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25 APRIL 1975
335
For some decades now, I have transmitted this bit of earthy wisdom to
other generations of students in slightly
modified form: "In general, it's a good
thing to know what you are doingand why you are doing it." The qualifier "in general" is designed, of course,
to warn against the danger of that premature faultfinding which stifles ideas
that need to be played with before
being subjected to systematic and rigorous examination. There is a place,
as Max Delbriick and Dickinson Richards have severally reminded us, for
"the principle of limited sloppiness."
What, then, does Holton do when he
does thematic analysis? How does he
identify themata so that we, the beneficiaries of his concept, can in turn
proceed to discover and understand
other themata?
Having studied his book, Thematic
Origins of Scientific Thought, and his
paper on the role of preconceptions in
the work of Millikan and Ehrenhaft
(5), I must report my strong impression that Holton identifies themata inductively. In saying this, I realize that
in some quarters these days the very
term "induction" is in ill repute, as in
other quarters is the term "deduction"
and even, one gathers, the Peirce-Hanson notion of "abduction." Nevertheless, it appears that this early phase in
exploring the potentialities of thematic
analysis (just as with current explorations of its distant conceptual cousins,
Kuhn's "paradigms and disciplinary
matrices," Lakatos's "research programmes," and, to go no further, Elkana's "images of science") requires caseby-case analysis in order to obtain a
working list of themata: of thematic
concepts, thematic methods, and thematic hypotheses or propositions.
To the best of my knowledge the list
of themata in the physical sciences has
not yet been assembled in any one
place, but Holton estimates them to
number fewer than 100, including doublets and occasional triplets. A next
step would therefore be to convert a
list of themata into a classification; for
whatever its limitations, the ancient
device of classification serves to convert
the tacit empiricism of lists into the
analytical rationalism of categories. Inductively assembled lists of themata in
scientific thought seem ready to be
336
25 APRIL 1975
337
particle
physics
is
shot
NEWS
AND
COMMENT
338