Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic
I am philosophically aligned with Medawar, which means philosophically aligned with Karl Popper. Pluto’s Republic is a collection of essays in Popper’s mold, which is to say: scientific, realistic about how scientists do their work, and opposed to pseudoscience of all kinds. Medawar has even picked up Popper’s hatred of psychoanalysis, and gives anti-Marxism in the Popperian style a healthy go.
Medawar’s heart is in the right place, and he’s less astringent — less academic, perhaps — than Popper. He has great faith in the power of science to cure the world’s ills, and conversely has a deep hatred of pseudosciences that purport to solve problems without submitting their claims to rigorous examination. The scientific life, properly conceived, is the one we all should aspire to: constant self-critique and constant piecemeal explanation. Science is an endless sequence of “conjectures and refutations,” to use Popper’s phrase.
That’s one of Medawar’s repeated critiques: that a long string of philosophers has misrepresented how science works, aided and abetted by polished scientific papers. This polished picture convinces us that we can understand the world free of theory: just gather a lot of data, look at it with an uncritical mind, and voilà : out of the data’s forehead springs the goddess Theory, fully formed. Whereas if you watch how science actually happens, says Medawar — if you actually listen to chatter in the lab — you’ll hear a temporarily plausible conjecture first; this conjecture drives the experiments. Scientists then gather data and either refute or temporarily confirm their story. Onward we go, haltingly, provisionally, in a piecemeal fashion.
So induction, as it may naïvely be imagined, is a non-starter as a description of how science works. But the untruth of induction doesn’t imply the uselessness of scientific method. It just means that we’ve misunderstood what that method is about. Science, with all its flaws, is the only legitimate candidate we know for demonstrably progressing toward a fuller knowledge of the world: guess, observe, test, repeat.
On a few occasions Medawar attacks those who see rampaging technology as a great evil in the world; here I think he falls off the rails a bit. Technology may cause great evils, says Medawar, but it is also the only solution for fixing its own mistakes. Those who’ve watched fertilizer runoff destroy the Gulf of Mexico may be skeptical that what we need to fix it is more technology rather than a whole new attitude toward agriculture; likewise, is there really a technological solution to the problem of nuclear weaponry? Medawar doesn’t go into enough detail about exactly what he means in this context. In general, he’s on the weakest terrain when he ventures outside his zone of professional competence; I found his general social commentary and economic philosophizing (e.g., why economic predictions are inherently less accurate than meteorological ones) fatuous.
Overall, I think there’s a much better book waiting inside of this one. A more courageous editor would have deleted perhaps 1/3 of the essays, or would have rearranged them into new, less overlapping ones. As it is, Pluto’s Republic fuses two of Medawar’s earlier books without apparently deleting much from either. And it suffers from the disease (which, I’ll grant you, some don’t consider a disease) of many British historians: I envision the writer ambling around the lecture stage, cigarette in hand, thinking out loud to himself while his bemused students try to copy down what he says and put it in some coherent kind of order. This book is what happens when someone types up those lecture notes.
So I’d recommend against reading Pluto’s Republic, when many other fine books in the same vein are available. I suspect Medawar would agree with me that you should run out and read Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies at your earliest convenience if you’ve not already. After that, Pluto’s Republic feels like rambly footnotes.