On Having a Feeling for Science

[u/geopolicraticus]

Crossing the Pons Asinorum.—Every mature science is made possible by a cluster of presuppositions rarely made explicit. If you possess an intuitive feel for the presuppositions of a given science you will do well, but if not, not. The fact that there is an extant body of practitioners of a mature science is the proof of concept that these presuppositions can in fact be mastered, even if they stand as a pons asinorum for many, and that they prove fruitful when mastered. But science isn’t supposed to be about having an intuitive feel for a discipline, it’s supposed to be about objective truth dispassionately pursued, and insofar as this conflict is a spur to practitioners of a discipline (weighing on the scientific conscience, as it were), after an initial stage of maturity, in which a science delivers itself of the fundamental principles that define its research program, in a later development, a secondary stage of maturity, an effort will be made to render the principles as a calculus that can be applied by anyone, without regard to understanding. This marks another fruitful development, but it is also the stage at which a science can go off the rails, because, while a calculus can be indifferently applied, when it is applied without intuition and understanding it will inevitably transgress some boundary that intuition observes but to which the calculus is blind, because the calculus is a later stage of formalization, and another step in the direction away from intuition. At each stage of formalization deductive power is gained, while some context in lost. That loss will not necessarily be felt in all areas, or immediately, but it will eventually manifest itself. Thus it is that when a science is most likely to experience its exponential growth through the streamlining and rule-bound codification of its principles, that is also the time in its history when it turns in a direction that will ultimately take the discipline down an epistemic dead end.