56 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



THE KNOWING 



By the knowing is meant the total complex of activities 

 which result in knowledge. More specifically, it is the aggre- 

 gate of activities devised to acquaint the scientist with 

 events, to enable him to derive (or discover) a system of 

 symbols representative of this realm, and to verify the 

 symbolic scheme by comparison with events. The tradi- 

 tional formulation of the scientific method in terms of 

 observation, induction, and deduction, represents an approx- 

 imate description of the knowing technique in terms of 

 these three features. Each of these aspects will be subjected 

 to analysis in the following chapters. For the present each 

 of them may be considered briefly. 



Since the point of origin of all science is the world of events, 

 the initial technique in the knowing activity must be con- 

 cerned with the establishment of situations in which the direct 

 awareness of events is possible. It is a commonplace that 

 science begins with facts. But the discovery of these elemen- 

 tal facts is often a complicated matter. Facts are not all 

 displayed to view and open to direct inspection. Most 

 obviously, facts can be observed only in the proper spatial 

 and temporal situations. Many events in nature, such as 

 eclipses, occur only at temporal intervals, and one must 

 therefore wait for them to take place. Other events occur 

 only in certain localities, and one must go to these areas to 

 experience them. Still other events, though given in the 

 here and now, may be too minute or too brief to enter 

 readily into awareness ; in such cases one must employ instru- 

 mental aids such as microscopes and slow-motion pictures. 

 Often one can overcome these difficulties by reproducing 

 events in the laboratories under experimental conditions; 

 he can put his fingers into nature, so to speak, and thus pro- 

 duce observational situations which either would not nor- 

 mally occur at all in nature, or might occur only under un- 

 desirable conditions such as in a remote space or time, in 

 very intense or very weak manifestations, or in the prox- 



