Holtzman E
Int J Health Serv. 1981;11(1):123-49. doi: 10.2190/L5EU-E7PC-HXG6-EUML.
The essay discusses a number of issues developed in several recent books on philosophical and ethical problems in the natural sciences, both pure (especially biology) and applied (especially medicine). The scaffolding of the discussion can be outlined as follows: Science is most coherently portrayed as a set of activities through which societies deal with a distinctive, but continually evolving set of interwoven practical, empirical, and conceptual problems. Consequently, approaches which attempt to delineate universal features of "scientific methods" or to depict the sciences as providing an approximation to an "objective" view of reality are much less enlightening than are analyses rooted directly in concrete scientific history and in the actual interplay of science with other social configurations. However, scientists are granted some meaningful autonomy in exercising their "curiosity" and there is a real sense in which scientific ideas and activities do possess momentum of their own. In other words, as is also true for other spheres, such as the arts, it is important not to fall into mechanical viewpoints which treat the movement of science as simply a derivative of forces generated elsewhere.
本文讨论了最近几本关于自然科学（包括纯科学，尤其是生物学，以及应用科学，尤其是医学）中的哲学和伦理问题的书中所提出的若干问题。讨论的框架可概述如下：科学最连贯的描述方式是将其视为一系列活动，通过这些活动，社会应对一组独特但不断演变的相互交织的实践、经验和概念问题。因此，试图描绘“科学方法”的普遍特征或将科学描述为提供对现实的“客观”观点的近似描述的方法，远不如直接植根于具体科学历史以及科学与其他社会结构实际相互作用的分析那样具有启发性。然而，科学家在发挥他们的“好奇心”方面被赋予了一定有意义的自主性，并且在某种实际意义上，科学思想和活动确实具有自身的发展势头。换句话说，正如在艺术等其他领域一样，重要的是不要陷入机械的观点，即把科学的发展仅仅看作是其他地方产生的力量的衍生物。
