metaphysical Review (1951).
The four features of Marxist philosophy of science that Nagel rejects are: (i) the normative claim that science ought to be guided by social aims; (ii) the empirical claim that it is always guided by social aims. In addition, (iii) the historicist thesis that science is determined by social economic context. And, finally, (iv) dialectical principles and its laws.
As an aside, (iii) was not just associated with Marxist philosophy of science. Institutional economists who were progressives (but not necessarily socialists or marxists) also accepted a version of (iii). As I have demonstrated, George Stigler, the Chicago economist, who was well read in philosophy of science (including Nagel) polemically rejects a version of (iii) in the 1950s-1960s; Stigler called it the “environmental theory" and he associated it with the historian of economics (and sociologist of knowledge) W. Stark and Wesley Mitchell, one of the leading institutionalists of the previous generation (who had died in 1948) and one of Milton Friedman’s mentors at NBER.
Some other time I want to reflect a bit, from a sociological perspective, on the significance of the polemical rejection of dialectics by (would be) analytic philosophers, including those self-proclaimed analytic marxists more friendly to Marxism. Unlike his treatment of (i-iii), and his criticisms of the other approaches to philosophy of science, Nagel clearly does not think it is worth his effort to try to argue against dialectic and its laws. His only criticism that does not reduce to name calling ("no fixed content';" "mysterious profundity;" glib" etc.)* is that its practitioners engage in retrospectifve confirmation ("after the facts have been independently established"), which may be true but it is not a criticism of it qua philosophy of science. (As Nagel frankly admits it his own favored approach is not interested in "canons" of discovery. (47))
Here I want to close with an observation on Nagel's assertion that the laws of dialectic are as barren as the purest of vestal virgins. As it happens (friend of the blog, recall), David Haig discusses some of the history of this phrase in the history and philosophy of science in chapter 1 of his (2020) From Darwin to Derrida, a book I have had occasion to mention before. For, it is often the case that final causes are likened to barren virgins and, thereby, to be rejected. As Haig shows a version of the phrase goes back to Bacon's (1623) De Dignitate et augmentis Scientiarum, where Bacon is referring to the virgins consecrated to God (as vestal virgins were). Although it is likely, as Haig, suggests that the modern association of Bacon with the phrase "vestal virgins" is due to William Whewell, the founder of philosophy of science. (Whewell himself thought of final causes as constitutive and regulative to speculations.) It is with Huxley, while reviewing Darwin (1859), that the association of final causes as "barren virgins" to be left aside is put in place. (Haig and I both agree this was not exactly how Darwin thought about it.)
We can assume that Nagel, who was widely read, was reasonably familiar with the association of the rejection of final causes as barren virgins since Huxley.[UPDATE: SEE FOOTNOTE]** Circumstantial evidence for the widespread familiarity of this point can be found in an essay in 1927 by C.D. Broad on "The Philosophy of Francis Bacon," where Broad warns his readers not to assume that in Bacon the phrase signals rejection of final causes. (I can't prove Nagel read this paper, but he was familiar with Broad's writings on the mind as a teleological system.) In the philosophy of biology, Nagel wrote quote a bit on teleological explanation. Much of it is naturally read as redescribing teleological concepts in terms of efficient causation or underlying laws. But near the end of his career he granted that "teleological concepts and teleological explanations" are not obscure (301)
So, to sum up, Nagel treats the dialectics of those inspired by Hegel and Marx as fundamentally obscure. Writing in 1941, he thereby foreshadows the more common criticisms by analytic philosophers of folk who much later came to be known as continental philosophers.+ But the trope he activates to do so is one then commonly associated with the rejection of final causes.
But at no point were final causes thought obscure or unintelligible (even Spinoza did not go that far); rather from Huxley's polemics onward they were taken as local final causes to be thought unfruitful in scientific or experimental research. Because (recall) Huxley himself was an agnostic about fundamental matters, Huxley could acknowledge that general final causes were intelligible and perhaps appropriate in the domain of fundamental metaphysics.
Nagel treats dialectics a bit like the early moderns treat the terms of scholastic philosophy: as fundamentally unintelligible. He simultaneously treats dialectics in the way Huxley treats local final causes: as intelligible albei unfruitful in (the philosophy of) science. But Nagel is so focused on his polemics that he forgets it can't be both.
*One may claim that Nagel's 'no fixed content' does represent an argument. Fine, if you want to believe that. It seems to me simple name calling (especially in light of the other claims he is making).
+ Regular readers know I think of Nagel as the person who invented how analytic philosophers think about analytic philosophy as a particular social kind.
**UPDATE: David Haig just my attention to: Nagel E (1961) The structure of science. Problems in the logic of scientific explanation. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London:
"Modern science, on the other hand, regards final causes to be vestal virgins which bear no fruit in the study of physical and chemical phenomena; and, because of the association of teleological explanations with the doctrine that goals or ends of activity are dynamic agents in their own realizations, it tends to view such explanations as a species of obscurantism." [page 401f]
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