The Personal Character of the Discovery of Mechanisms in Cloud Physics

Abstract

The field of research on clouds and rain is a fruitful and hitherto untapped source of illustrations for the growth of knowledge in science. I wish particularly to use examples from this field in a discussion of Michael Polanyi’s (1958) insistence that personal elements are necessary rather than ancillary to any account of knowing and reasoning, and of Rom Harré’s (1970) assertion that the primary aim of science is the elucidation of mechanisms and structures rather than the generation of deductive systems of propositions. I do not mean to imply that Polanyi is the only writer concerned with personal elements, but I do mean that he has given especial attention to the commitments whereby scientists proceed with confidence in the face of the unspecifiability of many of their operations of observing and theorizing. I also do not suggest that Наггé alone takes up the mechanism-and-structure point of view, or that I endorse all that he says about it; but I find his view a congenial approach to the complex taxonomy of explanations and consequently the wide variety of kinds of discovery.