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Science 



tions. When man— scientific man- 

 confronts any object he has a deep 

 craving to understand. The difference 

 between the state of not understanding 

 and of understanding is a complex and 

 subtle matter which has several aspects, 

 of differing importance to different per- 

 sons. 



For a scientist, a phenomenon is 

 understood provided he possesses a 

 satisfactory theory for this phenome- 

 non. But this statement is not very 

 illuminating until one goes on to say 

 what a satisfactory scientific theory is, 

 how it operates, and in what senses it 

 is useful or interesting or both. 



The theory, in refined cases and in 

 the physical sciences, is likely to con- 

 sist of a body of mathematical equa- 

 tions. These equations state the interde- 

 pendence of a few or several quantities, 

 represented simply by letters in the 

 equations. If you point to one of 

 the letters and ask, "What is this: what 

 physical thing does this represent?" 

 then the answer, at least from the 

 group here being described, is that you 

 have asked an irrelevant and improper 

 question. 



For associated with this body of 

 equations is a set of procedural rules. 

 You are told: 'Terform such and such 

 observations, either in a laboratory ex- 

 periment set up thus and so, or directly 

 upon nature in such and such a way. 

 Take the numbers which result from 

 those observations, and put them into 

 these equations, substituting the num- 

 bers for certain specified letters. Then 

 solve the equations, thus obtaining 

 numerical values for certain other let- 

 ters. Now go back to your experiment 

 (or another similar one), or go back 

 to nature and make certain further ob- 

 ser\'ations. This will provide you with 

 a new set of numbers: and if vou have 

 a sound theory, these new numbers will 

 coincide (with certain probabilistic 

 error which need not confuse us at the 

 moment) with the numbers which 



were previously solved out of the equa- 

 tions." 



The procedure sounds complicated 

 —and often it is in fact exceedingly 

 complicated. And how can this pro- 

 cedure possibly bring about under- 

 standing? 



Let us, therefore, drop this line of 

 attack for a moment, and consider a 

 more friendly, more understandable 

 sort of understanding. A person says, 

 "I don't understand genetics at all. I 

 don't understand genes and chromo- 

 somes." He is told, "Well, a chromo- 

 some (in every cell of your body, inci- 

 dentally) is sort of like a string of 

 beads, each bead being a gene. And 

 each gene determines, or helps to de- 

 termine, one of your characteristics, 

 such as your blue eyes, or your attached- 

 earlobes, or, for that matter, your sex." 

 And the person thinks, "Well, this is 

 something like it; I am beginning to 

 understand." 



With these extreme examples be- 

 fore us— of a very abstract and formal 

 theory on the one hand, and of a 

 friendly, loose, incomplete, but never- 

 theless useful analogy on the other 

 hand, we can now contrast two ex- 

 treme concepts of understanding. 



One of these, the friendly, man-in- 

 the-street variety, attempts to explain 

 by describing an unfamiliar phenome- 

 non in terms of its similarity to a fa- 

 miliar phenomenon. The fact that this 

 kind of explanation by analogy is com- 

 forting, that it satisfies the listener, is, 

 if you stop to think about it, rather sur- 

 prising. For logically and philosophi- 

 cally this procedure is a complete fraud. 

 The unfamiliar is explained in terms of 

 the familiar. But the familiar, if one 

 examines the situation honestly and 

 in detail, is itself simply not under- 

 stood. 



The other, formal, types of proce- 

 dure is, again, clearly not an explana- 

 tion, in any normal sense of that word. 

 In fact it baldly states that the scientist 



