10 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



eral conditions of logical and coherent thought." * This 

 interpretation may involve reference to ultimates such as 

 first causes, things-in-themselves, essences, and the like, 

 on the grounds that the human mind cannot be completely 

 satisfied with mere description, and demands that we go 

 beyond to more basic interpretations. 



It is clear that such an apportioning of the intellectual 

 task to science and philosophy need not result in a view 

 that the two disciplines are hostile to one another. For the 

 extreme positivists, who claim the exclusiveness of the 

 method of description, all philosophy becomes nonsense. 

 But for the more moderate proponents of the position, 

 science and philosophy constitute a cooperative enterprise 

 in which science assumes responsibility for the less ultimate 

 problems and philosophy for the more ultimate. The ground 

 for this attitude is the recognition that the distinction be- 

 tween description and explanation is not an ultimate one. 

 When one describes, he explains in terms of the more obvious 

 features of the given, and when he explains he describes in 

 terms of the less obvious features. With the advance in 

 instrumental techniques explanatory entities become de- 

 scriptive entities, e.g., molecules, as seen in the Brownian 

 movement. The answer to the question why is not funda- 

 mentally different from the answer to the question how; 

 when one explains he seems to be calling attention to the 

 more basic but somewhat more elusive features of nature — 

 he seems to be getting behind nature to enduring connec- 

 tions, more permanent substances, and the like. But it is 

 the fate of all explanatory entities whose existence becomes 

 well established that they become descriptive entities, which 

 must in turn be explained by still more basic entities. This 

 argues for the view that science and philosophy represent a 

 continuum with reference to one another — a continuum of 

 understanding, at one end of which the approach to nature 

 is through descriptive techniques, and at the other end of 

 which the approach is through explanatory methods. Hence 



: A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 47. 



