Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Foresight and Understanding: An Inquiry into the Aims of Science > Status Update

We need, accordingly, to see scientific thought and practice as a developing body of ideas and techniques. These ideas and methods, and even the controlling aims of science itself, are continually evolving, in a changing intellectual and social environment.

Alkemins guldmakande som "kultivering", ungefär som med penicillin.

So long as everything proceeds
according to his prior expectations, he has no opportunity to
improve on his theories. He must look out for deviations that
are not yet explained, but promise to be explicabl

This is what makes 'phenomena' important for him.
The games-player improves his sporting techniques most
quickly by playing against opponents who are just one degree
his superior. The scientist, likewise, is on the look-out for
events which are not yet quite intelligible, but which could
probably be mastered as a result of some intellectual step
which he has power to take.

Forecasting, then, is a craft or technology, an application
of science rather than the kernel of science itself. If a technique
of forecasting is successful, that is one more fact, which
scientists must try to explain, and may succeed in explaining.

Any activity has two aspects. One may consider a physical activity like tennis-playing, a practical one like nursing, or an intellectual one like theoretical physics; and in each case the aspect seen by the outsider differs in important respects from that which engrosses the professional.

Western society today may be said to harbour science like a foreign god, powerful and mysterious.