44 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



must not make the mistake of supposing that it is only the 

 scientist who is significant in the resulting picture; properly 

 speaking, it is the act of the scientist which is the funda- 

 mental feature, and this act must be considered as tying 

 both the scientist and his own picture of nature with nature 

 herself. Thus it is really the knowledge of the scientist 

 which one is studying, but this is considered only as having 

 arisen through a certain act and as having been directed 

 upon a certain object. If one does not insist upon this at 

 the outset he runs the risk of committing the fallacy of 

 vicious abstraction. 



Furthermore one should recognize that the act which is, 

 so to speak, the core of the scientific method is itself an 

 event in the life of the scientist, and as such to be inserted 

 into the background of his history. The pragmatist has 

 called attention to this fact in recent years. Thinking, he 

 has insisted, is a natural event happening in the fife of a 

 certain type of highly developed organism. It must there- 

 fore be understood genetically in terms of the situation out 

 of which it arose and for which it became an instrument of 

 adjustment. Thinking in general arises when the organism 

 finds itself in a situation for which it has no ready and suc- 

 cessful response; thought is explicable, therefore, as a some- 

 what complicated trial and error response, the ultimate aim 

 of which is the restoration to the organism of its previous 

 state of composure. This makes all reasoning, and deriva- 

 tively all science, instrumental in character, and hence in- 

 explicable apart from the situation for which it is the tool. 

 The scientist solves problems because they are irritating to 

 him, just as the fox seeks food in order to allay his feeling of 

 hunger, and one finds it impossible to explain either the 

 intelligence of the scientist or the slyness of the fox apart 

 from these facts. 



While this is an important revelation, credit for which is 

 due to the pragmatist, its full implications make a considera- 

 tion of thought apart from problems impossible. But the 

 very essence of the empirical method involves a recognition 



