Science as an Institution

Lecture 11.  September 25 and October 1.

Afterthoughts.  The question that we considered in today’s lecture — the “civilizational question” of why the Scientific Revolution took place only in Europe — is part of a larger picture concerned with seeing science as an institution.  When we think of science and scientists we tend to think of laboratories and researchers, but, as Weber observed in “Science as a vocation,” science is something much larger, a social institution composed not just of scientists, professional societies, and universities, but as a way of thinking with implications far outside the bounds of scientific investigation as such.

In this lecture, we looked at the the birth of science as an institution, and learned that it could not have been created without a variegated set of pre-existing values, practices, ideas, concepts, and institutions, many of which, such as corporations, had little or nothing to do with science to begin with.  The story exemplified the New History of Science I discussed in the first week of class.  

• We saw that the spirit of certain times and places made the invention of science likely or unlikely.
• We saw that the invention of science was not a thought out plan, but represented the coming together of numerous social, economic, and philosophical developments that coalesced in a remarkably creative way — almost a miracle and certainly unforeseeable.
• We saw that the Scientific Revolution was not an inevitable step leading to modernity, but depended critically upon contingent historical processes that could have come out differently.
• We saw that understanding the origin and course of the Scientific Revolution requires looking outside the technical problems addressed by early modern scientists such as Galileo and Newton to external factors such as Christianity’s recognition of the power of reason to at least partly grasp truth unaided by revelation.

The important lesson is that science is not, as scientists themselves sometimes seem to think, a uniquely rational enterprise that is (or, perhaps, ought to be) radically independent from everything else, but is an institution whose existence is interwoven with a network of other institutions which gave it life and continue to sustain it.

Forethoughts.  And as Weber observed, once science becomes part of this network of institutions, it begins to affect them.  In coming lectures we will look at psychology in light of these two insights.  We will see how the origin and nature of different psychologies were conditioned by the social institutions in which they originated.  For example, the psychology of consciousness was born in the (then) uniquely German new model universities that embodied a  certain values, such as pure research undertaken for its own sake, while in Britain and America the psychology of adaptation had no firm, yet defining, home, and developed in an atmosphere pervaded by different values, in which practical application of science was taken for granted.  We will then see (especially in the case of psychoanalysis) how psychological concepts were not only shaped by, but began powerfully to shape, peoples’ understanding of themselves in their innermost being and in their relation to others and to society.

Psychology Disenchants the Human World

Lecture 10.  September 23 and 29.

Afterthoughts.  

Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted [de-magified]. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means. This process of disenchantment, which has continued to exist in Occidental culture for millennia, and, in general, this ‘progress,’ to which science belongs as a link and motive force.

Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1918)

 

Weber was one of the most important social thinkers of the twentieth century.  He was very concerned about the effects of the application of reason to all spheres of life, an application resulting in what he elsewhere called the “iron cage” of reason and bureaucracy.  The talk I just quoted was given by Weber to German college students in 1918.  Members of his audience felt especially disenchanted just then.  What had started for them as a romantic, noble, cause — World War 1 — had ended in European horror and German defeat.  Their newly unified (1871) empire had been replaced by what seemed to many a bland, bourgeois, unexciting, unambitious democracy, known now to history as the Weimar Republic.

Weber was addressing an important theme in the history of science, the creation of a new social role, that of scientist, and what might and should be expected of scientists and their new institution, science.  Organized science is the epitome of the application of reason, and the Scientific Revolution had created a triumphant picture of the world as a machine knowable by reason, whose movements could be precisely calculated and technically controlled.  The problem for many people, including especially, as he notes several times, the youth in Weber’s audience, was that science was invading human relations, too, reducing them to rational calculation and technical adjustment.  They deeply resented this, and Weber discussed what science can and cannot offer as a replacement for religion, feeling, and mystery — enchantment — in living a flourishing life.  The answer was, very little.

The profound questions raised by Weber are of great importance for the history of psychology as an institution, because psychology (especially in the United States) is the central science through which the discipline of reason and technocracy have been brought to bear on everyday life.  Your life has been sorted by numbers from the Apgar test applied when you were but seconds old, to the SAT test you took in high school, to usage data collected from your most recent Google search, and conclusions about your behavior and life’s prospects calculated by equations.  Priests used to offer guidance on negotiating life’s vicissitudes, now scientifically-trained psychologists do.  This is Weber’s iron cage.

Forethoughts.  Science will make its move from the heavens to the earth, from the planets to people, during the 18th century and the Enlightenment Project of the philosophes, the topics of the next 2 lectures.  All will question, some will reject, and a few will seek to erase, what they see as the irrational institutions that had controlled Europe up to then, unreflective aristocratic tradition and revelatory religion.