The Value of Science - The Objective Value of Science

The Objective Value of Science

"What is the purpose of science?" is the question repeatedly asked in Poincaré's book. To this teleological problem, Poincaré responds by taking the opposite position from that of Édouard Le Roy, philosopher and mathematician, who argued in a 1905 article (Sur la logique de l'invention, "On the logic of invention") that science is intrinsically anti-intellectual (in the sense of Henri Bergson) and nominalistic. In contrast to Le Roy, Poincaré follows the thought of Pierre Duhem. He explains that the notion that science is anti-intellectual is self-contradictory, and that the accusation of nominalism can be strongly criticized, because it rests on confusions of thoughts and definitions. He defends the idea of conventional principles, and the idea that scientific activity is not merely a set of conventions arranged arbitrarily around the raw observations of experiment. He wishes rather to demonstrate that objectivity in science comes precisely from the fact that the scientist does no more than translate raw facts into a particular language: "(...) tout ce que crée le savant dans un fait, c'est le langage dans lequel il l'énonce". The only contribution of science would be the development of a more and more mathematized language, a coherent language because it offers predictions which are useful — but not certain, as they remain forever subject to comparisons with real observations, and are always fallible.