Barbara Wootton - Testament for Social Science (RLE Social Theory): An Essay in the Application of Scientific Method to Human Problems

ANYONE who sets out to enquire into the possible contribution of scientific method to human problems needs to be equipped, if he is to discharge the task adequately, with wide expert knowledge in both natural and social science, and at least to be able to meet the philosophers on their own ground. I am acutely conscious that these qualifications are not mine. On many of the subjects discussed in these pages I write frankly as an amateur, though naturally I have done my best to become as well-informed an amateur as I can. Unfortunately, those who have sufficient expertise are few, and greatly occupied with their own specialisms. Failing their contribution, the impact of scientific research as a whole upon human life is best perhaps considered independently by both the social and the natural scientists from their respective viewpoints.

I am also well aware that on topics where no final certainty is yet possibleparticularly those discussed in alternative answers are possible to those which I have suggested. I did at one stage consider setting out the reasons why I in my turn reject the solutions which others will doubtless in some cases prefer: but the effect could only have been to make the argument impossibly cumbrous, and to obscure the main line of thought. I have therefore confined myself to setting out as fairly as I can the evidence for my own hypotheses, including the weak as well as the strong points, and leaving it at thatonly asking that those who have answers to my answers to these questions should have in mind that there are also answers to theirs.

Throughout, I have given a good deal ofspace to the educational and academic implications of my thesis. This is partly because universities are the places where many (though not, of course, all) new discoveries are made; and partly for the purely personal reason that these implications necessarily obtrude themselves upon anyone who has been much engaged in various forms of university education.

My indebtedness to a great stream of thought will be obvious enough. Some of what is written here is, I hope, original; but much, of course, is not. You will find it in Mill, perhaps, or Comte or Bentham. There comes a time, however, when such debts can no longer be itemised: I know that I have drawn many buckets from the river, but I cannot hope to distinguish the water that has come from particular tributaries. More specific acknowledgements I am glad to be able to makenotably to several groups of undergraduate students, who set the main train of thought in motion, and were lively aids to its progress: to my colleagues, Professor H. B. Acton and Professor H. T. Flint, who were good enough to conduct a search for blunders in an earlier version of : to W. B. Curry for a similar but more comprehensive review: and to Barbara Kyle for detecting many confusions of thought and obscurities of expression which had escaped my notice. For whatever mistakes remain, I alone, of course, am responsible.

THE contrast between mans amazing ability to manipulate his material environment and his pitiful incompetence in managing his own affairs is now as commonplace as it is tragic. The world of atomic energy and nylon is for millions still the world of poverty, hunger, misgovernment, crime, domestic unhappiness or personal frustration. And mastery over earth and air and sea and atom has brought us only to daily fear of sudden death of our own making.

No one has any doubt how that mastery has been won. It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment. Nor are we troubled by doubts as to the validity of the results which scientific research has thus achieved in the understanding of, and the consequent power to manipulate, inanimate things. The Christian and the Muslim, the Fascist and the Liberal, the idealist and the logical positivist may dispute endlessly about their views on human life and the nature of things ; but they all accept the facts that steam engines will pull trains and amplifiers make their speeches more widely heard. Even the most primitive peoples quickly learn to put their trust in firearms.

It is no less obvious that this method, which has been so brilliantly successful in the natural sciences, is not normally applied to the field of our most disastrous failures. The personal relations of human beings, individual and collective, are conducted in a quite different way: these are for the most part governed by a medley of primitive impulses, kindly or harsh, sometimes even noble, modified by rules of thumb, and set in the framework of a traditional morality which varies from place to place and from age to age. In these matters science plays little part and commands but meagre respect. It may be true that of recent years the findings of the psychologistsoften in seriously distorted versionshave begun to seep into this area of experience, affecting the personal relationships of individuals and the upbringing of children quite considerably, penal codes and practice somewhat less noticeably, national politics still less, and international politics hardly at all.1 In these developments, as also in the growing prestige of empirical economic science, and in the gradual influence of anthropology upon the dealings of one cultural group with another, we may perhaps discern the beginnings of a very different future. But these are marginal occurrences: they have still not seriously modified the division of experience into two sharply divided sectionsthat in which science speaks with authority, and that in which she whispers furtively, or is dumb.