Our last paragraphs have touched upon the nature of science. They
contain, by way of intimation, an explanation of the distance which
lies between the things of daily intercourse and the terms of science.
Controlled inference is science, and science is, accordingly, a highly
specialized industry. It is such a specialized mode of practice that
it does not appear to be a mode of practice at all. This high
specialization is part of the reason for the current antithesis of
theory and practice, knowledge and conduct, the other part being the
survival of the ancient conception of knowledge as intuitive and
dialectical--the conception which is set forth in the Aristotelian
logic.
Starting from the hypothesis that the art of controlled inference
requires for its efficient exercise specially adapted entities, it
follows that the various sciences are the various forms which the
industry of controlled inquiry assumes. It follows that the
conceptions and formulations of the sciences--physical and
mathematical--concern things which have been reshaped in view of the
exigencies of regulated and fertile inference. To get things into the
estate where such inference is practicable, many qualities of the
water and air, cats and dogs, stones and stars, of daily intercourse
with the world have been dropped or depressed. Much that was trivial
or remote has been elevated and exaggerated. Neither the omissions nor
the accentuations are arbitrary. They are purposeful. They represent
the changes in the things of ordinary life which are needed to
safeguard the important business of inference.
There is then a great difference between the entities of science and
the things of daily life. This may be fully acknowledged. But unless
the admission is accompanied by an ignoring of the function of
inference, it creates no problem of conciliation, no need of
apologizing for either one or the other. It generates no problem of
the real and the apparent. The "real" or "true" objects of science are
those which best fulfil the demands of secure and fertile inference.
To arrive at them is such a difficult operation, there are so many
specious candidates clamoring for the office, that it is no wonder
that when the objects suitable for inference are constituted, they
tend to impose themselves as _the_ real objects, in comparison with
which the things of ordinary life are but impressions made upon us
(according to much modern thought), or defective samples of
Being--according to much of ancient thought. But one has only to note
that their genuinely characteristic feature is fitness for the aims of
inference to awaken from the nightmare of all such problems. They
differ from the things of the common world of action and association
as the means and ends of one occupation differ from those of another.
The difference is not that which exists between reality and
appearance, but is that between the subject-matter of crude
occupations and of a highly specialized and difficult art, upon the
success of which (so it is discovered) the progress of other
occupations ultimately depends.
The entities of science are not only _from_ the scientist; they are
also _for_ him. They express, that is, not only the outcome of
reflective inquiries, but express them in the particular form in
which they can enter most directly and efficiently into subsequent
inquiries. The fact that they are sustained within the universe of
inquiry accounts for their remoteness from the things of daily life,
the latter being promptly precipitated out of suspense in such
solutions. That most of the immediate qualities of things (including
the so-called secondary qualities) are dropped signifies that such
qualities have not turned out to be fruitful for inference. That
mathematical, mechanical, and "primary" distinctions and relations
have come to constitute the proper subject-matter of science signifies
that they represent such qualities of original things as are most
manipular for knowledge-getting or assured and extensive inference.
Consider what a hard time the scientific man had in getting away from
other qualities, and how the more immediate qualities have been
pressed upon him from all quarters, and it is not surprising that he
inclines to think of the intellectually useful properties as alone
"real" and to relegate all others to a quasi-illusory field. But his
victory is now sufficiently achieved so that this tension may well
relax; it may be acknowledged that the difference between scientific
entities and ordinary things is one of function, the former being
selected and arranged for the successful conduct of inferential
knowings.
I conclude with an attempt to show how bootless the ordinary
antithesis between knowledge (or theory) and practice becomes when we
recognize that it really involves only a contrast between the kinds of
judgments appropriate to ordinary modes of practice and those
appropriate to the specialized industry of knowledge-getting.
It is not true that to insist that scientific propositions fall within
the domain of practice is to depreciate them. On its face, the
insistence means simply that all knowledge involves experimentation,
with whatever appliances are suited to the problem in hand, of an
active and physical type. Instead of this doctrine leading to a low
estimate of knowledge, the contrary is the case. This art of
experimental thinking turns out to give the key to the control and
development of other modes of practice. I have touched elsewhere in
these essays upon the way in which knowledge is the instrument of
regulation of our human undertakings, and I have also pointed out that
intrinsic increments of meaning accrue in consequence of thinking. I
wish here to point how that mode of practice which is called
theorizing emancipates experience--how it makes for steady progress.
No matter how much specialized skill improves, we are restricted in
the degree in which our ends remain constant or fixed. Significant
progress, progress which is more than technical, depends upon ability
to foresee new and different results and to arrange conditions for
their effectuation. Science is the instrument of increasing our
technique in attaining results already known and cherished. More
important yet, it is the method of emancipating us from enslavement to
customary ends, the ends established in the past.
Let me borrow from political philosophy a kind of caricature of the
facts. As social philosophers used to say that the state came into
existence when individuals agreed to surrender some of their native
personal rights for the sake of getting the advantages of
non-interference and aid from others who made a like surrender, so we
might say that science began when men gave up the claim to form the
structure of knowledge each from himself as a center and measure of
meaning--when there was an agreement to take an impersonal standpoint.
Non-scientific modes of practice, left to their natural growth,
represent, in other words, arrangements of objects which cluster about
the self, and which are closely tied down to the habits of the self.
Science or theory means a system of objects detached from any
particular personal standpoint, and therefore available for any and
every possible personal standpoint. Even the exigencies of ordinary
social life require a slight amount of such detachment or abstraction.
I must neglect my own peculiar ends enough to take some account of my
neighbor if I am going to be intelligible to him. I must at least find
common ground. Science systematizes and indefinitely extends this
principle. It takes its stand, not with what is common with some
particular neighbor living at this especial date in this particular
village, but with any possible neighbor in the wide stretches of time
and space. And it does so by the mere fact that it is continually
reshaping its peculiar objects with an eye single to availability in
inference. The more abstract, the more impersonal, the more
impartially objective are _its_ objects, the greater the variety and
scope of inference made possible. Every street of experience which is
laid out by science has its tracks for transportation, and every line
issues transfer checks to every other line. You and I may keep running
in certain particular ruts, but conditions are provided for somebody
else to foresee--or infer--new combinations and new results. The
depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief
agency of their repersonalizing in new and more fruitful modes of
practice. The paradox of theory and practice is that theory is with
respect to all other modes of practice the most practical of all
things, and the more impartial and impersonal it is, the more truly
practical it is. And this is the sole paradox.
But lest the man of science, the man of dominantly reflective habits,
be puffed up with his own conceits, he must bear in mind that
practical application--that is, experiment--is a condition of his own
calling, that it is indispensable to the institution of knowledge or
truth. Consequently, in order that he keep his own balance, it is
needed that his findings be everywhere applied. The more their
application is confined within his own special calling, the less
meaning do the conceptions possess, and the more exposed they are to
error. The widest possible range of application is the means of the
deepest verification. As long as the specialist hugs his own results
they are vague in meaning and unsafe in content. That individuals in
every branch of human endeavor should be experimentalists engaged in
testing the findings of the theorist is the sole final guaranty for
the sanity of the theorist.