32 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



to the possibilities of cooperation in the scientific enterprise; 

 often newly discovered techniques in one field have proved 

 applicable to other fields, and frequently conclusions in one 

 department suggest analogies in other departments. 



Moreover, whatever may be said as to the dangers run 

 by science when it becomes over-attentive to method, it 

 can hardly be said that science will profit by a complete 

 neglect of logical considerations. Though the scientist can- 

 not be expected to tell us what truth in the abstract is, he 

 can certainly improve his results by clarifying his notion 

 of the techniques to be employed in testing the truth of an 

 hypothesis, and the dangers to which such techniques are 

 exposed. It is not unlikely that knowledge of the most 

 common errors of observation will make the observer less 

 susceptible to them; it is reasonable to suppose that an 

 understanding of the principles of deduction will enable the 

 scientist more readily to discover faulty applications of 

 them in his own mental processes. Even the carpenter 

 must occasionally pay attention to his tools. 



Finally, clarification of the implicit concepts and assump- 

 tions of science can only result in a corresponding clarifica- 

 tion of its explicit beliefs. Every intellectual enterprise 

 rests upon certain undefined notions and certain undemon- 

 strated propositions. These basic ideas, however, are the 

 foundations of the science in a logical sense rather than its 

 origin in a temporal sense. One makes no conscious assump- 

 tions to begin with but discovers in the course of his investi- 

 gation that his conclusions can be justified only if he makes 

 explicit certain beliefs which seem to have been implicitly 

 present from the beginning. But the fact that the science 

 rests upon these notions does not mean that they are clearly 

 understood; on the contrary they can be clarified only by a 

 slow and painful process which shows their derivation from 

 data which are more clearly given. "The truth is that 

 what is logically most primitive in nature is not what is 

 now most familiar to us, and therefore it is better for didactic 

 purposes to start with the logically derivative but practically 



