The Knowledge Machine and the Question of Motivation in Science

Speaker：

Michael Strevens

Chair：

刘闯 (Fudan University/CASIP)

Commentators：

Alex Rosenberg (Duke University)

谭笑 (Capital Normal University)

Malcolm Forster (Fudan University)

黄翔 (Fudan University)

Wed. 15th September, 2021, 

Meeting ID：

489 550 5875 (ZOOM)

6666

Organizer：

The Philosophy and Science of Intelligence Center (PSI), Fudan University

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn argued that working scientists are blind to alternative ways of thinking about their subject matter -- to different paradigms -- and that this blindness is, intriguingly, essential to science's success, providing a motivational framework that "forces scientists to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth that would otherwise be unimaginable". The blindness makes scientists intellectually impoverished or even irrational in a certain sense, yet without it science would work far less well. I argue that Kuhn is right: science thrives on an irrational narrowness in scientists' mode of inquiry. Yet as even Kuhn's closest allies would now concede, the existence of totalizing paradigms from which scientists' thinking cannot under any normal circumstances escape is extremely doubtful. What plays the narrowing role and thus supplies the motivation to focus so intensely is, as I have argued in the The Knowledge Machine, not a sequence of paradigms but rather the scientific method itself, with its emphasis on a highly specific but extremely powerful form of argument to the exclusion of all else. The method is restrictive to the point of unreasonableness, yet it motivates, indeed compels, scientists "to investigate some part of nature in a detail and depth" that accounts for the unprecedented success of modern science.