If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition tha...t man's sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.... Making sense of the world and one's place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.... We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our most characteristically human trait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The rationale for accepting or rejecting any theory is thus fundamentally based on the idea of problem-solving progress. If one re...search tradition has solved more important problems than its rivals, then accepting that tradition is rational precisely to the degree that we are aiming to "progress," i.e., to maximize the scope f solved problems. In other words, the choice of one tradition over its rivals is a progressive (and thus a rational) choice precisely to the extent that the chosen tradition is a better problem solver than its rivals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »