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Weapons Research and the Form of Scientific Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ian Hacking
Ian Hacking*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, CanadaM5S 1A1
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Extract

From time immemorial all weapons have been a product of human knowledge. Today the relationship is reciprocal. A great deal of the new knowledge being created at this moment is a product of weaponry. The transition occurred in World War ll, and, in the West, was institutionalized by the new ways of funding research and development put in place in 1945-47 in the U.S.A.

Presumably this makes some difference to what we find out. Brains and equipment are dedicated to the production of knowledge and technologies useful in time of war. Our Physical Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Biological Abstracts, Indexus Medicus — our repositories of references to new knowledge — would look very different if we had different research priorities. That means that the content of our new knowledge is much influenced by the choice of where to deploy the best minds of our generation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 12: Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence, and Disarmament , 1986 , pp. 237 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1986

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References

1 Estimates of R&D spending are notoriously inaccurate. For an extreme version, consult the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42, 3 (1986), which, using a National Science Foundation Report (USA) 85-322, estimates that military R&D now accounts for 72.7 percent of total American public R&D investment.

2 In the current fiscal year, SDI has about the same budget as the National Institutes of Health, a little less than $5 billion. The latter is projected to decrease a little in future years, while the former will increase substantially. Once again, figures must be regarded with caution. In 1986 many of the sums for SDI will be paper transfers, in which work already funded will be transferred to SDI accounts, thus ensuring responsibility to the military for work not previously held to be in that domain.

3 These ideas are developed in my ‘Styles of Scientific Reasoning,’ in Rajchman, J. and West, C., Post-analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press 1985), 145-64.Google Scholar

4 Terman, Lewis M. and Merritt, Maud A., Measuring Intelligence (London: Har rap 1937),Google Scholar esp. 22f., 34; I owe the example to L. Daston.

5 Sage: Los Angeles and London 1977

6 ‘Bubble Chambers and the Experimental Workplace,’ in Achinstein, P. and Hannaway, O., Observation, Experiment and Hypothesis in Modern Physical Science (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1985), 309-73Google Scholar

7 Here I rely heavily on a preprint by Paul Forman, Smithsonian Institution, ‘Behind Quantum Electronics: Elements of the Military Context of Physical Research in America, 1940-1960.’ His paper was read at the XVII Congress for the History of Science, Berkeley, California, August 1985.

8 This paper is also in the preprint stage. It too was read at the Congress cited in footnote 7.