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Responsibility in Science and in Decisions About the Use or Non-Use of Technologies
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11326 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1986 |
13,604 Words |
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Gerard Radnitzky
Gerard Radnitzky is professor of philosophy of science at the
University of Trier, Trier, West Germany. |
The "wealth" of a nation consists primarily in its human capital, in the knowledge that its professionals generate, in the creative talent and the diligence that make possible the generation of new knowledge, in the entrepreneurial spirit, managerial skills, professional ethics, and so forth. The early gatherer-hunters possessed virtually the same natural resources available today. The major difference between them and modern man is the amount of knowledge that we possess with regard to how resources can be transformed into desired good (Gwartney 1985). Economic history shows that it has been, above all, two interacting factors that brought a diversity of goods within the budget constraints of the mass of population: the wedding of science and technology at the end of the nineteenth century together with the market order. When private rights to innovations are protected, a market order not only provides a strong incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate, but also a premium reward for innovations that improve the material living standard of the masses. The whole history of liberal capitalism is one of extending the luxuries of a minority ever wider to become everyday conveniences of growing majorities. As F. von Hayek points out, "The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have 'created' was thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed without it and which it degraded to a lower level; it was an additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new opportunities for employment which capitalism provided" (Hayek 1954:151).
Institutional arrangements such as the market order, insofar as they are efficient, constitute an epistemic resource. Since technology policy and science policy play an increasingly important role, an industrialized nation has to answer the question: "How can our intellectual life, the institutions that carry it and the market of ideas, be arranged so as to facilitate the growth of knowledge?" In linea massima the answer is that it has to be arranged so that it stimulates both creativity and criticism. Unlimited competition (i.e., criticism) in the world of ideas, in scientific research as well as in critical thinking in general, is the intellectual counterpart to the market order (W.W. Bartley III 1984). The "criticist" tradition in Popper's and Bartley's sense, which, since Bartley developed it into "pancritical rationalism," explicitly separates criticism from justification, and in this way repairs the damage done to philosophy by Cartesian constructivism, is an epistemic resource that opens the way to a rational methodology. Dogmatizing, that is, the protection of certain ideas from critical examination, is the intellectual counterpart of economic protectionism, which is likewise an attempt to impair or even to eliminate the various mechanisms
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