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Science in Service of Society
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12402 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1987 |
2,941 Words |
| Author
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Andre Cournand
Andre Cournand is professor emeritus of medicine at the
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In
1956, he shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for
his work with cardiac catheterization. |
Since retiring from clinical investigation of respiratory and cardiovascular functions in human beings, I have been studying certain problems relating to the education of the mind, or, in the words of the French poet and essayist Paul Valery, "l'education de l'esprit." Early in this endeavor I had the opportunity, under the guidance of Gaston Berger, to learn the Prospective attitude and method. I have also had occasion to reflect on my own experiences as a scientist and to apply the penetrating insights of my friend Robert K. Merton on the conduct and method of science to those reflections. In all of this, I have sought to identify certain intellectual linkages between the ideas of Berger and Merton and to consider their bearing on the overriding problem of our time, the creation of a rational order for a world gone awry.
Concerned about the accelerating rate of technological, social, and cultural change, Berger thought deeply about preserving human values in a society whose rapidly evolving features are no longer predictable. His reflections disclosed a paradoxical situation: In this rapidly changing society, the ability to foresee the future with clarity is progressively more essential, and yet it is in just such a world that the inadequacy of conventional techniques for forecasting becomes most obvious.
The goal of the Prospective method is to create alternative images of the future that will serve the process of decision making in the present. Creation of these images is the result of an in-depth analysis of situations, identification of facts or events pregnant with future possibilities, and anticipation and projection of their possible and desirable developments. In this sense, it is somewhat akin to the creative process of the natural sciences - the process through which different hypotheses are devised and then submitted to experiment - that Merton has so insightfully described. The crucial difference between the scientific and Prospective methods is that the testing of hypotheses arrived at through the Prospective method lies only in the ulterior judgment of history.
The Dynamics of Scientific Thought
Scientific knowledge, whether fundamental or applied, evolves within the framework of a model that the physicist-historian Thomas Kuhn (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) has called the scientific paradigm. This model holds scientists within the limits of a theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and technical order. At work within that accepted order, scientists exemplify three different types: the
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