THE IMPROVEMENT AND UTILIZATION OF TUSSOCK GRASSLANDS: A SCIENTIST'S VIEWPOINT

Abstract

THERE has been a large increase in the volume of facts about tussock grassland improvement in the last few years. Although facts are important to the scientist, he is not merely a facts-gatherer. He also makes general statements. In the tradition of Anglo-Saxon logic formulated by John Stuart Mill, the scientist derives these general statements from the facts by the process called induction. Nobel Prizewinner for Medicine, Dr P. B. Medawar, questions this traditional assumption. He claims that "truth takes shape in the mind of the observer: it is his imaginative grasp of what might be true that provides the incentive for finding out, so far as he can what is true." If this imaginative idea of truth still fits the facts after rigorous testing, then it is a good idea and the facts themselves can be conveniently forgotten. Paradoxically, therefore, the factual burden of a science grows less as a science matures. As a science advances, "particular facts are comprehended within and therefore in a sense annihilated by general statements of steadily increasing explanatory power and compass".