ABSTRACT
Scientific activity is explicitly theory-guided, but this is not to deny that it is underpinned by the same kind of practical recipes. A physicist will learn how to wire up a circuit, how to use an oscilloscope, how to bend an electron beam by a specific amount. Science’s inherited images of itself conflict with arid in-strumentalism. Science is pictured searching for the Key to the Universe, hidden somewhere just beyond the frontier of current theory. A ‘worldview’ presents both a picture of the physical world and an account of human values in a co-ordinated fashion. It is sufficient for people to believe that there are connections between moral and physical concepts for changes in scientific theories to be taken to have wider significance. Science has the goal of bringing its knowledge under a small unified set of postulates.
