The Role of Mystery and Doubt in Scientific Understanding
Joshua Richardson on Henk W. de Regt’s Understanding Scientific Understanding
In Ignorance: How It Drives Science, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein explains why negative capability and its affirmation of mystery is so important to science. But negative capability isn’t a scientific idea, it’s a poetic one, a term coined by John Keats, the English Romantic poet known for his passionate verses capturing the beauty of nature and the human experience. “Negative capability,” wrote Keats “is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” According to Firestein, “being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt,” because there “is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.” Thus, it is the negative capability of scientists that, in part, allows them to formulate intelligible scientific theories amidst the dark light of uncertainty, mystery, and doubt. Our times are marked by political, economic, and environmental uncertainties, which is why a book like the Dutch philosopher Henk W. de Regt’s Understanding Scientific Understanding (Oxford University Press) is so timely: it shows us why scientific theories are successful, and in so doing it affirms that humans are able to handle uncertainty, mystery, and doubt when faced with the horizon-line of knowledge.
De Regt’s central theory is psychologistic, meaning that it emphasizes the subjective, psychological role of understanding in science. For De Regt, scientific understanding is the contextual and practical application of intelligible scientific theories. This means that in order for theories to be successful, they must not only make accurate and reliable predictions in pertinent contexts, they must also be understandable to a given community of scientists and researchers. De Regt’s focus is on the academic community, but the success of intelligible scientific theories has, of course, wider social and cultural implications. Popular scientific figures garner celebrity and even wield some political influence, in part, because of their communication of intelligible scientific theories to the public.
Perhaps the strongest case for De Regt’s thesis is in his study of the history of quantum mechanics. A heady world of complex theory and experimentation, he shows clearly how and why intelligibility matters for science. He writes regarding one school of thought, the Copenhagen School of quantum theory: “Outside this relatively small group the theory [of matrix mechanics] was largely ignored. One reason was that the theory is formulated in the mathematical language of matrices, which was difficult and unfamiliar to most physicists at that time.” He explains what this meant for a theory that was much easier for physicists to understand: “Schrödinger’s [theory of] wave mechanics, by contrast, was intelligible to the larger community of physicists because of its visualizability and its familiar mathematics.” Despite the valid predictions offered by both theorems, the intelligibility of Schrödinger’s theory meant it was far easier for physicists to use in constructing models and experiments, thus allowing them to further the science. In a political context, when a politician or civil-servant uses an intelligible theory to form policy, or communicate with the public, it means that decisions can be based on models that make accurate predictions. This is because the theory is understood. Even false, or misrepresented theories can still be understood, but understanding unaccompanied by validity is empty.
Understanding has long been the subject of debate in the history and philosophy of science. Johann Gustave Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey are credited with introducing the Explanation-Understanding dichotomy (Erklären-Verstehen) in the nineteenth-century to differentiate between the natural and human sciences: “The former,” de Regt writes, “aim at explanation (Erklären), whereas the latter have understanding (Verstehen) as their goal.” He continues: “Explanation [Erklären] is, in their view, a purely objective enterprise, which consists in uncovering the causes and general laws that underlie observed natural phenomena. Understanding [Verstehen], by contrast, is subjective and consists in interpreting the intentions of (historical) actors and the meaning of artifacts such as texts or works of art.” The objective natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, and physiology, with their mode of explanation, would forever be opposed to the human sciences, including history, psychology, and sociology, with this mode of understanding.
Henk W. de Regt, Understanding Scientific Understanding. Oxford University Press, 2017. 320 pg. $120 (hardcover)
In the 1950s and 60s, Austrian philosopher of science Carl Hempel helped solidify the division of the natural and human sciences in the twentieth-century by banishing understanding from his philosophy of science as a purely psychological aspect of subjectivity with no place in the objective realm of natural science. “My theory of scientific understanding, by contrast,” explains de Regt, “assigns a crucial role to the pragmatic and the psychological, namely via the notion of intelligibility. Accordingly, I renounce the strongly objectivist approach of Hempel: understanding is important also in the natural sciences.” De Regt’s position resembles that of another philosopher, the now relatively obscure 19th Century German physiologist Emil du Bois - Reymond, who thought that history should service science by providing meaningful context to its discoveries. In fact, the philosophical division of understanding (Verstehen) and explanation (Erklären) could be seen as a response to du Bois - Reymond, who was one of Germany’s premier public intellectuals at the time. (Thank you to Gabriel Finkelstein for this observation.) The History and Philosophy of Science movement which emerged on the tale of Carl Hempel in the late 1960s and early seventies may also be seen as building on du Bois - Reymond’s idea of history as handmaiden to the sciences - a movement of which De Regt may be counted as a member.
Long before De Regt, and before Carl Hempel had banished subjective, psychological understanding from his philosophy of the natural sciences, some in the discipline of psychology had already laid the groundwork for their own exile. Franz Brentano (1838-1917) had influenced a generation of scholars, including his student Sigmund Freud, by distinguishing between what he called descriptive and genetic psychology. For Brentano, descriptive psychology (deskriptive Psychologie) was the realm of human subjectivity, where every act of individual consciousness is the subject of an intention (meaning consciousness is always directed at something); phenomenology, a scrupulous describing of objects as we encounter them, is its mode of study. By contrast, genetic psychology (genetische psychologie) has as its object of study the causal mechanisms underlying mental activity (not genetics, as one may mistakenly construe); its mode of study is experimental science, much like the scientific psychology, or cognitive science we might recognize today. Most 19th and 20th Century scholarship would follow this or similar dividing lines, such as the Explanation-Understanding dichotomy, drawing dividing lines between the natural and human sciences, institutionalizing them into departments, funding bodies, and governmental policy, thus entering the cultural bedrock.
Another philosopher in the early 20th Century brought Brentano’s method of phenomenology and the ideas of explanation and understanding together in a synthesis in the service of science. In his General Psychopathology (1913), Karl Jaspers envisioned a science of psychopathology practiced by psychiatrists, where explanation and understanding were its basic modes. In it he made the distinction between delusions proper and delusion-like ideas. The former are so-called ‘primary delusions’ of which he wrote: “If we try to get some closer understanding of these primary experiences of delusion, we soon find we cannot really appreciate these quite alien modes of experience. They remain largely incomprehensible, unreal, and beyond our understanding.” In other words, where words no longer share meaning they become un intelligibile.” And yet, unintelligibility need not impede our scientific or social progress, as de Regt notes. “On the contrary:” he writes, “sometimes progress can only be made by confronting the unintelligible.” By facing the unintelligible, we may realize our own negative capability in the presence of subatomic and metaphysical uncertainty.
Unlike other science oriented thinkers, De Regt in no way attempts to dismiss, or eliminate metaphysical questions outside the realm of science. “Metaphysical ideas (e.g., ideas implied by religious doctrines),” writes De Regt, “can positively contribute to scientific research and development. Isaac Newton, whose theological views interacted with his scientific work, is a case in point.” But we’d be misguided to think that this means metaphysics, or religious faith, have the last say. Metaphysics may provide useful concepts for understanding scientific theories, but as De Regt observes in the context of the Newtonian revolution: “After Newton, phenomena could be explained mathematically, even when their metaphysical basis was (as yet) unknown. In my terminology: metaphysical intelligibility was no longer regarded as a requirement for a scientific understanding of phenomena.” Great metaphysical mysteries may remain, while science progresses.
Henk De Regt's Understanding Scientific Understanding provides a kind cognitive therapy for scientists by providing a rationale for understanding’s role in science and showing how subjectivity—with all of its uncertainties and doubts—is required for science to be successful. Faced with political, social, and environmental uncertainties, whether answers to our problems lay in science or in metaphysics, it is of value to our understanding of the world, that we acknowledge what we do not and cannot understand. In Understanding Scientific Understanding we find one way in which we can appreciate these limitations.
Josh Richardson is a registered psychotherapist. He studied philosophy at Trent University and pursued studies in philosophy at the University of Guelph, researching questions in the philosophy of psychiatry. His clinical education and experience began in psychiatric nursing, followed by training in psychotherapy. He lives and works in Ontario, Canada.
