Helen De Cruz writes:

When a scientific paradigm breaks down, scientists need to make a leap into the unknown. These are moments of revolution, as identified by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, when the scientists’ worldview becomes untenable and the agreed-upon and accepted truths of a particular discipline are radically called into question. Beloved theories are revealed to have been built upon sand. Explanations that held up for hundreds of years are now dismissed. A particular and productive way of looking at the world turns out to be erroneous in its essentials. The great scientific revolutions – such as those instigated by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein and Wegener – are times of great uncertainty, when cool, disinterested reason alone doesn’t help scientists move forward because so many of their usual assumptions about how their scientific discipline is done turn out to be flawed. So they need to make a leap, not knowing where they will land. But how?

To explain how scientists are able to make this leap, the philosopher of science Bas van Fraassen in The Empirical Stance (2002) drew on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939). Sartre was dissatisfied with the major mid-20th-century theories about emotions (especially those by William James and Sigmund Freud) that treated emotions as mere passive states. You might fall in love, or be gripped with jealousy. It seemed that emotions happened to you without any agency on your part. Sartre, by contrast, held that emotions are things that we do. They have a purpose, and they are intentional. For example, when we get angry, we do so to seek a solution, to resolve a tense situation. Sartre wrote:

When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world.

The world that Sartre referred to is the world of our subjective experience. It is the world of our needs, our wants, our fears and our hopes. In his view, emotions transform the world like magic. A magical act, such as voodoo, alters the attitude of the practitioner to the world. Magical spells and incantations don’t change the physical environment, but they change our world, by shifting our desires and hopes. Similarly, emotions change our outlook and how we engage with the world. Take Sartre’s example of sour grapes: seeing that the grapes are unreachable, you decide, ‘they are too sour anyway’. Though you didn’t change the chemical property of the grapes in any way, the world has become a bit more bearable. Anticipating contemporary ideas about embodied cognition, Sartre speculated that physical actions help us to produce emotions. We clench our fists in anger. We weep in sadness.

Applying this idea to scientific practice, Van Fraassen argues that scientists draw on their emotions when dealing with new, bewildering ideas, especially those that sprout up during scientific revolutions. If the paradigm is faltering, scientists need to change the way they view the world – and this requires that they change themselves. Scientists need to transform both who they are and what they know. Only once scientists themselves are transformed in this way can they accept a theory that they originally thought outlandish or ridiculous. [Continue reading…]