Richard Easterlin has observed that the great advances in scientific understanding have come not as a result of market pressures to serve practical ends, but instead from “internal factors” such as intellectual curiosity and path dependence from the current paradigm. In fact, the practical contributions of science have been greatly overstated, especially with respect to the volume of work that has been done that has never resulted in practical applications. In an era where enormous energy is spent attempting to measure and promote economic growth, we have a tendency to interpret every possible activity in terms of the extent to which it is an input for that growth. But science, by and large, is a labor of love for scientists, and one that is supported by economic growth rather than the other way around.
At the time that he began making his contributions to philosophy, Michael Oakeshott was deeply embedded in the shrinking circle of British idealists. This aging school was caught between two rising stars within philosophy—the pragmatists in America and the logical positivists in Britain and continental Europe. Against the claim of pragmatists, who believed that all science and scholarship was valid only to the extent that it served purely practical ends, Oakeshott argued that these activities could be valuable in themselves. Much like poetry, history and science could be practiced simply because it was satisfying for historians and scientists; there need not be any external justification.
Against the claim of logical positivists, Oakeshott argued that science was not some abstract, ideal activity of truth-seeking. Instead, it was a practice, and its practitioners were all embedded within various distinct traditions which guided how they went about their work and the sorts of conclusions they were likely to arrive at. This argument was advanced primarily to defend history as a distinct activity from physics or chemistry; each of which has its own traditions and practices.
In Bourgeois Dignity, Deirdre McCloskey dismantles just about every theory advanced to explain the great expansion of material well being since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. She deals with science in the chapter “The Cause Was Not Science”. While not denying the contributions that science has made to our material growth, especially since the second half of the twentieth century, it’s clear that a huge majority of the wealth generated in the past two and a half centuries came from tinkerers who figured out the how before they figured out the why. As McCloskey puts it:
Such an apparently straightforward matter as the chemistry of the blast furnace was not entirely understood until well into the twentieth century, and yet the costs of iron and steel had fallen and fallen for a century and a half.
Similar examples abound; for instance, the jet engine. Even in the “physical and biological sciences”, McCloskey observes, most practitioners “work on problems that will never bear technological fruit.” But the point is not to berate scientists for being unable to advance our material welfare to the extent that tinkerers have. Instead, it seems clear that Oakeshott was on to something—science and scholarship continue because they are activities valued by their practitioners, as well as some outsiders who believe they are worth supporting financially.
McCloskey argues that rather than science causing our modern prosperity, modern man’s values have shifted largely to a belief that science is worth supporting. Our newfound prosperity is what allowed science to grow, rather than the other way around. This should not seem such a strange claim for anyone who has fallen in love with ideas; anyone who has read history, philosophy, or biology because they are interesting rather than because they are expected to arm us with something practical. But we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that the only justification for such love should be advanced along practical lines. For this reason we sneer at literary and art majors and praise the STEM majors, even though the majority of what is done in each subject is done for its own sake, on its own terms, rather than to serve any practical end.