The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

We expect Elizabethan drama to end stirringly in true love or violence, and modern drama (perhaps) in misery or self-recognition. The drama of science, however, never need end at all. Montague and Capulet can continue their dialogue indefinitely without running out of lines. That is because there is always a purely scientific way to perpetuate a scientific argument: make more measurements or conduct new experiments. The unending script, the code of conduct for scientific argument according to which Montague and Capulet may continue their debate indefinitely, is provided by the methodological precept that I call the iron rule of explanation. What the rule says is simple enough: it directs scientists to resolve their differences of opinion by conducting empirical tests rather than by shouting or fighting or philosophizing or moralizing or marrying or calling on a higher power. That is all; it makes no attempt to interpret the evidence, to decide winners and losers. Indeed, its function is not so much to resolve the dispute as to prolong it. This perpetuation of the dramatic conflict for its own sake is the essence of the scientific method, and as the perpetuator-in-chief, the iron rule establishes itself as the heart, the soul, the life force of scientific inquiry.