Manual de Responsabilidades y autoridades

In October of 1938 Frank came to the United States for a lecture tour, and was forced to remain in Cambridge, Massachusetts after Czechoslovakia fell to the Nazis (Frank 1949a). In the U.S, Frank quickly resumed his work with Carnap (who had arrived just a little earlier), Hempel, Reichenbach, Ernest Nagel, and with American collaborators such as Charles Morris, Percy Bridgman, and W.V.O. Quine, among others (Holton 2006). By 1939, following a lecture tour of about 20 universities, Frank had

begun teaching in Harvard’s Department of Physics and Mathematics (Frank 1949a)55. He remained at Harvard for the duration of his career (from 1939-1953).

Prior to discussing Frank’s work on education, it will be helpful to understand the new context that Frank entered into when he first came to America. During this period, Frank’s work centered on two major pursuits: the development of the Unity of Science Institute and a fuller realization of his ambition to bring the philosophy of science into close contact with social/political concerns56. These pursuits were interrelated. Frank’s relationship to James B. Conant, president of Harvard at that time, was essential to the development of this project57. After Frank settled at Harvard, with an office in Jefferson Physical Laboratory, he became increasingly concerned that students of science were not intellectually equipped to wrestle with the philosophical and political aspects of their discipline (Frank 1947a/1949). Likewise, Frank noted that students concentrating primarily on topics in the humanities lacked the ability to think critically about contemporary research in pure science (Frank 1946/1949). In the early days of the atomic age and of the Cold War, the need for improved understanding was urgent.

Conant, like Frank, was deeply concerned with the divides that were beginning to emerge among all fields of academic work. For this reason, the two were important allies

55_{Despite Frank’s relationship with Conant, he never received a full appointment. This allowed Frank to} pursue his many intellectual activities but resulted in a financially unstable life. See Holton 2006.

56_{Given Frank’s talent as a physicist and long-time friendship with Einstein, it might be surprising to some} readers that Frank did not devote more attention to this line of research during his time at Harvard. Laszlo Tisza implicitly noted this in his remembrance of Frank, wherein he said that the period between 1904 and 1930 formed the core of Frank’s achievements in physics, which indicates that Frank did not devote much time to work in physics during the Harvard Period. (This information came from a printed remembrance that Holton put together and circulated in 1966, shortly after Frank’s death. Holton provided me with a hard copy in 2014.)

57 _{For example, see two of Frank’s writings on general education: “The Place of the Philosophy of Science} in the Curriculum of the Physics Student” (1947/1949), and “Science Teaching and the Humanities” (1946/1949). Both papers can be found in Modern Science and Its Philosophy.

and often took friendly approaches to each other’s work. At this time Conant was beginning to implement Harvard’s General Education Program58. He envisioned an interdisciplinary set of undergraduate requirements that would prepare students to engage in deliberative, democratic debates about important scientific issues. While Conant’s vision has undergone changes over the years, it has influenced many of North America’s systems of higher education. Frank, always sensitive to the potential for collaboration, organized the Fifth International Congress of the Unity of Science at Harvard. Conant was invited to give the opening remarks and spoke explicitly of the relationship between the unity of science movement and the General Education Program (Holton 2006).

In addition to forging an intellectual alliance with Conant, Frank began again the process of organizing a diverse group of scholars, who would meet regularly as a formal discussion group. (As in the Vienna Circle under Schlick, invitations were generally required.) It was from this discussion group that the Unity of Science Institute emerged (Holton 2006). The aims of the group were as follows:

The purposes for which the corporation is formed are to encourage the integration of knowledge by scientific methods, to conduct research in the psychological and sociological backgrounds of science, to compile bibliographies and publish abstracts and other forms of literature with respect to the integration of scientific literature, to support the international movement for the unity of science, and to serve as a center for the continuation of publications of the unity of science movement (Holton 2006).

“Integration” is the methodological component of the unity of science movement. Integration itself has two components on Frank’s view: theoretical and applied. The theoretical component consists in a logical empiricist and pragmatic understanding of

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science, as discussed in Chapter 1. Based on Frank’s autobiographical remarks, written during this time, we can say that the theoretical component of integration required the following elements: conventional interpretations of scientific definitions, an explicit role for pragmatic considerations (such as language choice and simplicity) and an application of the logical analysis of language to assess the meaning of scientific statements.

The applied component of the unity of science movement was fundamentally interdisciplinary and sought to organize scientists from a variety of backgrounds (including sociology, linguistics, physics, biology, psychology, and cybernetics) in order to better understand the shared principles of scientific research and to communicate those results to the scientific community, students, and the general public (Holton 1993). As noted above, this involved hosting meetings (formally recognized first as the Interscientific Discussion Group, and later as the Institute for the Unity of Science), preparing bibliographies, and publicizing the results of the discussions. This process could be extended beyond the realm of physical sciences to include the social sciences, and even the humanities, as Frank’s rapprochement claim suggests (Frank 1949a, p. 1). At Harvard, Frank’s work at the Institute for the Unity of Science and within the Interscientific Discussion Group was carried out in good company, for it included Percy Bridgman, Edwin C. Kemble, and Harlow Shapley (all of whom worked to secure an appointment for Frank), Quine, three Nobel laureates, and many other eminent scholars, all working towards the goal of improved understanding among scientists (Holton 2006, p. 303).

The Interscientific Discussion Group received funds from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1947, which provided the discussion group the means to transform itself

into a fully fledged Institute within the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Reisch 2005, p. 345). The funding allowed the group to pay more attention to its “proselytizing functions,” including public talks, and increased attention to publication efforts (such as support for the monographs of the Encyclopedia of the Unity of Science) (Holton 2006, p. 303). As Holton (1993) emphasizes, this group was not only focused on epistemological issues in science; its members always sought to contextualize scientific work by understanding science as an activity that could play a progressive role in society. For this reason the group incorporated discussions of science and values, using whatever lessons could be learned from sociology, history, and psychology (ibid.)59.

If we return to the role played by Conant, who was then trying to implement a Program of General Education at Harvard, we can see a clear connection between his work and Frank’s growing interest in education. By 1945, Conant’s reforms, championed by Frank and other members of the Institute, resulted in new course requirements and textbooks, in which the history and conceptual background to a particular field would be emphasized in all major fields of study (ibid.). But even this was not done as general education for its own sake. Rather, as the title of Conant’s proposal indicates, general education would serve a larger social role; the proposal is called General Education in a Free Society. This suggests that informed students are vital to free and democratic societies.

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The best example of this comes from Frank’s The Validation of Scientific Theories, which anthologized the papers presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1953. The Institute for the Unity of Science hosted this meeting, and the volume included papers by C. West Churchman and Richard Rudner. Both scholars worked in the social sciences and strongly advocated for the inclusion of values in science. Their work, along with Frank’s contribution, is discussed at length in Chapter 5.

The themes of Conant’s General Education Program were expanded upon by Frank in his 1950 “Introductory Remarks” to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Proceedings. In these remarks Frank outlined the goals of the Institute and his own research:

...we have to consider science as a human enterprise by which man tries to adapt himself into the external world. Then a “pragmatic” criterion means, exactly speaking, the introduction of psychological and sociological considerations into every science, even into physics and chemistry. It seems, therefore, that the sociology of science, the consideration of science as a human enterprise, has to be connected in a very tight way with everyday considerations which one might call logical or semantical (Frank 1951 quoted in Holton 2006).

The considerations that Frank calls “logical or semantical” refer to work done in logical analysis, where he notes that progress had been made in clarifying scientific methodology. Using Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions, Frank highlights the role of linguistic choice and thereby focuses his discussion on the role of external questions. Carnap defines external questions as “questions concerning the existence or reality of the system of entities as a whole” (Carnap 1947/1984 p. 242). “Do numbers exist?” is an external question because in attempting to ask about correctly applying the predicate “existence” to numbers, the question instead asks something about systems in which predicates are defined. Pragmatics enters when we question whether or not it is useful to accept the system as a whole, though the decision is not “of a cognitive nature” (ibid.). The possible pragmatic considerations that Carnap cites are “efficiency, fruitfulness, and simplicity” (ibid.).

In the Harvard period, Frank worked to show that the philosophy of the Vienna Circle could be used in the service of concrete social aims. By emphasizing the value of social and psychological considerations to logical empiricism, Frank insisted that logical

empiricists expand their research acumen to include these topics. Additionally, Frank provided the institutional mechanisms (by organizing the Institute for the Unity of Science) and developed the social network (by developing a relationship with Conant) to facilitate this research. It was in this context that Frank’s socially engaged philosophy of science began to grow.