8 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



in philosophical ideas than in scientific knowledge. But the 

 recent point of view, while admitting the fact, has adopted 

 another explanation. It insists that the differences between 

 science and philosophy are fundamental but not irrecon- 

 cilable — that the disciplines, instead of being opposed and 

 antagonistic to one another, are really supplementary. 

 Nature is one, but there may be different kinds of objects 

 in nature, and there may be different ways of studying 

 natural objects. Science and philosophy are distinct, either 

 because there are scientific and philosophical objects and 

 the study of the one cannot be the study of the other, or 

 because there is only one general kind of object in nature 

 but alternative ways of viewing it. The result of this ap- 

 proach to the problem in recent years has been the formu- 

 lation of a number of points of view from which the apparent 

 opposition between the two fields may be understood. For 

 present purposes five of the contemporary theories may 

 be discussed: (1) Science describes, philosophy explains; 

 (2) science describes facts empirically, philosophy analyzes 

 symbols logically; (3) science describes facts, philosophy 

 describes values; (4) science describes quantities, philos- 

 ophy describes qualities; (5) science analyzes, philosophy 

 intuits. 



DESCRIPTION VS. EXPLANATION 



The view that science should limit its task to that of mere 

 description, leaving the more ultimate problems of explana- 

 tion and interpretation to philosophy, has been character- 

 istic of the so-called positivistic school, of which Mach, 

 Kirchhoff, and Karl Pearson are representatives. Even as 

 far back as Comte one finds an acknowledged positivism. 

 "Our business is — seeing how vain is any research into what 

 are called Causes, whether first or final — to pursue an accu- 

 rate discovery of . . . Laws, with a view to reducing them 

 to the smallest possible number. By speculating upon causes, 

 we could solve no difficulty about origin and purpose. Our 

 real business is to analyze accurately the circumstances of 



