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Social Aspects of Scientific Method in Industrial Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Sebastian B. Littauer
Sebastian B. Littauer*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

In moments of daring, some physical scientists consider problems of social inquiry, hoping naively that the methods of physical inquiry will provide them with special insight. In my own work on problems of industrial production where I am searching for “practical” means for optimizing production in some socially satisfactory sense, I find that the physical scientist cannot escape the responsibility for social inquiry. So far as I can understand the nature of this work, it requires for its fruitful pursuit a methodology which leans heavily on the concepts of statistical control of Shewhart (1, 2, 3), of cybernetics of Wiener (4, 5) and of experimentalism of Singer (6, 7, 8, 9), Churchman (10, 11) and Ackoff (11).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , April 1954 , pp. 93 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1954

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Footnotes

1

Some of this material was presented at the first Conference on Ways of Science (“Scientific Method”) held jointly by Roosevelt College and the Philosophy of Science Association, Chicago, October 1950.

References

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