In fact, the two faces of science are much more intimately interwoven — less like faces than like two ingredients of a thoroughly stirred mixture. “Truth and utility,” wrote Francis Bacon, the early seventeenth-century English philosopher and statesman, “are the very same things.”
In other words, the truth of beliefs about the world is guaranteed only by the capacity of those beliefs to be turned into actions that produce the practical outcomes that human beings desire.
What we understand as the instrumentality of science was, for Bacon, nothing but the other side of the scientific coin. Where the poet John Keats wrote “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Bacon might have said, “Utility is truth, truth utility” — as long as we take “utility” in a very broad sense.
But we don’t believe Bacon, either. Like Bacon, we value utility because it seems to lend credibility to the claims that science makes about the nature of the world — science is true because it works. But, at the same time, we won’t allow science to be reduced to practical utility, because that would destroy its intellectual status, as well as the intellectual status of scientists themselves, and would prevent science from giving explanations.
Sometimes we believe that science is natural philosophy, and sometimes we believe that science is instrumentality. But in fact it’s both simultaneously, neither “pure” nor “applied.” If we could acknowledge that, we wouldn’t be joking about it.
Peter Dear is a professor of history and of science and technology studies at Cornell University.
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