COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 97 



enormous role that personal metaphysics may play in "purely scien- 

 tific" matters when deeper theoretical judgments are involved. 



This eflFect is obvious even in the routine deployment made of the 

 principle of continuity. In company with common sense, science long 

 accepted ideas of fabulous things and events occurring "strangely" in 

 remote places and times. Until Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and New- 

 ton, few indeed were those who dared to extend to the celestial 

 realm the laws known to obtain in terrestrial contexts. Conversely, 

 19th-century physicists did not hesitate to extend relations, ham- 

 mered out in the macroscopic world of experience, to the hypotheti- 

 cal microcosmic world underlying it. Today the timidity of the earlier 

 attitudes and the confidence of the later both appear excessive, but 

 of course both depend (like those "hair-raising extrapolations" of 

 which Bridgman speaks) on essentially metaphysical presupposi- 

 tions. 



The cosmology of the individual scientist— uncritically formulated, 

 unarticulated, and active at a level well below full consciousness- 

 must, as Crombie observes, make itself felt throughout his science. 



. . . there has never been natural science with no preconception at 

 all of theoretical objectives of a philosophical kind. . . 



The procedures of science are methods of answering questions 

 about phenomena; . . . But the form the questions take, the direc- • 

 tion and extent to which they are pressed in the search for an ex- 

 planation, will inevitably be strongly influenced by the investigator's 

 philosophy or conception of nature, his metaphysical presuppositions 

 or "regulative beliefs," for it is these that will determine his concep- 

 tion of the real subject of his inquiry, of the direction in which the 

 truth hidden in the appearances will be found. 



Beyond "promising" problems and "responsible" techniques, even 

 what are "acceptable" solutions will so be defined. A science giving 

 purposive explanations in answering "Why" questions yields to a 

 science giving causal explanations in answering "How" questions; 

 and this may, in its turn, yield ground to a science furnishing only 

 functional relations, permitting answers to "What-When-Where" 

 questions. All these sciences reflect cosmologic opinions, and are 

 themselves mirrored in such opinions. 



Commenting on the great pioneers of science, Polanyi remarks that 

 "even their outlook will remain predominantly determined by the 



