| repeated in all three countries concerned this problem. Team co operation and continuity are difficult to achieve and maintain; people change jobs frequently, or quarrel about relative prestige. And the supporting services are never fully adequate, and sometimes appalling. (v) At first sight, most natural science and technological research, at least internally, is strictly neutral in moral and political terms. Historians and literary scholars, theologians on the other hand are called on to pass all kinds of judgements in the exercise of their professions. The debate about 'value freedom' in social science is notorious; virtually all social science research makes some moral and political assumptions, and arrives at some morally and politically relevant conclusions. I return to this issue in section 8.(3) KNOWLEDGE AND INDUSTRIALISM Whatever measure we use, the industrialised nations are currently pre-eminent. This pre-eminence is normally put in purely economic terms. The rich countries (and for the moment I exclude the complication of the newly rich oil producers) produce most of the capital available for investment, and thus it seems are retaining their world lead; indeed, on average, they are fast increasing it. Recently, this concentration on purely economic criteria has been questioned. Within what some writers, and rather oddly, already call the post industrial society, it is argued (Bell, 1973, for example) that it is not only the controllers of investment capital that hold the reins of power but also the owners of knowledge. Certainly, the fantastic rate of technological progress within the industrialised societies makes the scientists and experts more and more indispensable. I cannot enter into this controversy here; but it is significant that this thesis is seriously argued. The pre- eminence of the present industrialised powers is very recent,—less than 200 years,—and it is surely obvious that one indispensable factor in this pre-eminence has been the explosive expansion of scientific and technological knowledge. On this science,—widely dispersed and put to work,—has rested both the growth of material resources |
| through increased productivity, and the increased military effectiveness which was one main necessary condition for western imperialism. Technology makes the industrial nations the current arsenals of the world. We can think of any nation,—the U.S.A. for example,—as a kind of immense and complex storehouse of knowledge,—a sort of computer memory bank. This knowledge is stored in two ways. It is stored in people who are organised to share and pool it through that complex division of labour which is embedded in government, industry, commerce, institutions of education and learning. It is also stored outside human beings, in books, files, recordings and indeed in products, from which it can readily be decoded. This knowledge is constantly available directly to anyone who has the right training and experience. What is perhaps less obvious is that it is also indirectly available to all of us through the market and government services, in the form of consumer goods and that vast array of services which are nowadays available,—law, medicine, entertainment, transport and so on. This vast storehouse of knowledge is constantly creating new knowledge. In this way, the industrial societies retain their lead. Wealth cannot by itself create knowledge. If the developing nations are to achieve equality, then in the long run they too must create knowledge, must develop their own independent research capacity. Of course, wealth has always been one necessary condition for the creation, storage and transmission of knowledge; and of course wealth can be, and is, used to facilitate the creation of knowledge; for example, currently in Iran. The whole theme of this conference is the precise ways in which nations should use their universities and their rising wealth to create, store and transmit knowledge. My point is this. Unless such an independent capacity is developed, even equality in material resources will not remove dependence on the knowledge-creating countries. Research is not the sole function of universities; universities also transmit knowledge; that is they train new human sties and creators of knowledge. And of course governments, institutions companies and private individuals also do |
| research. But the universities are distinguished from other teaching institutions by creating knowledge, and from other research bodies first by teaching, and secondly by the lively autonomy of their research efforts. Universities are sometimes described as consumption, as luxuries, as window dressing, as institutions for the validation of dubious qualifications to justify high incomes for the educated elites. Perhaps all universities are the scene of these things some of the time. But whatever their shortcomings, in the long run they are a major source for the most fundamental of all resources,- the capacity to create new knowledge. This conference then goes to the heart of inequality between nations. KNOWLEDGE AND RESEARCH I do not need to be reminded that books could be,—as indeed have been,—written qualifying, expounding, arguing about what I have just been saying. One problem is immediately relevant. If research is defined as the creation of knowledge, what is knowledge? I ask this question not In any innocent hope of providing an answer, but because thinking about the problems it raises leads us to insights of immediately practical relevance. The English words 'knowledge' and 'science' carry a variety of meanings. This becomes obvious as soon as we reflect that neither can be translated into any other language by one single corresponding word in all contexts. Nevertheless, I would hazard the statement that what is called knowledge in any language is by definition true. Only in an ironical or very special sense can we speak of people 'knowing' something which we know to be false. No one would claim himself to know something about which he felt less than absolute certainty. Yet it takes only a moment's reflection to realise that most people at any given time in any given society or social group claim to know,—that is, what they perceive as certain,— other people in other groups or at other times regard as error, or superstition, or wickedness; or at least as dubious. |
| The point of this excursion into philosophical scepticism is two-fold. First, scientific and academic knowledge, - or most of it,—is provisional, tentative, hypothetical, whether or not its inventors and proclaimers admit it to be so. And secondly, within any group of people, a lot of what people think they 'know' is untidy, inconsistent, puzzling. Puzzlement is the basic condition for generating research; researchers are professional seekers out of the inconsistencies and the puzzles. Doubt is the basic academic virtue. But new knowledge, while it resolves some doubts, creates others. It not only provides new puzzles, but normally it throws doubt also on old accepted truths. Thus new knowledge generates research, and the faster the growth of knowledge the more new puzzles there are to solve. Hence fruitful research takes place in nations and societies and groups in which a lot of advanced and developing knowledge is already stored. Doubt, puzzlement, the readiness to question is then basic to the creation of new knowledge. But doubt and the readiness to question are not always and everywhere seen as virtues. Doubters, questioners and arguers are sometimes, with varying degrees of nasty consequences, described as trouble-makers, heretics, dissidents, deviationists, traitors,— or to say the least,— as unreliable, disobedient, disloyal. The development of science, technology, and social science in the rich nations has not been without bitter conflict; repression, persecution, disturbance, revolutions. Of course, the vast majority of professional researchers, (many of them university teachers), are perfectly respectabel law abiding middle class citizens. They apply their professional scepticism only to the one small corner of knowledge in which they are working; moreover they mostly perceive what they themselves have done as providing new certainty to replace old error, and they do not reflect on the cumulative consequences of their own and similar sceptical activities. Nevertheless, new knowledge springs from the capacity not only to absorb, but also to be puzzled by and question received and validated knowledge, and no one can |