When I was a wee little lad of 28, I started a serious study of the philosophy of science. One of the "big names" was the brilliant mathematician Imre Lakatos, who was a colleague of Sir Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. He died far too early, but managed to publish a post-T. S. Kuhn defense of Popperian philosophy of science, "The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs" that nonetheless moved the goalposts a tad in the then (early 1970's) disagreements between Popper and Kuhn. One of the phrases that Lakatos introduced to the discussion was "rational reconstruction"; that is to say that philosophy of science should seek to strip away the detritus of actual scientific research, all non-scientific forces and influences, and deal solely and simply with a reconstruction in scientific terms of what happens when science is done. While this has the advantage of keeping one's mind focused, it has the disadvantage of leaving science neutered, some inhuman thing that has no reference to anything real.
I realized pretty quickly that this was not just untenable, but by creating this imaginary world where science was not so much a human project but some Thing that did and could exist without human beings, it stripped the scientific project of any connection to the actual practice of human beings. In other words, just as I have complained in the past of Richard Dawkins making up a religion, calling it Christianity, then proving that this invention of his stood in for all religions at all times, and at the same time was untenable, so Lakatos' castle in the air he called science was just as fantastic - and flawed.
Two anecdotes should suffice to show how irrelevant such a method is. The first involves the discovery of the chemical construction of benzene. The researcher who was attempting to figure out how the elements that make up benzene bonded the way they did was stuck for a long time. One night, he had a dream in which a snake bit its own tail, then rolled around the ground like a wheel. When he awoke and went to work the next day, he referred to the dream and discovered that benzene was, in fact, a chemical ring.
Percival Lowell was a member of a famous, and wealthy, Massachusetts family who was interested in astronomy. He had this fantastic idea that Mars was not only inhabited, but by a civilization so advanced they had constructed a series of canals visible to the telescopic eye as it observed the fourth planet. In order to further investigate this phenomenon, Lowell spent a bunch of his own money setting up an observatory. His decision to do this was prompted by a visit he had one night by a group of gnomes, who convinced him that this would be money well spent.
How can the philosophy of science deal with these two stories, if the goal is to strip away the human element from the practice? It cannot.
We can only make sense of any human project - science, love, religion, politics, art - if we embrace the wholeness, the complexity, the idiosyncratic nature, and, yes, even the irrational elements that go into each and every event and human experience. We cannot make any real sense of the world unless and until we are willing to accept that "rational reconstruction", whether of science or anything else, limits our understanding.
