Vlll PREFACE 



it has ever existed in this world. In order to escape all temptation to 

 treat science at this dangerously extreme level of abstraction, I have 

 throughout made a systematic eflFort to develop general ideas in the 

 context of actual events in the history of science. I say nothing of 

 what science could or should or might be, or of what scientists 

 could or should or might think. I have instead said only what I be- 

 lieve science has been and is, and what scientists have thought and 

 do think. I believe their practice and beliefs distorted only to the 

 extent that I have tried to make explicit views that are often only 

 implicit, and to the extent that I have emphasized the enormous area 

 of agreement at the expense of the small but significant areas in which 

 scientists disagree. 



Second: I have tried to give a complete and integrated representa- 

 tion of science, with a just apportionment of attention to science as 

 such and to its history, philosophy, internal organization, social ties, 

 and so forth. I have tried to dissect the total problem, so that its 

 "parts" can be seen clearly; but I have tried to reassemble the "parts" 

 in order that they may be seen correctly. In their natural context 

 there are between them crucially important interactions which can- 

 not be grasped when, as ordinarily, "parts" are treated in complete 

 abstraction from one another. The perspective on science thus de- 

 veloped can treat only cursorily some topics that have been treated 

 in depth by others but, if I have succeeded, this perspective should 

 have a breadth and balance not to be found elsewhere— simply be- 

 cause the depiction of real science "in the round" is so very rarely 

 essayed. 



The reader of this work needs no understanding of higher mathe- 

 matics, nor of the intricacies of quantum mechanics and relativity. 

 Less than half a dozen algebraic equations appear in the whole of 

 the book and, of course, some loss of coverage is thus entailed. How- 

 ever, I conceive that the most fundamental questions relative to the 

 nature of science were broached long before the advent of contem- 

 porary physics, and that these questions can be treated quite ade- 

 quately in simpler contexts. But even if these examples should prove 

 obscure, the technically untrained reader will, I think, still find him- 

 self quite well able to appraise the validity of the basic arguments 

 which— like the conclusions drawn from them— are largely independ- 

 ent of the technical examples I have used to document and illus- 

 trate them. 



