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Natural Science and Value-Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Read Bain
Read Bain*
Affiliation:
Miami University at Oxford, Ohio
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Extract

No final statement can be made regarding the relations between science and policy-making. Knowledge, values, and techniques are interrelated, cumulative, and constantly changing. They are derived from man's responses to the complicated interactions between physical, biological, and cultural phenomena. Final answers are impossible because the answers themselves are part of the world and therefore are factors in changing it. We see through a glass darkly, whether it be the giant glass of Palomar or the eye-piece of the electron microscope.

Type
Symposium: Applied Social Research in Policy-Formation
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , July 1949 , pp. 182 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1949

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Footnotes

∗

I am indebted to the following friendly critics: Robert Bierstedt, sociology and philosophy, University of Illinois; Fred Cottrell, sociology and government, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio); David French, anthropology, Edwin Garlan, philosophy, and Frank Munk, political science, all of Reed College (Portland, Oregon); Oscar Winther, history, Indiana University. The comments of Mr. Bierstedt and Mr. Garlan were especially helpful to me.

References

Notes

1 Read Bain, “Man, the Myth Maker”, Scientific Monthly, July, 1947, pp. 61–69.

2 Lincoln Barnett, “The Universe and Dr. Einstein”, Harper's Magazine, June 1948, page 532.

3 Read Bain, “Sociology and the Other Sciences”, Scientific Monthly, November 1941, especially pp. 449–453.

4 F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, Macmillan, New York, 1947, page 340. See especially Chapter 21, “Normative Social Theory”.

5 See Stuart Queen's discussion of Francis E. Merrill's paper, “The Study of Social Problems”, American Sociological Review, June 1948, pp. 261–62.

6 See Robert Bierstedt, “Social Science and Social Policy”, American Association of University Professors Bulletin, Summer, 1948, pp. 310–319, for a stimulating discussion of this whole question.