THE REAL WORLD 363 



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frees us from the obligation to search for clear conceptions of Na- 

 ture by condemning the belief in them as gross superstition. 



That "superstition," fortunately, is likely to survive all such attacks on 

 it. At least this is the conclusion Koyre draws from studies of scientific 

 history extending as far back as the Greeks. 



. . . (i) The positivistic phase of renouncement, or resignation, is 

 only a kind of retreat position, and it is always a temporary one; (ii) 

 although the human mind, in its pursuit of knowledge, repeatedly 

 assumes this attitude, it does not accept it as final— at least it has 

 never done so until now; and (iii) sooner or later it ceases to make 

 virtue of necessity and congratulate itself on its defeat. Sooner or 

 later it comes back to the allegedly unprofitable, impossible, or mean- 

 ingless task and tries to find a causal and real explanation for the ac- 

 cepted and established laws. 



REPRESENTATIONALISM 



Between optimistic naivete and defeatist cynicism there is room and 

 to spare for sanguine scepticism. Never beyond all doubt, scientific 

 knowledge is admittedly never something distinctly separable from 

 the characteristics of the human knower. But, I should think quite as 

 obviously, scientific knowledge also represents (though how I do 

 not pretend to grasp ) the characteristics of a real world independent 

 of our knowing of it. I maintain further that as science advances the 

 "purely human" element in our knowledge diminishes, though pre- 

 sumably never to extinction; and that the measure of what remains 

 unexplained also diminishes progressively, though never to zero. For 

 at least part of this contention one finds support from an unexpected 

 quarter. Though he entirely denies the possibility of scientific expla- 

 nation, Duhem confesses that he (and, he says, every other physicist) 

 finds inescapable the faith that 



. . . physical theory through its successive advances tends to arrange 

 experimental laws in an order more and more analogous to the tran- 

 scendent order according to which the realities are classified, that as a 

 result physical theory advances gradually toward its limiting form, 

 namely, that of a natural classification, . . . 



Claiming much more than Duhem, I assert an asymptotic approach 

 of scientific knowledge to a faithful representation of the real world. 

 // this view be granted then— turning to my own use an argument 



