La scienza come superstizione vincente.

La scienza non è un sapere che progredisce in modo lineare, questo il messaggio centrale di un libro come The Structure of Scientific Revolutions scritto oltre mezzo secolo fa da Thomas Kuhn e ormai diventato un classico.

Studiarne la storia modifica potentemente l’immagine che comunemente si ha della scienza…

… History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed…

La lettura dei manuali scientifici ci svia: ne comprendiamo i contenuti senza capire cosa sia questo sapere…

… the study of finished scientific achievements as these are recorded in the classics and, more recently, in the textbooks from which each new scientific generation learns to practice its trade. Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text…

E’ solo un “effetto ottico”, non si puo’ farne una colpa ai testi: manuali e libri di storia hanno obbiettivi differenti…

… Its aim is a sketch of the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical record…

L’errore più comune: pensare alla scienza mettendo troppa enfasi sull’osservazione…

… Those texts have, for example, often seemed to imply that the content of science is uniquely exemplified by the observations, laws, and theories described in their pages…

Quasi che lo scienziato osservi nel microscopio e si “converta” a cio’ che vede. Non stanno così le cose.

Lo scienziato per come emerge dai manuali ci appare con sembianze inverosimili…

… If science is the constellation of facts, theories, and methods collected in current texts, then scientists are the men who, successfully or not, have striven to contribute one or another element to that particular constellation. Scientific development becomes the piecemeal process by which these items have been added, singly and in combination, to the ever growing stockpile that constitutes scientific technique and knowledge. And history of science becomes the discipline that chronicles both these successive increments and the obstacles that have inhibited their accumulation…

I due compiti dello storico secondo il lettore ingenuo dei manuali…

… determine by what man and at what point in time each contemporary scientific fact, law, and theory was discovered or invented…

Ma una missione del genere è impossibile…

… In recent years, however, a few historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfil the functions that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who first conceived of energy conservation?… these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask…

La maggior difficoltà dello storico: distinguere ciò che nella storia è stata scienza da ciò che è stato superstizione…

… Simultaneously, these same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the “scientific” component of past observation and belief from what their predecessors had readily labeled “error” and “superstition.”…

Dobbiamo rassegnarci a considerare il “flogisto” come scienza, e per molti è dura…

… The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither less scientific nor more the product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods… If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today…

La scienza è un coacervo di teorie per lo più sbagliate, ecco il verdetto della storia…

… Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded…

È questo che ci fa dubitare della scienza come sapere cumulativo.

L’impresa scientifica va contestualizzata: Galileo, per essere compreso, non va visto in relazione a noi ma ai suoi contemporanei. È questo che fanno oggi gli storici…

… Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group,.. Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other similar ones from the viewpoint…

La scienza vista così cambia faccia…

… Seen through the works that result, works perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Alexandre Koyré, science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers…

Cosa conta nell’azione dello scienziato? Da cosa è guidato?…

… the particular conclusions he does arrive at are probably determined by his prior experience in other fields, by the accidents of his investigation, and by his own individual makeup…

La competizione personale è spesso al centro…

… We shall note, for example, in Section II that the early developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized by continual competition between a number of distinct views of nature…

Ciò che differenzia i vari approcci è qualcosa di incommensurabile…

… What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method—they were all “scientific”—but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it…

Se ci concentriamo solo sull’esito degli esperimenti e delle osservazioni non capiremo mai la dinamica in cui sono immersi scienza e scienziati…

… Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time…

Quali sono le credenze ricevute? Quali sono le componenti ultime dell’universo? La cornice filosofica conta e spiega la cocciutaggine di molti scienziati rispetto agli esiti sperimentali…

… Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption…

Le anomalie della teoria dominante vengono spesso minimizzate per restare fedeli al programma.

Poi, quando le anomalie si accumulano, ad un certo punto si cambia e scatta una “rivoluzione”…

… The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering…

Ma non è un “cambiare idea”: i vecchi paradigmi muoiono portandosi dietro i loro difensori. E’ più una selezione naturale delle idee.

Ci sono teorie più accurate delle dominanti che restano nell’ombra per il solo fatto di avere costi di transizione troppo elevati.

Le grandi svolte…

… we shall deal repeatedly with the major turning points in scientific development associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein…

Esempio di “resistenza”…

…. For the far smaller professional group affected by them, Maxwell’s equations were as revolutionary as Einstein’s, and they were resisted accordingly…

Fatti extra scientifici e teorie non sono mai perfettamente separabili…

… Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice…

Le rivoluzioni sono costantemente ostacolate…

… considers why scientific revolutions have previously been so difficult to see…

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Il processo do avanzamento della conoscenza assomiglia di più ad una selezione naturale che ad una conseguenza di nuove idee e nuovi esperimenti. Spesso le battaglie scientifiche sono battaglie generazionali: un paradigma si afferma per un cambio della classe docente all’ università più che per un esperimento cruciale. Una teoria, per quanto superata, verrà difesa ad oltranza da chi ha investito lì il suo capitale umano.

Ma non è questo il modo in cui evolvono anche le superstizioni?: dalla meno efficace alla più efficace.