120 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



Granting that data may be symbolized by a more or less 

 deliberate act, there arise the problems as to what this 

 operation is and as to what form the symbols take. These 

 two problems may be discussed briefly in the order given. 



The nature of the operation is determined by one's con- 

 ception of the general task of science. Does science merely 

 describe or does science also explain? The more detailed 

 analysis of these two basic notions will be given later. For 

 the present it may suffice to point out that in description 

 one endeavors to symbolize the obvious features of events, 

 whereas in explanation he tries to represent their less obvious 

 features — their causes and effects, their constituents, their 

 appearances under different conditions, and so on. Now 

 since a knowledge of the less obvious features is presumably 

 based on a knowledge of the more obvious, description must 

 precede explanation. If one adopts the positivistic point 

 of view that the task of science is merely to describe and 

 not to explain, he will insist that science has completed 

 its work when it has pointed out the obvious features of 

 events. But since, presumably, no one would maintain 

 that the task of science is merely to explain and not to 

 describe, one may conclude that the very minimum which 

 science can do is to symbolize the obvious features of events. 

 Hence science is at least description. 



Description may be defined as the operation by which the 

 more obvious features of an event are symbolized. Gold 

 would be described as a hard, yellow, lustrous substance; 

 a robin as a bird about ten inches in length, slate-gray above 

 and chestnut-brown beneath; an orange as a spherical fruit, 

 orange in color, having a spicy smell and a sweet taste. 

 If the complex term in each of these cases means simply the 

 properties enumerated, the application of the term itself 

 to the event would also be description. Since description 

 passes imperceptibly into explanation, an enumeration of 

 some of the less obvious properties might be called descrip- 

 tion by contrast with a characterization of the highly ob- 

 scure features. Thus one might also describe gold as a sub- 



