Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

142 Scientism and Values
und qualitativen sensorischen Analyse der Qualitat von Lebensmitteln,"
Deutsche Lebensmittel-Rundschau, LIV [May, 1958], 99-108). I should
like to cite some of them here: H. S. Groninger, Tapper! and Knapp,
"Some Chemical and Organoleptic Changes in Gamma-irradiated Meats,"
Food Res., XXI (1956), 555-564. D. Sheppard, "The Importance of
Psychophysical Errors," J. Dairy Res., XIX (1952), 348-355. E. L. Pippin,
A. A. Campbell and Streeter, "Flavour Studies," J. Agric. and Food
Chemistry, II (1954), 354-367. M. M. Boggs and H. L. Hanson, "Analysis
of Foods by Sensory Difference Tests," Adv. Food Research, II (1949),
219-258. H. L. Hanson et al., "Sensory Test Methods," Food Techn.,
IX (1955), 50-59. D. R. Peryam, "Hedonic Scale Method of Measuring
Food Preferences," Food Engng., XXIV (1952), 7. E. C. Crocker, "The
Nature of Odor," Techn. Associat. of the Pulp and Paper Industry,
XXXV (1952), 9.
Tilgner emphasizes the differences in talent and gifts in sensory competence
among chemists, especially the varying gift of feeling (Gefilhlsbegabung)
which is important when it comes to deciding qualities and
degrees of appetizingness or loathsomeness. And yet, Tilgner joins the
Australian chemist, D. W. Crover, ("Progress in Food Analysis." Food
Manuf., XXV, 1949) in saying that the present status of the sensory
(organoleptic) method permits results so precise that this method belongs
to the chemical-analytical methodology. Microchanges in protein molecules,
for instance, which elude ordinary chemical analyses, can be discovered
quickly and definitely by the sensory method (p. 100).
Incidentally, at this point, the method of the food chemist and the
medical haematologist become similar epistemologically.
Thus, in practice, the natural sciences are far from being reduced to
the study of the measurable. Curiously enough, E. C. Harwood ("On
'Measurement as Scientific Method in Economics,''' American Journal of
Economics and Sociology, XVII [October, 1957], 101) challenges Leland
B. Yeager's claim that there are social scientists narrow enough to restrict
science to measurement. At any rate, I can name one: the sociologist
Franz Adler, who wants to restrict to pure measurement even so delicate
a field as the sociology of knowledge. The original view that science is
measurement, of course, was given by Galileo, who wrote: "My program
is to measure what can be measured and to make measurable what cannot
be measured yet." (Galilei, Opere, ed. by Alberi, IV, 171). But it is
very doubtful whether Galileo ever would have thought of "making
measurable" those phenomena which our scientistic students of man
insist on measuring.
14. Biochemical individuality and the sense of smell is one of the problems
intriguing Roger J. Williams. See his books Free and Unequal (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1953), p. 32, and Biochemical Individuality
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1956), p. 180.
15. The issues of qualitative versus quantitative judgment and the element
of subjectivity in the field of haematology are discussed, in a vein supporting
my argument, by St. Sandkiihler, "tiber Dokumentation von
Knochenmarkbefunden," Rontgen- und Labor-Praxis, X, 278-280. Or,