20. BEYOND THE TURN

Is a different invisible hand

David Hull (1935-2010) was vexed. A distinguished philosopher of biology, he had published, in 1988, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Now, the Northwestern University professor had been drawn into the Science Wars, the debunking of science that took place in the Nineties.

He had argued that one of the reasons that science had succeeded as well as it had was because it was governed by an “invisible hand,” a mechanism in which, as he described it, “individuals serve their own self-interest and, in the process, bring about some unintended and more general consequence for a large group of people of which they are part.”

Now he has been attacked by a reviewer for employing “optimistic fantasies.” Hull later wrote, “I was aware at the time that invisible hand explanations had something of a tarnished reputation in the social sciences, but I did not realize how tarnished until I read reviews of my book.” He decided to examine other invisible hand explanations and their applications.