The Meaning of It All Read Free Page A

tries to prove himself wrong as quickly as possible.
    The principle that observation is the judge imposes a severe limitation to the kind of questions that can be answered. They are limited to questions that you can put this way: “If I do this, what will happen?” There are ways to try it and see. Questions like, “Should I do this?” and “What is the value of this?” are not of the same kind.
    But if a thing is not scientific, if it cannot be subjected to the test of observation, this does not mean that it is dead, or wrong, or stupid. We are not trying to argue that science is somehow good and other things are somehow not good. Scientists take all those things that can be analyzed by observation, and thus the things called science are found out. But there are some things left out, for which the method does not work. This does not mean thatthose things are unimportant. They are, in fact, in many ways the most important. In any decision for action, when you have to make up your mind what to do, there is always a “should” involved, and this cannot be worked out from “If I do this, what will happen?” alone. You say, “Sure, you see what will happen, and then you decide whether you want it to happen or not.” But that is the step the scientist cannot take. You can figure out what is going to happen, but then you have to decide whether you like it that way or not.
    There are in science a number of technical consequences that follow from the principle of observation as judge. For example, the observation cannot be rough. You have to be very careful. There may have been a piece of dirt in the apparatus that made the color change; it was not what you thought. You have to check the observations very carefully, and then recheck them, to be sure that you understand what all the conditions are and that you did not misinterpret what you did.
    It is interesting that this thoroughness, which is a virtue, is often misunderstood. When someone says a thing has been done scientifically, often all he means is that it has been done thoroughly. I have heard people talk of the “scientific” extermination of the Jews in Germany. There was nothing scientific about it. It was only thorough. There was no question of making observations and then checking them in order to determine something. In that sense, there were “scientific” exterminations of peoplein Roman times and in other periods when science was not so far developed as it is today and not much attention was paid to observation. In such cases, people should say “thorough” or “thoroughgoing,” instead of “scientific.”
    There are a number of special techniques associated with the game of making observations, and much of what is called the philosophy of science is concerned with a discussion of these techniques. The interpretation of a result is an example. To take a trivial instance, there is a famous joke about a man who complains to a friend of a mysterious phenomenon. The white horses on his farm eat more than the black horses. He worries about this and cannot understand it, until his friend suggests that maybe he has more white horses than black ones.
    It sounds ridiculous, but think how many times similar mistakes are made in judgments of various kinds. You say, “My sister had a cold, and in two weeks . . .” It is one of those cases, if you think about it, in which there were more white horses. Scientific reasoning requires a certain discipline, and we should try to teach this discipline, because even on the lowest level such errors are unnecessary today.
    Another important characteristic of science is its objectivity. It is necessary to look at the results of observation objectively, because you, the experimenter, might like one result better than another. You perform theexperiment several times, and because of irregularities, like pieces of dirt falling in, the result varies from