The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

The ideas in the last few pages are some of the most important that I have to share. Together they capture the way in which the procedural consensus orchestrated by the iron rule powers the scientific knowledge machine. I’ll state them one more time. First, the consensus ensures continuity. Provided that there are resources and the will to continue the investigation, there is no prospect that Montague and Capulet will arrive at a position where they can think of nothing to do or say that might bring them any closer together. There are no duels or divorces in science, no schisms to parallel the historical schisms in religion, politics, and philosophy, where opposing camps stop talking or worse. Always there is something that even the most bitter adversaries can agree to do next: another test. Second (and consequently), the iron rule channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence. Capulet and Montague’s complex feelings about one another must, as long as they follow a scientific script, work themselves out in the lab, the field, or the observatory. Third, the fundamental conventions of the game, the legitimate evidential moves, are fixed for all time. This gives the players, the scientists, a quiet but firm certainty in the foundation of their enterprise, a stable intellectual and moral platform on which to construct great experimental enterprises, with all their financial, emotional, ...