Our text today is Peter Atkins’ essay, “Science
as Truth,” from History of the Human Sciences.
This is from 1995 but I think it's still relatively timely.
Atkins is a scientist who is defending the
value of science, and he’s defending it
in a particular context which you guys may
not be completely aware of.
He doesn't engage with philosophy at the end of the essay so much as he engages with social science.
One of the things he's talking about, when
he speaks about scientific revolutions, is
a whole way of thinking about science that’s
become popular since about 1970, or the mid 1960s,
which is to look at science as a cultural
practice and the social practice, as a social
practice, to do what's sometimes called the
social science, sociology of science.
To look at science as an activity that's engaged
in by a certain group of people according
to certain rules, and to look at it as a cultural
form, the way that an anthropologist might
look at religion in some remote society that
he's studying.
When Atkins emphasizes the truth value of
science’s product and when he talks about
the nature of scientific revolutions as not
being arbitrary and random but as being guided
by the evidence, he's pushing back against
this idea that the political and sociological
factors that influence scientists limit the
objective reach of their conclusions.
Along the way towards the end of the essay
he dismisses religion and philosophy with
a wave of the hand, but I think we can take
his conception of science and its unique power
to give us the truth about the physical world
as a position we want to engage with as we
come to the end of the week we're spending
with A.J.
Ayer and his positivism and his emotivism
about values, and about his verification criterion
of meaning.
So the first thing I asked you about in this
essay was the thesis of the essay, from the
first paragraph. What is Atkins up to? 
What is Atkins’ thesis in this essay?
He tells us pretty plainly right up front.
(Student: Sciences is the best procedure yet
discovered for exposing truths.)
The best procedure yet discovered for getting
truth, leaving open the door that there may
be some superior procedure that might come
in the future, but thinking of affairs as
they stand right now if you want the truth
that science is your best bet.
We might think he would contrast that to religion,
to philosophy, maybe the social sciences or
some sort of political analysis of the practice
of working scientists.
What else does he say in this first paragraph
that is significant?
He stakes out a pretty bold position, what
does he say?
(Student: That science has no bounds, [unintelligible])
There appear to be no bounds to its competence:
it can comment on the origin and end of the
world, on the emergence, evolution, and activities
of life, it can even account for the activities
and beliefs of sociologists.
Do we see here a descendant then of Descartes’
single method?
We’re reading back in the 1630s, and now
here the 1990s, we have Atkins speaking with
confidence about science generally, scientific
method, as able to give us pretty much anything
that can be known, he thinks could be known
by science.
We have a single method, and we have an absolute
confidence that this method will give us whatever
there is that can be known.
In a sense this may be the payoff from the promise that we get at the beginning of Descartes’ project.
He says here is the, THE method of the human
mind, which can tame reality and allow us
to realize Bacon’s dream. What was Bacon’s ideal?
Science is for the sake of the benefit of
mankind, to improve man's estate, to increase
our power, collectively, over nature for the
benefit of mankind.
So explaining what he calls, at the beginning
of the second paragraph, universal competence.
This may seem arrogant but it actually is
justified, as Babe Ruth, who played baseball
here on Echo Field at the Mount, long ago.
Babe Ruth once said “It's not bragging if
you can do it.”
So I'm not boasting about science; science actually
can do the things that I’m claiming for
science, I can pay it this off.
