sadly, its just not true... amazing that this naive view from the mid 19th century is still so popular.
The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious
of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no
one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and
suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before.
Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its
source. Its source is somewhere else.
Einstein has said:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that
suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He
then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the
world of experience, and thus to overcome it…. He makes this cosmos and
its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in
this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow
whirlpool of personal experience…. The supreme task… is to arrive at
those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up
by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only
intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can
reach them…..
Intuitition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific knowledge.
A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, “But
scientific knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the
hypotheses.” But Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature
provides only experimental data.
A lesser mind might then have said, “Well, then man provides the
hypotheses.” But Einstein denied this too. “Nobody,” he said, “who has
really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of
phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the
fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their
theoretical principles.”
Phaedrus’ break occurred when, as a result of laboratory
experience, he became interested in hypotheses as entities in
themselves. He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what
might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the
hypothesis, was the invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing
everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was
testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other
hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more
came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind
until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing
hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not
decrease. It actually increased as he went along.
At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have
the humor of a Parkinson’s law that “The number of rational hypotheses
than can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” It pleased him
never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed
dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and
muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would
come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined
the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or benefits
of it.
(Pages 111-112)
There’s more to the discussion here in the book, but I feel like
this is enough to get a picture for the kinds of things the author
discusses. He explains a few pages later how these thoughts are related
to the core issue of objectivism as a way of thinking that has had an
ill effect on society. What I liked from this part of the book was how
it highlights that not all of science is clear or unambiguous. Not only
that but it points in the direction, for me, that it can never be as
objective as many people want it to be. It is that tendency of thinking
that the author discusses in the book and has had an ill-effect on
people’s lives. It can easily lead to rigid thinking such as the
creation of sometimes unnecessary and even harmful dichotomies (e.g.
work or play, service or work, family or community).
Here’s another part I enjoyed. This part is in the context of a
conversation the main character is having with a friend of his. His
friend is frustrated at the directions to put together a rotisserie and
the main character is explaining to him that the first thing he needs
is “peace of mind.” Then, they go into ‘directions’ for putting the
device together and how they aren’t simply correct because “they came
from the factory.”
[…] “Technology presumes there’s just one right way
to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one
right way to do things, of course, the instructions begin and end
exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an
infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the
machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of
the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many
choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind
and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you
need the peace of mind.
“Actually this ideas isn’t so strange,” I continue. “Sometime
look at a novice workman or a bad workman and compare his expression
with that of a craftsman whose work you know is excellent and you’ll
see the difference. The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of
instruction. He’s making decisions as he goes along. For that reason
he’ll be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing even though he
doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are in
a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions
because the nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and
motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the material at
hand. The material and his thoughts are changing together in a
progression of changes until his mind’s at rest at the same time the
material’s right.”
“Sounds like art,” the instructor says.
“Well, it is art,” I say. “This divorce of art from technology
is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have
to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie
assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from
its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to
associate the two sounds ludicrous.”
(page 166-67 - zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance)
