ARNOLD BRECHT'S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED Political ...

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THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
the eleven "steps" which constitute Scientific Method is his repeated
admission of the underlying and insurmountable uncertainty which
attaches to the results produced through these scientific steps. In his
account, the products of the proper Method are inevitably uncertain
both as to their accuracy and their completeness. They are, at best,
propositions which must be regarded as tentative or incompletely
confirmed efforts to describe and explain what really "is" or is going
on. And their uncertainty is insurmountable because of the inescapable
role played in "scientific" inquiry by such intersubjectively
untransmissible elements as individual "genius," "insight," and
"judgment," as well as by the intersubjectively transmissible but
"unscientific" elements of "common sense."
In remarks made preliminary to his exposition of the eleven
"steps," he stresses that "Scientific Method must not be understood
as a merely mechanical procedure of indiscriminately gathering
data and processing them in line with prescribed steps, leaving every
progress to assiduity and little if anything to genius. Rather the opposite
is true " (30) . It is creative genius which perceives or selects the
questions worthy of scientific inquiry; and it is such creative genius,
which Scientific Method is incapable of supplying, which somehow
perceives the order present amid the "confusing multitude of
factors" which are present in most "events" which we seek to understand,
as a necessary precondition of any systematic "scientific" investigation
of such events. He insists, of course, that all such creative
insights "must finally be processed in line with Scientific Method in
order to become a part of the body of science"; but he admits that
"to put a fertile idea through the mills of Scientific Method is often
merely the last act of the total process, even though it be the one that
gives it the stamp of science" (31). The clear implication, then, is
that "the total process" by which our knowledge of the world is produced
goes well beyond the provisions, rules, or steps of Scientific
Method. The latter constitutes, at best, only the last of an
unspecified number of "acts" or stages of the total process, and
perhaps not even the most important stage at that, insofar as it is not
the stage or act by which new discoveries or insights which add to
our knowledge are generated. It appears from Brecht's subsequent
explanations rather to be primarily, if not exclusively, merely a
means of testing and choosing between such ostensible insights for
the purpose of distinguishing between those which are to be ac-