46 SCIENCE (and common sense) 



cus or Einstein recognize a need, and an opportunity, to drive new 

 and deeper pilings— to reformulate the constructs. That opportunity 

 presents itself as new scientific concepts are brought into play. 



SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS 



Scientific concepts, like their counterparts in common sense, fall into 

 two distinguishable though not wholly distinct groups. There are, 

 first, the lower-level indicative concepts, having reasonably clear 

 experiential denotations, which give us power to create and use the 

 colligative relations through which we seek to forecast the future. 

 There are, second, the more abstract explicative concepts, often lack- 

 ing such denotations, which give us power to work a further organ- 

 ization of experience by bringing the separate colligative relations 

 into association with each odier. 



Extended discussion of the second group of scientific concepts I 

 defer to Chapter VIII, where I consider them in the context of the 

 theories they make possible. Serving diflFerent (logical) functions, 

 they diflFer radically from their common-sense counterparts; servang 

 a similar explicative role, they somewhat resemble those counter- 

 parts. Thus, for example, we forever seek to construe what seems 

 strange and puzzling in terms of analogies with what we have come 

 to find familiar and take for granted. In common sense we may con- 

 ceive physical causes on the analogy of the emotions we suppose to 

 be the "cause" of human activity. In science purpose or volition is not 

 acceptable as a physical cause; but the concept of "force," which 

 loomed so large in Newtonian mechanics, is an anthropomorphic 

 cause patterned on a familiar analogue. Meyerson correctly draws the 

 general conclusion that 



. . . starting from a conception of the world such as our naive per- 

 ception offers, the physicist has never transformed it save by putting 

 into play the very rules according to which this conception was consti- 

 tuted. He has continually substituted the invisible for the visible, but 

 what he has created is of the same order as what he has destroyed. 



The strangeness of scientific concepts. The concepts of science, 

 whether indicative or explicative, often strike us as "strange." They 

 must seem strange. The common-sense concepts, grasped in child- 

 hood, we find sanctified in the very structure of everyday language. 

 The scientific concepts we acquire much later in life; only with diffi- 



