104 COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 



studies showing the disproportionately small number of American 

 Roman Catholics among important American scientists?* Capacity 

 for doubt and dissent may, on the other hand, abound in one who 

 —as member of an "out-group" (perhaps a religious minority)— is 

 forced to regard existing orthodoxies from the outside, and so more 

 sceptically than the orthodox for whom orthodoxy is final. The pre- 

 dominance of dissenters in early English science, and the dispropor- 

 tionately large number of Jews in the ranks of major scientific inno- 

 vators, perhaps finds here some explanation. Not all out-groups pro- 

 duce a multitude of great scientists. Insufficient in itself, scepticism 

 must be complemented by a moral faith that, in the dissenting and 

 Jewish traditions, judges scholarship a matter of "value." 



THE COSMOLOGY OF ORGANIZED SCIENCE 



Cosmology is not a highly organized enterprise: each scientist is his 

 own cosmologist, and to each his own individual cosmology is, over- 

 whelmingly, the most appealing. Multiple factors originating in his 

 local community enter into the cosmology of each, and thence into 

 his science. How then can science have unity? By virtue of its own 

 existence as a social entity! Organized science creates and maintains 

 its own cultural milieu, its own ideological atmosphere, in which the 

 scientist dwells so long as he studies science and works as scientist. 

 Organized science has its own language ("scientific language"), its 

 own aesthetics ("simplicity"), its own ethics ("truth is the supreme 

 good"), its own morality ("the search for truth is the supreme moral 

 obligation"). To these add a set of principles, accepted by practically 

 all scientists of a given generation, which determine the whole tex- 

 ture of scientific thought. Summing over all, one finds a respectable 

 approximation to a corporate cosmology. 



Nowhere stated as such, this cosmology forms part of the scientific 

 tradition with which the individual scientist becomes familiar during 

 his education, and in his later dealings with his colleagues. Encour- 

 aged by this tradition to disregard die various influences originating 

 in the social milieu of his native community, the scientist can never 

 wholly disregard them— but their eflFect is greatly attenuated or di- 

 luted by the cosmology of organized science. Despite the variations in 



* On this very large subject see R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Struc- 

 ture (Free Press of Glencoe, 1957), chapter 18, "Puritanism, Pietism, and 

 Science." 



