In February 1994 I sent Thomas Kuhn the following letter with a copy of an article, ‘On Misunderstanding Science’ which subsequently became chapter 11 of my book: Philosophy and Mystification. His generous response to the letter and to the article began a correspondence which lasted until his death in 1996.
Since I first read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shortly after it appeared I regarded Tom Kuhn as having opened up a whole new perspective on the sciences which made it possible to see how the attempts to produce logical or metaphysical models of scientific reasoning and development were incapable of producing genuine understanding of how the sciences and the scientists actually worked and developed, or even of providing a model for the scientists to use as a guide or against which to be judged. Starting from a concrete and practical background in the sciences, Kuhn was able to turn his back on the long tradition of attempting to make the sciences into a kind of ‘theology of the real’ and to see them as a historical, practical human enterprise. This revolutionary change of perspective produced a great many misunderstandings and misrepresentations of his view which I tried in my piece to address.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
One
Guy Robinson Foulkstown, Ballinure, Thurles, Co. Tipperary, Ireland.
22 Feb 94
Dear Tom
Many years ago when you kindly took me to lunch in Princeton (and in conversation we discovered that we had both been to Solebury) you mentioned your interest in art as illuminating the sciences. I think I may, at long last got onto what you were after back then. It comes out in the enclosed, which I hope you may find interesting in its general thrust even though it is only part done and requires a lot more work on the notion of objectivity by way of trying to break the hypnotizing and paralyzing grip of the real and ultimate reality and suchlike. I think those notions, for example, completely paralyze the discussion in that collection of pieces by Putnam, Van Fraasen et al called Scientific Realism, and that the strength of their grip has deep and subterranean sources not easy to break till those sources are brought out and understood.
I have tried to bring them out, a bit anyway, in accounting for the multiple misunderstandings that your work has encountered. I think that the basic thrust of your work is far too revolutionary (just as Wittgenstein’s is) and confronts deeply-held and multiply-connected elements of a world view that has been dominant since the Seventeenth Century.
Anyway, I’d be interested to hear if I have finally got the right end of the stick that you were tendering back then (somewhen in the 70’s).
I’m assuming you’re settled somewhere in the Princeton area, I hope happily. I remember your wife saying at the 1964 Bedford Conference when you were just moving there: ‘Not another permanent position!’
Yours
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138
July 16, 1994
Dr. Guy Robinson
Foulkstown, Ballinure
Thurles, Co. Tipperary
Ireland
Dear Guy Robinson:
It's close to six months since you addressed a fine letter to me in Princeton. As you'll gather from this letterhead, it had to be forwarded (I left Princeton in 1979 for "another tenure position" shortly after my divorce from the wife who put that phrase into the language. Since then I've been at, or emeritus from, MIT where your letter finally reached me in mid-March. Unfortunately, at that time I was still engaged in an exhausting battle (it's occupied most of a year) to recover from major surgery followed by radiation treatment. That recovery is putting me back into very nearly the shape from which I began, but l'm only now finding the strength and concentration to face the large pile of manuscripts and mail that accumulated while I was "away". Your letter has at last surfaced, and I'm immensely glad of it, for the manuscript that came with it has given me intense pleasure.
Before trying to give an account of my reaction, I've an embarrassing confession to make. I've never had a good memory, and I've entirely forgotten our past meetings. Your letter is too circumstantial and the reactions you report too plausible to leave me with doubts. I can reconstruct the events you speak of and also participate in them here and there. But its your memory and my sense of self that permits that participation.
All this is a prelude to saying that I like the manuscript pages you've sent me very much indeed. How could I not? They flatter me in ways I long for and rarely achieve. Kuhn and Wittgenstein, eh! Egad! I would not, however, react in that way if I didn't think you'd seen, to an almost unprecedented extent, what I've been up to. I couldn't have identified my position so clearly at the time I wrote Structure, but I've learned since and many of the views you express emerge loud and clear in the early chapters of the book I've now got underway. People to whom I say what I now believe, sometimes tell me I've changed my mind. I think I've only developed it, and the parallel between the positions you and I have reached after these years tends to confirm that description of what's occurred. In particular, both you and I would now emphasize that the position towards which Structure points requires the abandonment of anything like the realist's notion of truth and the approach of scientific belief to it. I think we'd agree also that the charge of relativism was and always has been a red herring.
A couple of more specific remarks. I initially responded with a big marginal "WOW!" to your second paragraph, the one in which you demolish Scientific Realism by asking what changes in the world could change its status from true to false or vice versa. That's just the sort of argument I most love, one that leaves readers wondering how they could ever have held such demonstrably absurd beliefs. The first argument against metaphysical realism in my projected book aims to be of that sort, and it delighted me to be supplied with another. Now, however, I'm not so sure that yours works as we both want it to, and I suspect that what has come to trouble me about it may be important to us both. If I'm reading you properly, the "world" you have in mind is the natural world, the one that natural scientists aim to understand. But Scientific Realism is not a doctrine about the natural world but about the relation between it and a social practice. If one addresses your question about the effect of change to that relationship Other than to the natural world by itself, it may get a different answer. Scientific Realism would not, of course, be reintroduced by that change in the object of the question, but the argument would work very differently in ways that should perhaps be explored
My other remark is quite different. Since I don't remember our conversation, I can't be sure what I had in mind in speaking of studying art to illuminate the sciences, but I doubt it's the point you make so splendidly on p. 3. I agree fully with that point, think it important, and doubt that I could have made it so cogently when I wrote Structure. But I'm more likely to have had in mind the desirability of studying art to explore what made it different from science. I thought of Structure as buying into the categories used in history of art, literature, etc., and declaring that science was like that too. Partly as an unintended consequence of that book, there's developed a considerable body of sociological literature arguing that science is just like all other human practices, and that it's claims to special status are simply a political ploy. I, without any thought of establishing a hierarchy, have always felt a need to recapture what's special about science, what differentiates it, not from other practices as a group, but from other practices considered individually. Art is an obvious and an especially apposite practice to choose for this purpose. I suspect that that is what I was getting at in my remark to you.
There's much more in your paper that interests and cheers me, but I can't now go on. I'd value being kept in touch as you develop these themes. And I'd be glad also, if you respond positively to that suggestion, to learn a bit more about who you now are and what you're more generally up to.
Warm greetings,
Tom Kuhn
22 Feb 94
Dear Tom
Many years ago when you kindly took me to lunch in Princeton (and in conversation we discovered that we had both been to Solebury) you mentioned your interest in art as illuminating the sciences. I think I may, at long last got onto what you were after back then. It comes out in the enclosed, which I hope you may find interesting in its general thrust even though it is only part done and requires a lot more work on the notion of objectivity by way of trying to break the hypnotizing and paralyzing grip of the real and ultimate reality and suchlike. I think those notions, for example, completely paralyze the discussion in that collection of pieces by Putnam, Van Fraasen et al called Scientific Realism, and that the strength of their grip has deep and subterranean sources not easy to break till those sources are brought out and understood.
I have tried to bring them out, a bit anyway, in accounting for the multiple misunderstandings that your work has encountered. I think that the basic thrust of your work is far too revolutionary (just as Wittgenstein’s is) and confronts deeply-held and multiply-connected elements of a world view that has been dominant since the Seventeenth Century.
Anyway, I’d be interested to hear if I have finally got the right end of the stick that you were tendering back then (somewhen in the 70’s).
I’m assuming you’re settled somewhere in the Princeton area, I hope happily. I remember your wife saying at the 1964 Bedford Conference when you were just moving there: ‘Not another permanent position!’
Yours
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138
July 16, 1994
Dr. Guy Robinson
Foulkstown, Ballinure
Thurles, Co. Tipperary
Ireland
Dear Guy Robinson:
It's close to six months since you addressed a fine letter to me in Princeton. As you'll gather from this letterhead, it had to be forwarded (I left Princeton in 1979 for "another tenure position" shortly after my divorce from the wife who put that phrase into the language. Since then I've been at, or emeritus from, MIT where your letter finally reached me in mid-March. Unfortunately, at that time I was still engaged in an exhausting battle (it's occupied most of a year) to recover from major surgery followed by radiation treatment. That recovery is putting me back into very nearly the shape from which I began, but l'm only now finding the strength and concentration to face the large pile of manuscripts and mail that accumulated while I was "away". Your letter has at last surfaced, and I'm immensely glad of it, for the manuscript that came with it has given me intense pleasure.
Before trying to give an account of my reaction, I've an embarrassing confession to make. I've never had a good memory, and I've entirely forgotten our past meetings. Your letter is too circumstantial and the reactions you report too plausible to leave me with doubts. I can reconstruct the events you speak of and also participate in them here and there. But its your memory and my sense of self that permits that participation.
All this is a prelude to saying that I like the manuscript pages you've sent me very much indeed. How could I not? They flatter me in ways I long for and rarely achieve. Kuhn and Wittgenstein, eh! Egad! I would not, however, react in that way if I didn't think you'd seen, to an almost unprecedented extent, what I've been up to. I couldn't have identified my position so clearly at the time I wrote Structure, but I've learned since and many of the views you express emerge loud and clear in the early chapters of the book I've now got underway. People to whom I say what I now believe, sometimes tell me I've changed my mind. I think I've only developed it, and the parallel between the positions you and I have reached after these years tends to confirm that description of what's occurred. In particular, both you and I would now emphasize that the position towards which Structure points requires the abandonment of anything like the realist's notion of truth and the approach of scientific belief to it. I think we'd agree also that the charge of relativism was and always has been a red herring.
A couple of more specific remarks. I initially responded with a big marginal "WOW!" to your second paragraph, the one in which you demolish Scientific Realism by asking what changes in the world could change its status from true to false or vice versa. That's just the sort of argument I most love, one that leaves readers wondering how they could ever have held such demonstrably absurd beliefs. The first argument against metaphysical realism in my projected book aims to be of that sort, and it delighted me to be supplied with another. Now, however, I'm not so sure that yours works as we both want it to, and I suspect that what has come to trouble me about it may be important to us both. If I'm reading you properly, the "world" you have in mind is the natural world, the one that natural scientists aim to understand. But Scientific Realism is not a doctrine about the natural world but about the relation between it and a social practice. If one addresses your question about the effect of change to that relationship Other than to the natural world by itself, it may get a different answer. Scientific Realism would not, of course, be reintroduced by that change in the object of the question, but the argument would work very differently in ways that should perhaps be explored
My other remark is quite different. Since I don't remember our conversation, I can't be sure what I had in mind in speaking of studying art to illuminate the sciences, but I doubt it's the point you make so splendidly on p. 3. I agree fully with that point, think it important, and doubt that I could have made it so cogently when I wrote Structure. But I'm more likely to have had in mind the desirability of studying art to explore what made it different from science. I thought of Structure as buying into the categories used in history of art, literature, etc., and declaring that science was like that too. Partly as an unintended consequence of that book, there's developed a considerable body of sociological literature arguing that science is just like all other human practices, and that it's claims to special status are simply a political ploy. I, without any thought of establishing a hierarchy, have always felt a need to recapture what's special about science, what differentiates it, not from other practices as a group, but from other practices considered individually. Art is an obvious and an especially apposite practice to choose for this purpose. I suspect that that is what I was getting at in my remark to you.
There's much more in your paper that interests and cheers me, but I can't now go on. I'd value being kept in touch as you develop these themes. And I'd be glad also, if you respond positively to that suggestion, to learn a bit more about who you now are and what you're more generally up to.
Warm greetings,
Tom Kuhn
Two
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
25 July 1994
Dear Tom
How could I not respond immediately to such a gracious and enthusiastic reaction to my letter and paper!
Sorry you have had such a tough medical time and hope that’s pretty well behind you.
I’m not surprised that you don’t remember that lunch you gave me in Princeton, (graciously, again as we had only brushed glancingly by one another at that famous Bedford conference in 1960-whatever.) But I have it in my mind that at that lunch you told me that you had been to the same tiny school I went to, Solebury, but only for a year before transferring to Germantown Friends. (We used to play Germantown in Football and always got slaughtered - Well, we only had fifty boys in the whole school.) Am I dreaming all that?
Still keeping to the personal: Who am I? Not sure how to answer. Brief CV: after Solebury, I went to Bard at the time of Mary McCarthy (The Groves of Academe gives a distorted account of those times and my teacher.) It was a pretty interesting place, though. My introduction to philosophy was via Aristotle, and his conception of philosophy’s business, I am coming to see has kept me away from the disastrous ‘theorizing’ conception of philosophy that has held pretty much sway since Descartes. (I’m working on getting clear about that question of philosophy’s business in the process of trying to bring out in an introduction to what has always been there implicit in the scanty few pieces I have published and now want to collect. I certainly don’t think that my second paragraph gives a knock-down argument against Realism. -As you can imagine, I don’t believe in those - But it’s something to think about.
Anyway, after Bard came Harvard, which I thought too self-important, and anyway I was already well out of tune with the way philosophy was done there. (There was no Stanley Cavell in ‘49 -50). After Harvard, Oxford, which I liked a lot better. It was, after all, the Oxford of Ryle and Austin and Gwyl Owen and Anscombe and Geach were about, Waisman lecturing on Relativity Theory, and, above all, I discovered Wittgenstein through the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in a struggle with the Cantorian transfinite and the so-called notion of ‘the actual infinite.’ However, Oxford (with some exceptions) was operating with something of the same conception of philosophy as theorizing and people talked about the ‘use theory ‘of meaning they claimed to get from Wittgenstein. And so, once again I found myself at a slight distance - particularly from the account of ‘rules for the use’ and from the account of what people are pleased to call ‘the private language argument’ that was accepted as canonical.
So, I was always a bit to the side of the way the stream was flowing without having any formulated critique of the assumptions and conceptions that pushed it that way. At the moment I’m working now on just that formulation and on identifying the assumptions and pressures, the agenda and aims that have established a certain, I think disastrous, conception of what it is to do philosophy - one that differs from the one that I got from Aristotle and Wittgenstein. And there, I want to say that I would agree entirely with your remark that it is a ‘political ploy,’ the giving a special status to Science (I always want to give it a capital letter when using it as a singular term for reasons to do with the mystifications that are going on when people talk about ‘Science’ instead of ‘the sciences’ - of that more in the piece I’ll send you, Deus sive Natura). What I want to make out is just what it was that made that move attractive and apparently necessary. There is a bit toward that aim in Deus but more in something I’m working on called ‘Philosophy &Madness, which lays in all on Descartes and his Method, and the whole search for ‘method’ and the whole historical situation which made the search seem so urgent. (Heavens! not another historical explanation coming in? What have such things got to do with philosophy!?!?)
Now, it may not come as a complete surprise that I want to dissent from the phrase you use to describe something you and I really both agree on, namely the ‘requirement’ that we abandon ‘the realist’s notion of truth’. I would want to say that the so-called ‘conceptions of truth’ from Tarski on are riddled with words and phrases to which no sense has been given, so that there is no real ‘realist conception of truth.’ There is only a tacit, clubby agreement to use that phrase as if it had meaning The notion of truth has itself to be demystified, prized loose from that old warhorse, the ‘correspondence theory’ (another theory!) which itself has to be shown to be an empty show. There is no ‘realist’- ‘anti-realist’ opposition. Both sides of this famous and clangorous opposition depend on assumptions that can’t be made good and notions that turn out to be empty. That’s the way I think we have to approach it. We can’t ‘abandon’ what isn’t there.
That’s a long tirade about a single word, but I think we have to be clear about the form of the question and of the investigation. There is a lot to be said for the old Tractatus injunction: ‘The correct method in philosophy would be this: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science - and then whenever someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.’ There are also some things to be said against it, but of that another time.
Yes, I think you are a Wittgenstinian - of the best kind, an instinctive one, one who has come to those things is his own way, through his own struggles. Not one who keeps the book in hand and the phrase in mind, or worse, one who guards the temple.
A propos your concern to bring out what is special and differentiates the sciences from other human practices: I think that one is not going to solve that within a sociological frame that deals with religion, art, science, sport, or whatever, simply as practices. I would prefer to use the word ‘enterprise’ or ‘project’ of the sciences, hoping that this would go some way toward helping us see the nature of the shaping constraints on the practice of the sciences as a product of the meeting of human aims and projects with the blank walls of possibility and impossibility that they come up against. That way, I hope we avoid both the notion of ‘reality’ of some pre-formed sort (what used to be called ‘Providence’) and that which terrifies those who reach for the word ‘relativism’, namely: the idea it is all in control of the old-boy network, or even humanity as a whole, as you might think the arts were.
Of course that involves turning Popper and the standard conception on its head and seeing the sciences as essentially and at bottom practical enterprises and the purely theoretical flights as aids and adjuncts to practical pursuits, as waiting in a kind of limbo (as imaginary numbers or non-commutative algebras) till practical applications should be found that give them sense.
Enough for now, though I will be more than pleased to carry on a discussion and to send you further stuff in which the above sketched notions are worked out - when they are. In the meantime here is the promised piece, Deus sive Natura, which develops some of them. I’d be interested in your observations - positive or negative.
To return to the personal for a second: I didn’t find place earlier to say that I spent my teaching life at the University of Southampton, though I was briefly at Leeds where I hung out with Alasdair MacIntyre and Jerry Ravetz, though I haven’t kept up with Jerry. In 1982, fed up with British universities, I took early retirement and tried my hand at being an American a bit, but found that didn’t really work and went back to London, re-married and we have now moved here to rural Tipperary, where the talk is about the weather, hay and the headage payments on cattle. My wife, Bee (Ring) is a writer of short stories.
I myself am trying to gather up the scanty work of a lifetime, survey it and articulate the conception of philosophy that has been implicit in it from the first, and to set that conception against the prevailing conception of philosophy as theorizing, as ‘contemplating the truth’ as Descartes has it, and to reduce the attractions of the latter by uncovering the historical situation philosophers were trying to make sense of and the historical pressures acting on them - to do for philosophy what you did for the sciences, that is to show them as historical human enterprises that take place in and react to a definite historical milieu, both their own history and a larger.
Greetings and thanks and hopes that we will have much useful to say to one another,
Yours,
Guy
25 July 1994
Dear Tom
How could I not respond immediately to such a gracious and enthusiastic reaction to my letter and paper!
Sorry you have had such a tough medical time and hope that’s pretty well behind you.
I’m not surprised that you don’t remember that lunch you gave me in Princeton, (graciously, again as we had only brushed glancingly by one another at that famous Bedford conference in 1960-whatever.) But I have it in my mind that at that lunch you told me that you had been to the same tiny school I went to, Solebury, but only for a year before transferring to Germantown Friends. (We used to play Germantown in Football and always got slaughtered - Well, we only had fifty boys in the whole school.) Am I dreaming all that?
Still keeping to the personal: Who am I? Not sure how to answer. Brief CV: after Solebury, I went to Bard at the time of Mary McCarthy (The Groves of Academe gives a distorted account of those times and my teacher.) It was a pretty interesting place, though. My introduction to philosophy was via Aristotle, and his conception of philosophy’s business, I am coming to see has kept me away from the disastrous ‘theorizing’ conception of philosophy that has held pretty much sway since Descartes. (I’m working on getting clear about that question of philosophy’s business in the process of trying to bring out in an introduction to what has always been there implicit in the scanty few pieces I have published and now want to collect. I certainly don’t think that my second paragraph gives a knock-down argument against Realism. -As you can imagine, I don’t believe in those - But it’s something to think about.
Anyway, after Bard came Harvard, which I thought too self-important, and anyway I was already well out of tune with the way philosophy was done there. (There was no Stanley Cavell in ‘49 -50). After Harvard, Oxford, which I liked a lot better. It was, after all, the Oxford of Ryle and Austin and Gwyl Owen and Anscombe and Geach were about, Waisman lecturing on Relativity Theory, and, above all, I discovered Wittgenstein through the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics in a struggle with the Cantorian transfinite and the so-called notion of ‘the actual infinite.’ However, Oxford (with some exceptions) was operating with something of the same conception of philosophy as theorizing and people talked about the ‘use theory ‘of meaning they claimed to get from Wittgenstein. And so, once again I found myself at a slight distance - particularly from the account of ‘rules for the use’ and from the account of what people are pleased to call ‘the private language argument’ that was accepted as canonical.
So, I was always a bit to the side of the way the stream was flowing without having any formulated critique of the assumptions and conceptions that pushed it that way. At the moment I’m working now on just that formulation and on identifying the assumptions and pressures, the agenda and aims that have established a certain, I think disastrous, conception of what it is to do philosophy - one that differs from the one that I got from Aristotle and Wittgenstein. And there, I want to say that I would agree entirely with your remark that it is a ‘political ploy,’ the giving a special status to Science (I always want to give it a capital letter when using it as a singular term for reasons to do with the mystifications that are going on when people talk about ‘Science’ instead of ‘the sciences’ - of that more in the piece I’ll send you, Deus sive Natura). What I want to make out is just what it was that made that move attractive and apparently necessary. There is a bit toward that aim in Deus but more in something I’m working on called ‘Philosophy &Madness, which lays in all on Descartes and his Method, and the whole search for ‘method’ and the whole historical situation which made the search seem so urgent. (Heavens! not another historical explanation coming in? What have such things got to do with philosophy!?!?)
Now, it may not come as a complete surprise that I want to dissent from the phrase you use to describe something you and I really both agree on, namely the ‘requirement’ that we abandon ‘the realist’s notion of truth’. I would want to say that the so-called ‘conceptions of truth’ from Tarski on are riddled with words and phrases to which no sense has been given, so that there is no real ‘realist conception of truth.’ There is only a tacit, clubby agreement to use that phrase as if it had meaning The notion of truth has itself to be demystified, prized loose from that old warhorse, the ‘correspondence theory’ (another theory!) which itself has to be shown to be an empty show. There is no ‘realist’- ‘anti-realist’ opposition. Both sides of this famous and clangorous opposition depend on assumptions that can’t be made good and notions that turn out to be empty. That’s the way I think we have to approach it. We can’t ‘abandon’ what isn’t there.
That’s a long tirade about a single word, but I think we have to be clear about the form of the question and of the investigation. There is a lot to be said for the old Tractatus injunction: ‘The correct method in philosophy would be this: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science - and then whenever someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.’ There are also some things to be said against it, but of that another time.
Yes, I think you are a Wittgenstinian - of the best kind, an instinctive one, one who has come to those things is his own way, through his own struggles. Not one who keeps the book in hand and the phrase in mind, or worse, one who guards the temple.
A propos your concern to bring out what is special and differentiates the sciences from other human practices: I think that one is not going to solve that within a sociological frame that deals with religion, art, science, sport, or whatever, simply as practices. I would prefer to use the word ‘enterprise’ or ‘project’ of the sciences, hoping that this would go some way toward helping us see the nature of the shaping constraints on the practice of the sciences as a product of the meeting of human aims and projects with the blank walls of possibility and impossibility that they come up against. That way, I hope we avoid both the notion of ‘reality’ of some pre-formed sort (what used to be called ‘Providence’) and that which terrifies those who reach for the word ‘relativism’, namely: the idea it is all in control of the old-boy network, or even humanity as a whole, as you might think the arts were.
Of course that involves turning Popper and the standard conception on its head and seeing the sciences as essentially and at bottom practical enterprises and the purely theoretical flights as aids and adjuncts to practical pursuits, as waiting in a kind of limbo (as imaginary numbers or non-commutative algebras) till practical applications should be found that give them sense.
Enough for now, though I will be more than pleased to carry on a discussion and to send you further stuff in which the above sketched notions are worked out - when they are. In the meantime here is the promised piece, Deus sive Natura, which develops some of them. I’d be interested in your observations - positive or negative.
To return to the personal for a second: I didn’t find place earlier to say that I spent my teaching life at the University of Southampton, though I was briefly at Leeds where I hung out with Alasdair MacIntyre and Jerry Ravetz, though I haven’t kept up with Jerry. In 1982, fed up with British universities, I took early retirement and tried my hand at being an American a bit, but found that didn’t really work and went back to London, re-married and we have now moved here to rural Tipperary, where the talk is about the weather, hay and the headage payments on cattle. My wife, Bee (Ring) is a writer of short stories.
I myself am trying to gather up the scanty work of a lifetime, survey it and articulate the conception of philosophy that has been implicit in it from the first, and to set that conception against the prevailing conception of philosophy as theorizing, as ‘contemplating the truth’ as Descartes has it, and to reduce the attractions of the latter by uncovering the historical situation philosophers were trying to make sense of and the historical pressures acting on them - to do for philosophy what you did for the sciences, that is to show them as historical human enterprises that take place in and react to a definite historical milieu, both their own history and a larger.
Greetings and thanks and hopes that we will have much useful to say to one another,
Yours,
Guy
Three
Foulkstown, Ballinure, Thurles, Co. Tipperary
July 28 1994
Dear Tom
This will be a bit of a supplementary note because I see that I need to say something more about the argument you liked but came to have misgivings about - the one asking what changes in ‘the world’ might make realism false, having been true, &c. You worry about what ‘world’ I am talking about there.
I suppose the short answer is that I don’t myself want to use the expression ‘the world’ at all in any hard sense, in any way that rests weight on it, neither ‘natural world’ nor any other. My own view is that the expression ‘the world’ (of any sort) is a façon de parler, OK for informal indicating, but not capable of sustaining any theoretical weight. It hides traps that won’t spring if we only tread lightly. But that’s not the view of the (would-be) realists. They think that it has a hard sense and real work can be done with it. In particular, they think that the notion is implicated in, and has work to do in understanding, both the notions of reference and of truth. The notion of world at issue would, I guess, be the broadest sense, something like ‘the way things are.’ What I am asking is the Wittgenstinian question -’Does Scientific Realism say anything?’ (or ‘Anti-Realism’ for that matter?)
What I regard myself as doing in my argument is to use that ‘belief’ of theirs that the notion of the world has real content or real reference to undermine itself. Given their views of truth, falsehood and reference, what is the status of their would-be thesis of Realism? What kind of an account can they give of it? Is the notion of proof really applicable at all? If not, what does that tell us?
Again, I don’t want to put this forward as a ‘knock-down’ argument, because I don’t think that that is the way philosophy works. I just want people to mull over that question and hope that mulling may end by reducing the attractiveness of the view. But it will be a hard and long business because of the great network of mutually supporting notions and views that we are up against.
Maybe as Wittgenstein thought in his pessimistic moments, those views will only be cured with the curing of ‘the sickness of a time.’ Still, I think there is work to be done by identifying the sickness, trying to say something about its causes, and by sketching an alternative picture. What else can we do?
Incidentally, my memory of your wife’s remark was: ‘Not another permanent position!’ - which makes the paradox nicer. (Actually, the stress has to fall on another.)
All the best
Yours,
Guy
July 28 1994
Dear Tom
This will be a bit of a supplementary note because I see that I need to say something more about the argument you liked but came to have misgivings about - the one asking what changes in ‘the world’ might make realism false, having been true, &c. You worry about what ‘world’ I am talking about there.
I suppose the short answer is that I don’t myself want to use the expression ‘the world’ at all in any hard sense, in any way that rests weight on it, neither ‘natural world’ nor any other. My own view is that the expression ‘the world’ (of any sort) is a façon de parler, OK for informal indicating, but not capable of sustaining any theoretical weight. It hides traps that won’t spring if we only tread lightly. But that’s not the view of the (would-be) realists. They think that it has a hard sense and real work can be done with it. In particular, they think that the notion is implicated in, and has work to do in understanding, both the notions of reference and of truth. The notion of world at issue would, I guess, be the broadest sense, something like ‘the way things are.’ What I am asking is the Wittgenstinian question -’Does Scientific Realism say anything?’ (or ‘Anti-Realism’ for that matter?)
What I regard myself as doing in my argument is to use that ‘belief’ of theirs that the notion of the world has real content or real reference to undermine itself. Given their views of truth, falsehood and reference, what is the status of their would-be thesis of Realism? What kind of an account can they give of it? Is the notion of proof really applicable at all? If not, what does that tell us?
Again, I don’t want to put this forward as a ‘knock-down’ argument, because I don’t think that that is the way philosophy works. I just want people to mull over that question and hope that mulling may end by reducing the attractiveness of the view. But it will be a hard and long business because of the great network of mutually supporting notions and views that we are up against.
Maybe as Wittgenstein thought in his pessimistic moments, those views will only be cured with the curing of ‘the sickness of a time.’ Still, I think there is work to be done by identifying the sickness, trying to say something about its causes, and by sketching an alternative picture. What else can we do?
Incidentally, my memory of your wife’s remark was: ‘Not another permanent position!’ - which makes the paradox nicer. (Actually, the stress has to fall on another.)
All the best
Yours,
Guy
Four
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
19 August, 1994
Dear Tom
I don’t want to overload you with correspondence, but your enthusiastic response to my paper emboldens me.
I’m writing now because a friend of mine, Dermot Moran of University College Dublin as editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies has asked to publish ‘Misunderstanding Science’ and wondered whether you would be interested in writing, or could be persuaded to write, a brief afterword. He has already published a piece from Hilary Putnam and one from Crispin Wright that are roughly in the ‘scientific realism’ - ‘anti-realism’ area.
Of course, you and I want to say ‘a pox on both your houses’ and to change the debate in a way that eliminates that so-called issue entirely. (That’s why I call you a ‘Wittgenstinian’ - though on my view of Aristotle I could equally call us both ‘Aristotelians’ in taking the business of philosophy to be that of clarification not theorizing and in insisting on thinking concretely and on not choreographing abstractions.) I would take Cora Diamond as an ally with her emphasizing the Wittgenstein remark ‘Not realism but the realistic spirit.’ I see this as a rejection of abstract theory in favor of concrete thought.
What I think that you and I share that is not shared by the majority of those who identify themselves as ‘Wittgenstinians’ is a sense of the importance of historical understanding, of its uneliminability. That is not to the fore in Wittgenstein and so many carry on with the search for the timeless and the universal. But it is there - in his talk of ‘the sickness of a time’ and his describing his remarks as being concerned with ‘the natural history of mankind.’
My own conception of the entry point for historical understanding in philosophy is that one cannot come to a critique of the agenda and the assumptions that seemed ‘natural’ to the philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (whose heirs we are) without understanding the projects that were laid on them by the great historical changes that had been taking place. The feudal form of social organization was being eliminated, along with its style of philosophizing, and being replaced by a society shaped by market forces, one that created problems that the old way of philosophizing could not deal with. Scholasticism was in no way refuted. It simply came to seem irrelevant, ridiculous even. And that change can only be understood historically.
So, you see, I’m a ‘Kuhnian’ in relation to philosophy itself. (Scandal! Alarm! Noises off!)
It would be nice if you felt able to make some brief comment on the paper to be published along with it, though Dermot has not made that a condition of publishing. He likes it well enough himself as it stands. What struck him particularly was the discussion of the notion of progress and particularly the example of progressing in playing the piano not implying a goal approached. But certainly a comment from you would make people read the piece more carefully. I would be glad of that. The name ‘Guy Robinson’ does not make people sit up and take notice the way ‘T.S. Kuhn’ does.
Incidentally, I have ended the paper just before setting off to explore the temptations to the ‘passive’ picture of seeing, knowing and so forth that seem to call for the formed, external cause that lies at the heart of ‘realism’. I think there is some important stuff there, particularly the business about the incommensurability of the vocabulary within which seeing has its place and the vocabulary of optics, neurology and of scientific understanding and explanation. Also I want to develop the point that the project of a comprehensive single vocabulary is essentially a religious, not a scientific one - the use of the sciences (or Science, their religious amalgam) for religious purposes. All that remains to be developed.
All the best.
Yours,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138
September 4, 1994
Dear Guy:
I am sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your generous receptions of my initial letter. I had difficulties knowing how to respond and resolved them by procrastination, as is my custom. Probably I would not have continued in that mode for much longer, but your last letter, which needs an answer, forecloses the possibility of my doing so.
I am greatly pleased to hear that "Misunderstanding Science" will be published, but I've decided against attempting an afterword. To me that's an unwelcome decision, and it's not the one I anticipated when your letter reached me. You read me as I want to be read, and there are not many who do. That's what I intended to communicate in my first letter. and I'd welcome a way to say it for a wider audience.
But I also find myself uneasy with aspects of the enterprise into which you occasionally want to fit me, and I've seen no way either to deal with my discomforts or to avoid them in the suggested afterword. They're too complex and too deeply entangled with the problems I'm currently trying to work through in my book. You and I must some day explore them together. But I'm not ready for that yet, and the results, whatever they may be, won't fit an afterword.
I've not gotten to this point without soul searching and that's a process in which I regularly appeal to my wife, Jehane, for help. I enclose a note she wrote to you in the midst of the process.
As ever,
Tom
Incl:
Dear Guy,
Of course you can “abandon what isn’t there.” What’s more it’s just what you’re asking your reader to do. I’m worried because the bit in your letter that ends with ‘you can’t abandon what isn’t there’ (and begins with ‘you and Tom don’t really disagree) has to be more than an unnecessary twist. More like a surface eddy signalling a deep snag below. (One that is part of the difficulty of what you’re trying to do.
Warmly,
Jehane (another permanent spouse)
19 August, 1994
Dear Tom
I don’t want to overload you with correspondence, but your enthusiastic response to my paper emboldens me.
I’m writing now because a friend of mine, Dermot Moran of University College Dublin as editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies has asked to publish ‘Misunderstanding Science’ and wondered whether you would be interested in writing, or could be persuaded to write, a brief afterword. He has already published a piece from Hilary Putnam and one from Crispin Wright that are roughly in the ‘scientific realism’ - ‘anti-realism’ area.
Of course, you and I want to say ‘a pox on both your houses’ and to change the debate in a way that eliminates that so-called issue entirely. (That’s why I call you a ‘Wittgenstinian’ - though on my view of Aristotle I could equally call us both ‘Aristotelians’ in taking the business of philosophy to be that of clarification not theorizing and in insisting on thinking concretely and on not choreographing abstractions.) I would take Cora Diamond as an ally with her emphasizing the Wittgenstein remark ‘Not realism but the realistic spirit.’ I see this as a rejection of abstract theory in favor of concrete thought.
What I think that you and I share that is not shared by the majority of those who identify themselves as ‘Wittgenstinians’ is a sense of the importance of historical understanding, of its uneliminability. That is not to the fore in Wittgenstein and so many carry on with the search for the timeless and the universal. But it is there - in his talk of ‘the sickness of a time’ and his describing his remarks as being concerned with ‘the natural history of mankind.’
My own conception of the entry point for historical understanding in philosophy is that one cannot come to a critique of the agenda and the assumptions that seemed ‘natural’ to the philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (whose heirs we are) without understanding the projects that were laid on them by the great historical changes that had been taking place. The feudal form of social organization was being eliminated, along with its style of philosophizing, and being replaced by a society shaped by market forces, one that created problems that the old way of philosophizing could not deal with. Scholasticism was in no way refuted. It simply came to seem irrelevant, ridiculous even. And that change can only be understood historically.
So, you see, I’m a ‘Kuhnian’ in relation to philosophy itself. (Scandal! Alarm! Noises off!)
It would be nice if you felt able to make some brief comment on the paper to be published along with it, though Dermot has not made that a condition of publishing. He likes it well enough himself as it stands. What struck him particularly was the discussion of the notion of progress and particularly the example of progressing in playing the piano not implying a goal approached. But certainly a comment from you would make people read the piece more carefully. I would be glad of that. The name ‘Guy Robinson’ does not make people sit up and take notice the way ‘T.S. Kuhn’ does.
Incidentally, I have ended the paper just before setting off to explore the temptations to the ‘passive’ picture of seeing, knowing and so forth that seem to call for the formed, external cause that lies at the heart of ‘realism’. I think there is some important stuff there, particularly the business about the incommensurability of the vocabulary within which seeing has its place and the vocabulary of optics, neurology and of scientific understanding and explanation. Also I want to develop the point that the project of a comprehensive single vocabulary is essentially a religious, not a scientific one - the use of the sciences (or Science, their religious amalgam) for religious purposes. All that remains to be developed.
All the best.
Yours,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138
September 4, 1994
Dear Guy:
I am sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your generous receptions of my initial letter. I had difficulties knowing how to respond and resolved them by procrastination, as is my custom. Probably I would not have continued in that mode for much longer, but your last letter, which needs an answer, forecloses the possibility of my doing so.
I am greatly pleased to hear that "Misunderstanding Science" will be published, but I've decided against attempting an afterword. To me that's an unwelcome decision, and it's not the one I anticipated when your letter reached me. You read me as I want to be read, and there are not many who do. That's what I intended to communicate in my first letter. and I'd welcome a way to say it for a wider audience.
But I also find myself uneasy with aspects of the enterprise into which you occasionally want to fit me, and I've seen no way either to deal with my discomforts or to avoid them in the suggested afterword. They're too complex and too deeply entangled with the problems I'm currently trying to work through in my book. You and I must some day explore them together. But I'm not ready for that yet, and the results, whatever they may be, won't fit an afterword.
I've not gotten to this point without soul searching and that's a process in which I regularly appeal to my wife, Jehane, for help. I enclose a note she wrote to you in the midst of the process.
As ever,
Tom
Incl:
Dear Guy,
Of course you can “abandon what isn’t there.” What’s more it’s just what you’re asking your reader to do. I’m worried because the bit in your letter that ends with ‘you can’t abandon what isn’t there’ (and begins with ‘you and Tom don’t really disagree) has to be more than an unnecessary twist. More like a surface eddy signalling a deep snag below. (One that is part of the difficulty of what you’re trying to do.
Warmly,
Jehane (another permanent spouse)
Five
Foulkstown, Ballinure, Thurles, Co. Tipperary
13 September 94
Dear Tom & Jehane,
First, Tom: - Fair enough, I’m sure there are differences enough between our conceptions and styles to need some working out. Though I should perhaps say that I wasn’t looking for a ‘seal of approval’ so much as an indication that I hadn’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick, - so that the piece wouldn’t be taken to be a purely idiosyncratic view of your enterprise.
As for my own enterprise - you’ve had your role in it and cannot now be prized loose. It is really only to clarify things in my own mind in the hope that that process and whatever success it may have may have some benefit to others. I’m not trying to found a philosophic party, or recruit you to one - that would go completely against my conception of the point and nature of philosophising. Perhaps I gave the wrong impression by talking about ‘Wittgenstinians’ and ‘Aristotelians’. Those expressions had only the role of broad indication of a style and conception of philosophising - of its tasks, its methods and the resources it can call on. There was not lurking behind them, a set of shibboleths, passwords and articles to be subscribed to.
And that is where I come to your remarks, Jehane. I think you must have had some private information that the piece I have just started out working on is called ‘Understanding Nonsense’ and is in a way addressing itself, or will address itself to your question. Perhaps my question could be put oppositely - ‘Can one embrace what isn’t there?’ People do seem to embrace nonsense, often with great passion and with great resistance to recognizing it as such - like people in the middle of a lush, amorous dream resisting waking. What is going on in that embrace is something that is not easy to understand. Still it happens. I guess my role and task is the thankless one of trying to convince them that there is nothing there, that their arms are in fact empty. Perhaps I could rephrase my original remark that gave you trouble and say that people ‘can’t put from them what isn’t there.’
Much of my philosophic work has been of that thankless, negative sort, concerned to show that something that people have embraced passionately or rejected with as much passion was a thing of air and no substance. Artificial intelligence, for example, or ‘the actual infinite’. What I have tried to do in dealing with them was to show that the would-be notions that were being argued about were in fact made up of parts that could not be combined. That if, for example, the proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence really examined the notion of machine or of artifact they would find implicit in both notions a prior connection with the intelligence of a user or maker that precluded the sort of combination that was being argued for or against.
So maybe I was asking them not so much to ‘abandon what isn’t there’ as simply to recognize that it isn’t there. I’m not sure. I’m not sure I want to go to the wall over that phrase, but maybe you can see a little better what was behind it.
Bee and I will be in the States for a month and a half in the latter part of November till after Christmas - Bee maybe longer if she goes to a low-residence writing course at Bennington in January - so maybe we can manage to meet and argue some of these things out. Bee and I will be mostly in Virginia where Bee wants to try to assemble her scattered children & grandchildren, see her brothers who live there and do some background research for of her writing, which is firmly set in that neighborhood. I have a son in NY and two daughters and three grandchildren in Britain - so we don’t assemble so easily.
Yours
Guy
13 September 94
Dear Tom & Jehane,
First, Tom: - Fair enough, I’m sure there are differences enough between our conceptions and styles to need some working out. Though I should perhaps say that I wasn’t looking for a ‘seal of approval’ so much as an indication that I hadn’t got hold of the wrong end of the stick, - so that the piece wouldn’t be taken to be a purely idiosyncratic view of your enterprise.
As for my own enterprise - you’ve had your role in it and cannot now be prized loose. It is really only to clarify things in my own mind in the hope that that process and whatever success it may have may have some benefit to others. I’m not trying to found a philosophic party, or recruit you to one - that would go completely against my conception of the point and nature of philosophising. Perhaps I gave the wrong impression by talking about ‘Wittgenstinians’ and ‘Aristotelians’. Those expressions had only the role of broad indication of a style and conception of philosophising - of its tasks, its methods and the resources it can call on. There was not lurking behind them, a set of shibboleths, passwords and articles to be subscribed to.
And that is where I come to your remarks, Jehane. I think you must have had some private information that the piece I have just started out working on is called ‘Understanding Nonsense’ and is in a way addressing itself, or will address itself to your question. Perhaps my question could be put oppositely - ‘Can one embrace what isn’t there?’ People do seem to embrace nonsense, often with great passion and with great resistance to recognizing it as such - like people in the middle of a lush, amorous dream resisting waking. What is going on in that embrace is something that is not easy to understand. Still it happens. I guess my role and task is the thankless one of trying to convince them that there is nothing there, that their arms are in fact empty. Perhaps I could rephrase my original remark that gave you trouble and say that people ‘can’t put from them what isn’t there.’
Much of my philosophic work has been of that thankless, negative sort, concerned to show that something that people have embraced passionately or rejected with as much passion was a thing of air and no substance. Artificial intelligence, for example, or ‘the actual infinite’. What I have tried to do in dealing with them was to show that the would-be notions that were being argued about were in fact made up of parts that could not be combined. That if, for example, the proponents or opponents of artificial intelligence really examined the notion of machine or of artifact they would find implicit in both notions a prior connection with the intelligence of a user or maker that precluded the sort of combination that was being argued for or against.
So maybe I was asking them not so much to ‘abandon what isn’t there’ as simply to recognize that it isn’t there. I’m not sure. I’m not sure I want to go to the wall over that phrase, but maybe you can see a little better what was behind it.
Bee and I will be in the States for a month and a half in the latter part of November till after Christmas - Bee maybe longer if she goes to a low-residence writing course at Bennington in January - so maybe we can manage to meet and argue some of these things out. Bee and I will be mostly in Virginia where Bee wants to try to assemble her scattered children & grandchildren, see her brothers who live there and do some background research for of her writing, which is firmly set in that neighborhood. I have a son in NY and two daughters and three grandchildren in Britain - so we don’t assemble so easily.
Yours
Guy
Six
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
17 Dec, 1994
Dear Jehane and Tom,
Herewith the missing picture - or at least another copy. What happened to the first I don’t know.
Thanks for the meal and the criticisms. I am still trying to work out how to deal with them without getting into a major discussion of a large issue that is to one side of my own main concern - namely, to show some different ways in which nonsense arises and gets worked into our ways of talking. I still think that Einstein’s analysis is a fine example of the unmasking of an expression and a would-be notion as one that had been given no sense and furthermore could be given none. The trouble came because I was riding an old hobby-horse of mine that what I would call ‘absolute’ notions have no real place in the sciences, that they are religious rather than scientific notions, that as termini they propose to step outside processes that from a scientific point of view and from within the sciences themselves, are endless. The kind of end that those absolute notions propose is not a scientific end, but one that involves a standpoint outside the scientific enterprise, looking at it as a ‘whole’ and at the subject of its study as also a whole.
Right there are the roots of that ‘scientific realism’ which you and I oppose as creating great misunderstandings of the sciences. What I would say is that ‘scientific realism’ is essentially a religious position offering an external and religious perspective on something called ‘the World’. I would go on to say that that very notion of the World is itself a religious one that involves just such a leaping over processes that from our human point of view are endless and tentative to an external and, if you like divine, point of view that gathers up those untidy infinities into a comfortable whole.
Hidden in all of that is perhaps how I would want to respond to the second thoughts you had about my arguments in ‘Misunderstanding Science’ against theories and theses in philosophy. I’d like to reinstate that initial ‘WOW’, and would like to do it by entering caveats and cautions about the implications of the notion of the World, whether the ‘natural World’ or any other, as involving a notion of wholeness and completion that in turn involves an external and divine point of view.
I have nothing against such a conception of an external and divine point of view. I just want to say that it has no place or legitimate function within the sciences as a human enterprise and can get no licence from them. Scientific Realism is an attempt to posit a closure or completion for the human scientific enterprise, a closure or completion that has a logical or metaphysical standing, a place where the human enterprise must end, not an end that might be brought about by some historical catastrophe or by some human decision to give up that activity.
I am in the middle of an argument with Alasdair MacIntyre about some of these matters, an argument that started over the notion of miracles and my opposition to attempts to ‘secularise’ that notion by giving it some relation to the sciences. An old paper of mine on that subject tried to define that separation between the religious and the scientific points of view and to bring out the way in which the attempts to define ‘miracle’ as some kind of residue on scientific explanation implied such a notion of completion or closure that had no scientific licence and could only have a home within a religious point of view.
Of course we all use those ‘absolute’ notions, those ‘closure’ notions such as ‘the World’, ‘the origins of the Universe’, ‘the end of time’, ‘fundamental particles’ and so forth. Most of the time they are convenient ways of talking that can be unpacked into other, untroublesome ways - as I tried to do at the tail end of Deus Sive Natura in relating the unsplitability of Dalton’s atoms to their function within the state of knowledge at the time.
Ideally, I should try to do something of the same kind for Newton’s absolutes to follow out your suggestion that they were essential at that time for the development of dynamics. They would then be like Wittgenstein’s ladder we climb up to a position from which we can throw it away. Aristotle has a similar conception of hypothesis in the Posterior Analytics - as something we take on board for the purposes of progress in the subject, though we may progress to the point where we can turn back and criticise that starting point.
That’s how I see the problem anyway, and I’ll have to see what I can do in that line. One of the other things I take to be at least useful is to try to see what differences I can make out between a mathematical model and a method of analysis - if there are any. It might have been better to have described the Principia as a ‘method of analysis’ of dynamic changes than as a mathematical model - taking the description of the heavens as a paradigmatic application rather than the Principia as primarily a mathematical model of them.
Still, I’m not sure I can take all that on in the confines of the discussion in that Introduction. We will see.
Jehane, we never got to talk about the problem of belief in nonsense, which I think is an interesting, and maybe a pretty important one. Another time.
At the moment the problem I’m anxious to get working on is the nature and function and consequences of the inverted picture of humanity as individuals first and social beings after - that the Seventeenth Century laid down as its starting point, thus setting the agenda to which, in large part, we are still working. Much of the confusions generated by the notion of method in the sciences and elsewhere can be set down to their being aimed at a putative isolated individual for her or his private use.
Enough for now. Needless to say, Tom, that without benefit of pencil and paper, I immediately forgot your e-mail number. But I detected a slight reluctance to communicate that way. Perhaps I should say that I will never get into ‘chat mode’ because logging on involves a long distance call for me. My mode is to get in, grab and send mail and get out.
All the best,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
January 17, 1995
Dear Guy:
Your good letter, written the week before Christmas, has done much to clarify what I take us to disagree about. I'm correspondingly glad to have it, for I was not by any means satisfied with my attempts to describe them during your visit. But I've needed to get past the residues of the season before repeating the attempt. I'm now as nearly there as I'm likely to get, so I resurface.
There are three aspects of your letter that bother me: the rejection of theory as a legitimate enterprise for philosophers, your notion of nonsense, and your talk of throwing away the ladder. The first two we've talked about before but not, on my part, very well; the third provides a means to clarify what I've had in mind.
As to philosophical theories, my disagreement is personal. In response to questions about whether Structure treats science descriptively or normatively, I've repeatedly said that it presents a theory in the sense that it explains many previously anomalous observations about the development of science and the behavior of its practitioners. Its technique for doing so is redescription, but redescription that claims to be generally applicable, not restricted to the particular cases used to illustrate and explain it. The generalizations it makes or suggests are, in a sense that needs explicating, lawlike. What I'm doing now is often even more explicitly theoretical. In particular, it claims to explain incommensurability for which purpose it develops a theory of meaning for kind terms, making use in the process of considerable material from developmental psychology. I can't make my points without undertaking that sort of work, and I don't see why I should. You may respond that the aim of the efforts I'm describing is not theory, to which I'll respond it's usually called that. Alternatively you may say that what I am doing isn't philosophy, to which I'll respond (not entirely disingenuously) that it's you, not I, who said it was. It's not that I think philosophers must introduce theories or that they regularly do (though the line between theoretical and non theoretical work is extraordinarily difficult to draw). But your conception of philosophy would exclude, among others, both Aristotle and Kant, two of the figures I most admire. I'm against many of the same things you are, but I think you're throwing out baby with the bath.
Next comes nonsense. I'm sure there is such a thing, but if you ask for indubitable examples the only ones I come up with are in the writing of Edward Lear, and I've no desire to extirpate them. None of the examples you give seem to me like nonsense. You are right, of course, that we use them to climb and can then throw them away, but that throwing away, in my view, always requires that they be replaced by another which has the same status as what they replace. If they were nonsense, then so is what replaces them. That's what my onetime talk of paradigms and revolutions was about, and I've always been upset by people who thanked me (as students in the '60's often did) for telling them about paradigms thus enabling them, they assured me, to get along in their absence.
Your nonsense, in short, seems to me just as absolutist as Descartes' sense: it's outside of time, culture, and space. For me, nonsense must always be situated in a context of language, belief, and custom. In another context it might not be nonsense at all. You think of Einstein as "unmasking an expression and a would-be notion as one that had been given no sense and could be given none," and in our time and place that's nonsense His argument depends upon a then much contested generalization about nature, one drawn directly or indirectly from experience. It presupposes, that is, that the speed of light is the same in all Galilean coordinate systems. If the Michelson Morley experiment (or other available sources of the same conclusion) had given a different answer, simultaneity would not have been relative.
In my view (but it takes a book length elaboration as well as a theory of meaning to make this out) the statements which get unpacked as claims about the absoluteness of space or time or simultaneity are deeply embedded in a larger (but not Quinean) web of statements and procedures through which members of a community learn what space, time, etc., are. The individual statements are not quite definitions (various other statements and procedures could be substituted for them), but they or their substitutes must be learned to supply what I think of as quasi-Kantian categories, prerequisite to experience of the realm to which they apply. In that sentence, the "quasi-" functions to open the possibility that different language communities, cultures, periods, etc., may operate from somewhat different prerequisites to experience. These prerequisites are then constitutive of different form of life; they are not to be thought of as true or false (or nonsense) in themselves.
Which brings me to a final point in your letter. You speak of the seventeenth century's inverted picture of humanity as individuals first and social beings after, and suggest that it sets an agenda for much that follows. Except that I would not speak of what results as "confusions" (for the same reasons that I resist your use of "nonsense) I agree entirely. But I take "social being" to mean member of one culture or another, not simply member of the human race (another mode of thought with ties to the seventeenth century). And since I think different cultures may have (partially) different prerequisites to experience and correspondingly different way of describing the world, I see my way to talking of different group's living in (partially) different worlds. That sort of world (lower case not upper case) is not something I would know how to dispense with, in part because in any culture one can say things about it that are to be judged true or false on the basis of shared empirical evidence. But it does bring a lower case realism with it.
I can't now go further. Instead, I send Jehane's and my thanks for the missing picture, and our warm greetings to the three members of your family who are represented by images in our archive. We hope some day to acquire living images of the other two.
Yours,
Tom
17 Dec, 1994
Dear Jehane and Tom,
Herewith the missing picture - or at least another copy. What happened to the first I don’t know.
Thanks for the meal and the criticisms. I am still trying to work out how to deal with them without getting into a major discussion of a large issue that is to one side of my own main concern - namely, to show some different ways in which nonsense arises and gets worked into our ways of talking. I still think that Einstein’s analysis is a fine example of the unmasking of an expression and a would-be notion as one that had been given no sense and furthermore could be given none. The trouble came because I was riding an old hobby-horse of mine that what I would call ‘absolute’ notions have no real place in the sciences, that they are religious rather than scientific notions, that as termini they propose to step outside processes that from a scientific point of view and from within the sciences themselves, are endless. The kind of end that those absolute notions propose is not a scientific end, but one that involves a standpoint outside the scientific enterprise, looking at it as a ‘whole’ and at the subject of its study as also a whole.
Right there are the roots of that ‘scientific realism’ which you and I oppose as creating great misunderstandings of the sciences. What I would say is that ‘scientific realism’ is essentially a religious position offering an external and religious perspective on something called ‘the World’. I would go on to say that that very notion of the World is itself a religious one that involves just such a leaping over processes that from our human point of view are endless and tentative to an external and, if you like divine, point of view that gathers up those untidy infinities into a comfortable whole.
Hidden in all of that is perhaps how I would want to respond to the second thoughts you had about my arguments in ‘Misunderstanding Science’ against theories and theses in philosophy. I’d like to reinstate that initial ‘WOW’, and would like to do it by entering caveats and cautions about the implications of the notion of the World, whether the ‘natural World’ or any other, as involving a notion of wholeness and completion that in turn involves an external and divine point of view.
I have nothing against such a conception of an external and divine point of view. I just want to say that it has no place or legitimate function within the sciences as a human enterprise and can get no licence from them. Scientific Realism is an attempt to posit a closure or completion for the human scientific enterprise, a closure or completion that has a logical or metaphysical standing, a place where the human enterprise must end, not an end that might be brought about by some historical catastrophe or by some human decision to give up that activity.
I am in the middle of an argument with Alasdair MacIntyre about some of these matters, an argument that started over the notion of miracles and my opposition to attempts to ‘secularise’ that notion by giving it some relation to the sciences. An old paper of mine on that subject tried to define that separation between the religious and the scientific points of view and to bring out the way in which the attempts to define ‘miracle’ as some kind of residue on scientific explanation implied such a notion of completion or closure that had no scientific licence and could only have a home within a religious point of view.
Of course we all use those ‘absolute’ notions, those ‘closure’ notions such as ‘the World’, ‘the origins of the Universe’, ‘the end of time’, ‘fundamental particles’ and so forth. Most of the time they are convenient ways of talking that can be unpacked into other, untroublesome ways - as I tried to do at the tail end of Deus Sive Natura in relating the unsplitability of Dalton’s atoms to their function within the state of knowledge at the time.
Ideally, I should try to do something of the same kind for Newton’s absolutes to follow out your suggestion that they were essential at that time for the development of dynamics. They would then be like Wittgenstein’s ladder we climb up to a position from which we can throw it away. Aristotle has a similar conception of hypothesis in the Posterior Analytics - as something we take on board for the purposes of progress in the subject, though we may progress to the point where we can turn back and criticise that starting point.
That’s how I see the problem anyway, and I’ll have to see what I can do in that line. One of the other things I take to be at least useful is to try to see what differences I can make out between a mathematical model and a method of analysis - if there are any. It might have been better to have described the Principia as a ‘method of analysis’ of dynamic changes than as a mathematical model - taking the description of the heavens as a paradigmatic application rather than the Principia as primarily a mathematical model of them.
Still, I’m not sure I can take all that on in the confines of the discussion in that Introduction. We will see.
Jehane, we never got to talk about the problem of belief in nonsense, which I think is an interesting, and maybe a pretty important one. Another time.
At the moment the problem I’m anxious to get working on is the nature and function and consequences of the inverted picture of humanity as individuals first and social beings after - that the Seventeenth Century laid down as its starting point, thus setting the agenda to which, in large part, we are still working. Much of the confusions generated by the notion of method in the sciences and elsewhere can be set down to their being aimed at a putative isolated individual for her or his private use.
Enough for now. Needless to say, Tom, that without benefit of pencil and paper, I immediately forgot your e-mail number. But I detected a slight reluctance to communicate that way. Perhaps I should say that I will never get into ‘chat mode’ because logging on involves a long distance call for me. My mode is to get in, grab and send mail and get out.
All the best,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
January 17, 1995
Dear Guy:
Your good letter, written the week before Christmas, has done much to clarify what I take us to disagree about. I'm correspondingly glad to have it, for I was not by any means satisfied with my attempts to describe them during your visit. But I've needed to get past the residues of the season before repeating the attempt. I'm now as nearly there as I'm likely to get, so I resurface.
There are three aspects of your letter that bother me: the rejection of theory as a legitimate enterprise for philosophers, your notion of nonsense, and your talk of throwing away the ladder. The first two we've talked about before but not, on my part, very well; the third provides a means to clarify what I've had in mind.
As to philosophical theories, my disagreement is personal. In response to questions about whether Structure treats science descriptively or normatively, I've repeatedly said that it presents a theory in the sense that it explains many previously anomalous observations about the development of science and the behavior of its practitioners. Its technique for doing so is redescription, but redescription that claims to be generally applicable, not restricted to the particular cases used to illustrate and explain it. The generalizations it makes or suggests are, in a sense that needs explicating, lawlike. What I'm doing now is often even more explicitly theoretical. In particular, it claims to explain incommensurability for which purpose it develops a theory of meaning for kind terms, making use in the process of considerable material from developmental psychology. I can't make my points without undertaking that sort of work, and I don't see why I should. You may respond that the aim of the efforts I'm describing is not theory, to which I'll respond it's usually called that. Alternatively you may say that what I am doing isn't philosophy, to which I'll respond (not entirely disingenuously) that it's you, not I, who said it was. It's not that I think philosophers must introduce theories or that they regularly do (though the line between theoretical and non theoretical work is extraordinarily difficult to draw). But your conception of philosophy would exclude, among others, both Aristotle and Kant, two of the figures I most admire. I'm against many of the same things you are, but I think you're throwing out baby with the bath.
Next comes nonsense. I'm sure there is such a thing, but if you ask for indubitable examples the only ones I come up with are in the writing of Edward Lear, and I've no desire to extirpate them. None of the examples you give seem to me like nonsense. You are right, of course, that we use them to climb and can then throw them away, but that throwing away, in my view, always requires that they be replaced by another which has the same status as what they replace. If they were nonsense, then so is what replaces them. That's what my onetime talk of paradigms and revolutions was about, and I've always been upset by people who thanked me (as students in the '60's often did) for telling them about paradigms thus enabling them, they assured me, to get along in their absence.
Your nonsense, in short, seems to me just as absolutist as Descartes' sense: it's outside of time, culture, and space. For me, nonsense must always be situated in a context of language, belief, and custom. In another context it might not be nonsense at all. You think of Einstein as "unmasking an expression and a would-be notion as one that had been given no sense and could be given none," and in our time and place that's nonsense His argument depends upon a then much contested generalization about nature, one drawn directly or indirectly from experience. It presupposes, that is, that the speed of light is the same in all Galilean coordinate systems. If the Michelson Morley experiment (or other available sources of the same conclusion) had given a different answer, simultaneity would not have been relative.
In my view (but it takes a book length elaboration as well as a theory of meaning to make this out) the statements which get unpacked as claims about the absoluteness of space or time or simultaneity are deeply embedded in a larger (but not Quinean) web of statements and procedures through which members of a community learn what space, time, etc., are. The individual statements are not quite definitions (various other statements and procedures could be substituted for them), but they or their substitutes must be learned to supply what I think of as quasi-Kantian categories, prerequisite to experience of the realm to which they apply. In that sentence, the "quasi-" functions to open the possibility that different language communities, cultures, periods, etc., may operate from somewhat different prerequisites to experience. These prerequisites are then constitutive of different form of life; they are not to be thought of as true or false (or nonsense) in themselves.
Which brings me to a final point in your letter. You speak of the seventeenth century's inverted picture of humanity as individuals first and social beings after, and suggest that it sets an agenda for much that follows. Except that I would not speak of what results as "confusions" (for the same reasons that I resist your use of "nonsense) I agree entirely. But I take "social being" to mean member of one culture or another, not simply member of the human race (another mode of thought with ties to the seventeenth century). And since I think different cultures may have (partially) different prerequisites to experience and correspondingly different way of describing the world, I see my way to talking of different group's living in (partially) different worlds. That sort of world (lower case not upper case) is not something I would know how to dispense with, in part because in any culture one can say things about it that are to be judged true or false on the basis of shared empirical evidence. But it does bring a lower case realism with it.
I can't now go further. Instead, I send Jehane's and my thanks for the missing picture, and our warm greetings to the three members of your family who are represented by images in our archive. We hope some day to acquire living images of the other two.
Yours,
Tom
Seven
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
Jan 31 95
Dear Tom,
Thanks for your letter. It gives me a lot to respond to. But I want to thank you again for your criticism of my ahistorical treatment of Newton. It sent me back to the Principia, where I found some useful things and came away with a greater admiration for the instinctive philosophy underlying much of it (where his theological interests didn’t impinge). In fact, there are parts in which he is radically at odds with the philosophy of his time, particularly that of his professed admirer, Locke and the individualism that was the premise and starting point of it all.
What I have in mind is the Preface to the First Edition in which he discusses the relation of mechanics to the geometry which he now wants to use in his analysis of motion both in the heavens and on Earth. I don’t think anybody has picked up on the radical character of his statement that ‘Geometry is founded in mechanical practice.’ In practice! - (Sounds like Kuhn, Heaven forbid!)
Certainly Locke never considered that statement or thought about it deeply. Nor have the others who have wanted to hold geometry up as an example of the power of pure rationality to generate out of itself, or as proving the existence of innate ideas, or as ‘pure intuition’ (whatever that is) or pure formal creativity, à la Hilbert. None of them have attempted to come to terms with that striking discussion. (‘After all, he was only a physicist not a philosopher. What would he know about it?’) Actually, I think the philosophers never thought about that discussion of Newton’s or its implications. The achievements of Newton’s system were all that later generations were interested in. Those achievements bedazzled them and sent them off on great speculative flights (‘determinism’ and all the rest). It would have brought them sharply to earth if they had accepted the view that this great analytical tool that allowed them to describe what they took to be God’s own order, was founded in the practice of ordinary mechanics working with the brute things of this world - carpenters, surveyors, draftsmen and other menials.
For Newton, geometry was only paying back its debt to mechanics in what could be described (talking for myself, now) as a dialectical development. Geometry was only the idealization of that practice of carpenters and surveyors, &c. And so it could found a mechanics and new practices that were still in touch with that world, were still grounded, without needing the notion of truth to give them point and reference and applicability. (How many problems could be solved by that recognition!)
[Now, if that process of idealization of practices is what you want to mean by ‘theory’ then I’ll say ‘fine’ - yes, you have theorized the sciences in that way in offering us a way of looking at them and understanding them by examining those practices. But then the notion of truth doesn’t come into it in the way that the proponents and opponents of the various ‘isms’ (particularly ‘realism’) would have it. It’s that latter sort of thing I want to shoot down with my short argument. All the backing and forthing of those ‘ism’ mongers is only sterile and depressing. A track that is going nowhere.]
I happen to think that Newton is right - right in the sense that his way of looking at geometry gives us more insight and enables us to clear up mysteries that have defeated those who have looked at it in those other ways that had to see it as founded in individual faculties and capabilities that are supposed to be uniformly and universally distributed. I think that Newton’s view was also Euclid’s and is implicit in the setting out of the definitions, common notions and axioms. In particular, as I put in that brief note in my Introduction, if we look for a mechanical practice that underlies Euclid’s otherwise mysterious definition of straight line, it becomes simple and plain and easy to understand. And the advantages of Euclid’s definition over the others, ancient and modern that have been proposed become equally plain. Analogously, Euclid’s definition of plane becomes plain if one thinks of the practices of the rude mechanic in testing surfaces for ‘flatness’. Perhaps having myself worked briefly as a draftsman/ inspector has given me some advantage and insight there.
But the notion of a practice, whether proposed by Newton or by Kuhn, is a subversive one, subversive, anyway, of the individualistic premise that has underlain philosophy in the modern era and defined its problems for it. A practice is after all a social notion - something that is developed, refined, transmitted socially, like a language. It is not something available to the atomized individual with which modern philosophy has sought to start. [That is where the deeply challenging force of Wittgenstein’s remarks about rules and private languages make themselves felt.] A practice is not something an atomized individual can engage in. The notion of a solecism or a mistake in practice is a social notion. That it is a social notion comes out in the fact that the whole of a linguistic community cannot collectively commit a solecism. The group collectively defines what a solecism is. The individual, on the other hand can commit one but cannot define one. A habit, which is something individual, is not a practice in the sense meant. A deviation from a habitual pattern is just that; it is not thereby a mistake or a solecism.
(Perhaps I should send you a piece of mine: ‘Language and the Society of Others’ that goes into these things more.)
Now I’m going to risk something - for what I want to do is to convince you of the radical nature of your own work and perhaps to make larger claims for it than you are willing to make yourself. That may make you uneasy. When I read the Structures in the ‘60’s it was with a sense of revelation and liberation and I never saw the problems of the philosophy of science in the same way after. I saw the SSR as a concrete working out and a confirmation of the Wittgenstinian critique of the individualistic premise of the philosophy and maybe even the weltanschauung of the time. Maybe that is too much responsibility for you to take on. But I think it is there in the presentation of the sciences as the activity, and the collective practice of groups practicing together and collectively giving direction and setting standards, training and inducting new members. (Of course that does not make it into an ‘old boy network’ as the unsympathetic have wanted to pretend. The sciences are not like ballroom dancing. They have a practical outcome too. And without that they would be something very different.)
I want to say to you: ‘Don’t listen to the philosophers. Let them listen to you.’ You have provided philosophy with the raw materials of and impetus for a critique of assumptions that have kept it pursuing the impossible project of showing how an isolated, atomized, pre-social individual had available, internally or externally, the means to reach an objective, true picture of thngs that would be a bridge to others and the basis of a common language. That project inverts things. Your analysis brings out that inversion in bringing out the social nature of the scientific enterprise, both actual and necessary. And so the old question whether your account was ‘normative or descriptive’ is one that should not in any way be answered. It should be critiqued and rejected as being implicated in the whole old framework. Don’t be hauled onto that old ground where, if descriptive, then your work is ‘merely’ historical, and of no philosophical interest, and if ‘normative’ then what is the sanction or the basis of recommendation? And so forth. Neither of those notions can capture what you are doing in SSR. ‘Descriptive’ asks us to bring into play the notion of truth and falsehood whereas what you are doing there is offering a way of looking at the sciences, their history and their practice, and ways of looking are not true and false. But ‘normative’ doesn’t get anywhere near it either. You are hardly making a recommendation to the scientist of how they should go about their business. You are saying ‘Look at it this way and it will make more sense to you. Look at the sciences as the historically developed practices of a set of related communities. Not as a set of abstracted and timeless logical methods and canons that are set over those communities as guide and judge of whether what they are doing is ‘science’ or not.’
That search for the ahistorical, timeless logical methods and canons that will generate scientific truth if followed by even an isolated individual, that attempt to ‘mechanize’ or ‘Taylorize’ scientific work, is part of that individualistic program that was laid out in the Seventeenth Century and not deeply critiqued since - till Wittgenstein looked at language and rules and saw that they could not be cut loose from the social notions of practices, solecisms, of training, imitation, criticism and correction. All of which imply a social structure and social relations: between teacher and student, master and apprentice, initiated and neophyte and so forth. All I have to say is that whether consciously following or intuitively and as parallel discovery, you applied those notions to the understanding of the sciences, and so, willy, nilly have become part of a radical critique of the basic premise of philosophy in our era, of its aim and its ‘problematic’, which is to make language, thought and the search for knowledge to be within the reach of each individual, whose joining with others is taken to be a matter of convenience only. This is the view that requires that abstract ‘realism’ as a common focus and a test of progress. If we dump it, we dump that need for a mythical ‘Reality’ as the focus of our endeavors and source of our community of view.
There were good historical reasons that recommended that individualistic view and the myth of the Social Contract as well. But they had to do with combating the feudal order and hierarchy and with justifying the market based social relations that required the throwing off of the old social bonds of serfdom that were associated with a subsistence economy. Those problems are not our problems anymore, though the power of the individualistic myth lives on. There is a large measure of inertia involved. Those notions are deeply worked into a way of doing philosophy and of setting out its problems that we really have an incommensurability problem here.
Perhaps this is the place to mention a worry I have, abstract and perhaps unfounded, about appealing to developmental psychology in giving an account of the notion of incommensurability. On my own view, the source of incommensurabilities is in incompatibilities of practice and project - that one has to choose between hunting with the hounds, or running with the fox. One can’t do both at once. And I would say that our classifications and the kinds we recognize in any community or society are bound up with the way of life and the projects recognized and engaged in by that community. There is a dialectical relation here - that is, those recognitions and classifications both form and are formed by that way of life. They shape lines of development which then reflect back to modify and develop those classifications and recognitions. My abstract worry about developmental psychology is that it may tend to conceal those social dimensions of practice, project, and way of life, - and history.
As for my notion of nonsense, I would and do connect it with incompatibilities of role within specific historical languages, though there may be larger common features and projects of human societies that shape common features across languages. It is for that reason that Aristotle’s discussions of ‘cause’, ‘matter’, ‘good’, ‘change’ and the rest are still clarifying for us. But take my example of ‘infinite whole’ as an example of nonsense because of the play on two senses of ‘whole’ one of which implied completion and the other implied openness. Another language might have two different words and English might even come to adopt two.
And take my large categorizing of a source of nonsense in taking the metaphorical for the literal and asking questions and drawing conclusions appropriate only to the literal. The borders between the metaphorical and the literal change with time and often pass from the poetic to the cliché to the literal. Again, maybe there’s a book more to be said.
I think there is a lot of agreement hidden in our apparent disagreement, even over nonsense. This comes out particularly in your final paragraph, with which I am pretty well in agreement. That use of ‘world’ you propose and want licensed is one that I think raises no problems and is much needed. The trouble comes with that use of ‘world’ that calls for capitalization because it claims uniqueness for its referent and implies a standpoint outside and unconditioned. Your use is precisely contrary to that and might even be said to have echoes of the Tractatus ‘The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world.’ - as transferred, in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, to a linguistic community.
But, enough for now. I’ll have to leave something for later.
Bee and a brother of hers have been jointly left (in trust) a lovely house in the pretty little town (c 300) of Fincastle Virginia, the county seat of a county (Botetourt Co.) that was once roughly the size of Western Europe. None of that glory remains, though there is a handsome courthouse and several fine churches as well as a couple of log houses. We have the aim of spending a few weeks there in the year. Maybe you and Jehane would like to come visit some time. We’d like that.
All the best.
Yours,
Guy
Jan 31 95
Dear Tom,
Thanks for your letter. It gives me a lot to respond to. But I want to thank you again for your criticism of my ahistorical treatment of Newton. It sent me back to the Principia, where I found some useful things and came away with a greater admiration for the instinctive philosophy underlying much of it (where his theological interests didn’t impinge). In fact, there are parts in which he is radically at odds with the philosophy of his time, particularly that of his professed admirer, Locke and the individualism that was the premise and starting point of it all.
What I have in mind is the Preface to the First Edition in which he discusses the relation of mechanics to the geometry which he now wants to use in his analysis of motion both in the heavens and on Earth. I don’t think anybody has picked up on the radical character of his statement that ‘Geometry is founded in mechanical practice.’ In practice! - (Sounds like Kuhn, Heaven forbid!)
Certainly Locke never considered that statement or thought about it deeply. Nor have the others who have wanted to hold geometry up as an example of the power of pure rationality to generate out of itself, or as proving the existence of innate ideas, or as ‘pure intuition’ (whatever that is) or pure formal creativity, à la Hilbert. None of them have attempted to come to terms with that striking discussion. (‘After all, he was only a physicist not a philosopher. What would he know about it?’) Actually, I think the philosophers never thought about that discussion of Newton’s or its implications. The achievements of Newton’s system were all that later generations were interested in. Those achievements bedazzled them and sent them off on great speculative flights (‘determinism’ and all the rest). It would have brought them sharply to earth if they had accepted the view that this great analytical tool that allowed them to describe what they took to be God’s own order, was founded in the practice of ordinary mechanics working with the brute things of this world - carpenters, surveyors, draftsmen and other menials.
For Newton, geometry was only paying back its debt to mechanics in what could be described (talking for myself, now) as a dialectical development. Geometry was only the idealization of that practice of carpenters and surveyors, &c. And so it could found a mechanics and new practices that were still in touch with that world, were still grounded, without needing the notion of truth to give them point and reference and applicability. (How many problems could be solved by that recognition!)
[Now, if that process of idealization of practices is what you want to mean by ‘theory’ then I’ll say ‘fine’ - yes, you have theorized the sciences in that way in offering us a way of looking at them and understanding them by examining those practices. But then the notion of truth doesn’t come into it in the way that the proponents and opponents of the various ‘isms’ (particularly ‘realism’) would have it. It’s that latter sort of thing I want to shoot down with my short argument. All the backing and forthing of those ‘ism’ mongers is only sterile and depressing. A track that is going nowhere.]
I happen to think that Newton is right - right in the sense that his way of looking at geometry gives us more insight and enables us to clear up mysteries that have defeated those who have looked at it in those other ways that had to see it as founded in individual faculties and capabilities that are supposed to be uniformly and universally distributed. I think that Newton’s view was also Euclid’s and is implicit in the setting out of the definitions, common notions and axioms. In particular, as I put in that brief note in my Introduction, if we look for a mechanical practice that underlies Euclid’s otherwise mysterious definition of straight line, it becomes simple and plain and easy to understand. And the advantages of Euclid’s definition over the others, ancient and modern that have been proposed become equally plain. Analogously, Euclid’s definition of plane becomes plain if one thinks of the practices of the rude mechanic in testing surfaces for ‘flatness’. Perhaps having myself worked briefly as a draftsman/ inspector has given me some advantage and insight there.
But the notion of a practice, whether proposed by Newton or by Kuhn, is a subversive one, subversive, anyway, of the individualistic premise that has underlain philosophy in the modern era and defined its problems for it. A practice is after all a social notion - something that is developed, refined, transmitted socially, like a language. It is not something available to the atomized individual with which modern philosophy has sought to start. [That is where the deeply challenging force of Wittgenstein’s remarks about rules and private languages make themselves felt.] A practice is not something an atomized individual can engage in. The notion of a solecism or a mistake in practice is a social notion. That it is a social notion comes out in the fact that the whole of a linguistic community cannot collectively commit a solecism. The group collectively defines what a solecism is. The individual, on the other hand can commit one but cannot define one. A habit, which is something individual, is not a practice in the sense meant. A deviation from a habitual pattern is just that; it is not thereby a mistake or a solecism.
(Perhaps I should send you a piece of mine: ‘Language and the Society of Others’ that goes into these things more.)
Now I’m going to risk something - for what I want to do is to convince you of the radical nature of your own work and perhaps to make larger claims for it than you are willing to make yourself. That may make you uneasy. When I read the Structures in the ‘60’s it was with a sense of revelation and liberation and I never saw the problems of the philosophy of science in the same way after. I saw the SSR as a concrete working out and a confirmation of the Wittgenstinian critique of the individualistic premise of the philosophy and maybe even the weltanschauung of the time. Maybe that is too much responsibility for you to take on. But I think it is there in the presentation of the sciences as the activity, and the collective practice of groups practicing together and collectively giving direction and setting standards, training and inducting new members. (Of course that does not make it into an ‘old boy network’ as the unsympathetic have wanted to pretend. The sciences are not like ballroom dancing. They have a practical outcome too. And without that they would be something very different.)
I want to say to you: ‘Don’t listen to the philosophers. Let them listen to you.’ You have provided philosophy with the raw materials of and impetus for a critique of assumptions that have kept it pursuing the impossible project of showing how an isolated, atomized, pre-social individual had available, internally or externally, the means to reach an objective, true picture of thngs that would be a bridge to others and the basis of a common language. That project inverts things. Your analysis brings out that inversion in bringing out the social nature of the scientific enterprise, both actual and necessary. And so the old question whether your account was ‘normative or descriptive’ is one that should not in any way be answered. It should be critiqued and rejected as being implicated in the whole old framework. Don’t be hauled onto that old ground where, if descriptive, then your work is ‘merely’ historical, and of no philosophical interest, and if ‘normative’ then what is the sanction or the basis of recommendation? And so forth. Neither of those notions can capture what you are doing in SSR. ‘Descriptive’ asks us to bring into play the notion of truth and falsehood whereas what you are doing there is offering a way of looking at the sciences, their history and their practice, and ways of looking are not true and false. But ‘normative’ doesn’t get anywhere near it either. You are hardly making a recommendation to the scientist of how they should go about their business. You are saying ‘Look at it this way and it will make more sense to you. Look at the sciences as the historically developed practices of a set of related communities. Not as a set of abstracted and timeless logical methods and canons that are set over those communities as guide and judge of whether what they are doing is ‘science’ or not.’
That search for the ahistorical, timeless logical methods and canons that will generate scientific truth if followed by even an isolated individual, that attempt to ‘mechanize’ or ‘Taylorize’ scientific work, is part of that individualistic program that was laid out in the Seventeenth Century and not deeply critiqued since - till Wittgenstein looked at language and rules and saw that they could not be cut loose from the social notions of practices, solecisms, of training, imitation, criticism and correction. All of which imply a social structure and social relations: between teacher and student, master and apprentice, initiated and neophyte and so forth. All I have to say is that whether consciously following or intuitively and as parallel discovery, you applied those notions to the understanding of the sciences, and so, willy, nilly have become part of a radical critique of the basic premise of philosophy in our era, of its aim and its ‘problematic’, which is to make language, thought and the search for knowledge to be within the reach of each individual, whose joining with others is taken to be a matter of convenience only. This is the view that requires that abstract ‘realism’ as a common focus and a test of progress. If we dump it, we dump that need for a mythical ‘Reality’ as the focus of our endeavors and source of our community of view.
There were good historical reasons that recommended that individualistic view and the myth of the Social Contract as well. But they had to do with combating the feudal order and hierarchy and with justifying the market based social relations that required the throwing off of the old social bonds of serfdom that were associated with a subsistence economy. Those problems are not our problems anymore, though the power of the individualistic myth lives on. There is a large measure of inertia involved. Those notions are deeply worked into a way of doing philosophy and of setting out its problems that we really have an incommensurability problem here.
Perhaps this is the place to mention a worry I have, abstract and perhaps unfounded, about appealing to developmental psychology in giving an account of the notion of incommensurability. On my own view, the source of incommensurabilities is in incompatibilities of practice and project - that one has to choose between hunting with the hounds, or running with the fox. One can’t do both at once. And I would say that our classifications and the kinds we recognize in any community or society are bound up with the way of life and the projects recognized and engaged in by that community. There is a dialectical relation here - that is, those recognitions and classifications both form and are formed by that way of life. They shape lines of development which then reflect back to modify and develop those classifications and recognitions. My abstract worry about developmental psychology is that it may tend to conceal those social dimensions of practice, project, and way of life, - and history.
As for my notion of nonsense, I would and do connect it with incompatibilities of role within specific historical languages, though there may be larger common features and projects of human societies that shape common features across languages. It is for that reason that Aristotle’s discussions of ‘cause’, ‘matter’, ‘good’, ‘change’ and the rest are still clarifying for us. But take my example of ‘infinite whole’ as an example of nonsense because of the play on two senses of ‘whole’ one of which implied completion and the other implied openness. Another language might have two different words and English might even come to adopt two.
And take my large categorizing of a source of nonsense in taking the metaphorical for the literal and asking questions and drawing conclusions appropriate only to the literal. The borders between the metaphorical and the literal change with time and often pass from the poetic to the cliché to the literal. Again, maybe there’s a book more to be said.
I think there is a lot of agreement hidden in our apparent disagreement, even over nonsense. This comes out particularly in your final paragraph, with which I am pretty well in agreement. That use of ‘world’ you propose and want licensed is one that I think raises no problems and is much needed. The trouble comes with that use of ‘world’ that calls for capitalization because it claims uniqueness for its referent and implies a standpoint outside and unconditioned. Your use is precisely contrary to that and might even be said to have echoes of the Tractatus ‘The limits of my language indicate the limits of my world.’ - as transferred, in the spirit of the later Wittgenstein, to a linguistic community.
But, enough for now. I’ll have to leave something for later.
Bee and a brother of hers have been jointly left (in trust) a lovely house in the pretty little town (c 300) of Fincastle Virginia, the county seat of a county (Botetourt Co.) that was once roughly the size of Western Europe. None of that glory remains, though there is a handsome courthouse and several fine churches as well as a couple of log houses. We have the aim of spending a few weeks there in the year. Maybe you and Jehane would like to come visit some time. We’d like that.
All the best.
Yours,
Guy
Eight
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
6 Feb. 95
Dear Tom,
Thought I’d better send you an updated version of my Introduction even though it may be later modified if Cora Diamond comes up with some points I think need dealing with. For one thing some things in my last letter may not make much sense without it to refer to. The note about Newton and Euclid’s definition of straight line has been a small bit expanded, though the implications of Newton’s putting mechanical practice at the foundation of geometry are not at all brought out. There is much to be done there.
At the moment I am working on the sources and implications of the 17C individualistic, atomistic picture of humanity and the reasons for the dominance of the Contract theories of society, of political obligation &c. There’s an example of nonsense - lying even in a question: the origins of society is a nonsense notion (and I would say the same for the origins of language). Contract Theories, or any others that may be proposed as an answer to the would-be question, turn out to be riddled with contradictions and incoherences and to make no sense at all if taken seriously. Those ‘theories’ turn out to be myths only and I aim to explore and try to bring out just what is their actual function as myths. Incidentally, I do regard the question of the origin of society as one that is incoherent and nonsensical without limit of time.
You may still find much to criticise in my treatment of Newton, but I hope you see it as moving in the right direction in trying to emphasise the need for a concept of absolute motion in order to maintain the Coperincan view and make the heavens available for the study of frictionless motion.
But in the end I want to insist on the deep importance of Poincaré’s analysis of the Second Law and what it shows us about them all and about the whole Newtonian system at whose base they lie. But I don’t think Poincaré’s description of them as ‘definitions’ is right. ‘Ways of looking’ and ‘methods of analysis’ I think capture their role and function much better. What the two descriptions have in common is withdrawing the ‘Laws’ and the whole system from competition in the ‘truth stakes’. If we enter them into the truth stakes we get claims for them as ‘cosmic laws’ and suchlike, and God starts getting pulled into the picture, and all that sort of thing that signals the higher nonsense - i.e. metaphysics (as secular theology, that is - not metaphysics as practised by Aristotle.) With truth goes reality as the dummy correlate required by it, and we can leave that pair for particular propositions and turn to a whole range of assessments for universal and timeless propositions - sense/nonsense, coherent/incoherent, applicable/inapplicable, illuminating/unilluminating, and so on. Of course the propositions have to get past the first two assessments before they get to be assessed in the other ways. (That is, I don’t think we have a place for the notion of illuminating nonsense but I wouldn’t want to go to the wall on that one.) I would certainly be prepared to call Lewis Carroll’s nonsense ‘illuminating’. But what it illuminates is the borders of sense - by deliberately and obviously going over them. Even unconscious nonsense can do that, though not for its proposer.
I’ll quit there since this was only meant to be an accompanying note.
Yours,
Guy
6 Feb. 95
Dear Tom,
Thought I’d better send you an updated version of my Introduction even though it may be later modified if Cora Diamond comes up with some points I think need dealing with. For one thing some things in my last letter may not make much sense without it to refer to. The note about Newton and Euclid’s definition of straight line has been a small bit expanded, though the implications of Newton’s putting mechanical practice at the foundation of geometry are not at all brought out. There is much to be done there.
At the moment I am working on the sources and implications of the 17C individualistic, atomistic picture of humanity and the reasons for the dominance of the Contract theories of society, of political obligation &c. There’s an example of nonsense - lying even in a question: the origins of society is a nonsense notion (and I would say the same for the origins of language). Contract Theories, or any others that may be proposed as an answer to the would-be question, turn out to be riddled with contradictions and incoherences and to make no sense at all if taken seriously. Those ‘theories’ turn out to be myths only and I aim to explore and try to bring out just what is their actual function as myths. Incidentally, I do regard the question of the origin of society as one that is incoherent and nonsensical without limit of time.
You may still find much to criticise in my treatment of Newton, but I hope you see it as moving in the right direction in trying to emphasise the need for a concept of absolute motion in order to maintain the Coperincan view and make the heavens available for the study of frictionless motion.
But in the end I want to insist on the deep importance of Poincaré’s analysis of the Second Law and what it shows us about them all and about the whole Newtonian system at whose base they lie. But I don’t think Poincaré’s description of them as ‘definitions’ is right. ‘Ways of looking’ and ‘methods of analysis’ I think capture their role and function much better. What the two descriptions have in common is withdrawing the ‘Laws’ and the whole system from competition in the ‘truth stakes’. If we enter them into the truth stakes we get claims for them as ‘cosmic laws’ and suchlike, and God starts getting pulled into the picture, and all that sort of thing that signals the higher nonsense - i.e. metaphysics (as secular theology, that is - not metaphysics as practised by Aristotle.) With truth goes reality as the dummy correlate required by it, and we can leave that pair for particular propositions and turn to a whole range of assessments for universal and timeless propositions - sense/nonsense, coherent/incoherent, applicable/inapplicable, illuminating/unilluminating, and so on. Of course the propositions have to get past the first two assessments before they get to be assessed in the other ways. (That is, I don’t think we have a place for the notion of illuminating nonsense but I wouldn’t want to go to the wall on that one.) I would certainly be prepared to call Lewis Carroll’s nonsense ‘illuminating’. But what it illuminates is the borders of sense - by deliberately and obviously going over them. Even unconscious nonsense can do that, though not for its proposer.
I’ll quit there since this was only meant to be an accompanying note.
Yours,
Guy
Nine
Foulkstown, Ballinure, Thurles, Co. Tipperary, Eire
7 March 95
Dear Tom
I haven’t heard from you for a bit and hope that the large claims I want to make on behalf of The structure didn’t make you too nervous about ‘the project’ you were at one time worried that I was trying to recruit you to.
Anyway, here’s the stuff I told you I was working on about the Seventeenth Century inversion and the myriad false trails it sent us philosophers on. It tries to give some sense of the sources of the modern attempts to write history out of the scenario and some hints as to how a return to Aristotelian conceptions (as I conceive them) may help to write history back in.
There are some sketchy hints at the end about ‘natural kinds’ and why I, in my turn, am nervous (maybe without cause) about the use of developmental psychology in giving an account of them. As you will see, my own approach would be to see them as a variable matter between cultures and times, varying with the projects, practices and interests that characterise the ‘way of life’ of different times and cultures.
I’m sure you will find it interesting but hope that you will not find it as annoying and anathematic as I am equally sure a lot of people will.
All the best to Jehane
and yourself,
Yours,
Guy
7 March 95
Dear Tom
I haven’t heard from you for a bit and hope that the large claims I want to make on behalf of The structure didn’t make you too nervous about ‘the project’ you were at one time worried that I was trying to recruit you to.
Anyway, here’s the stuff I told you I was working on about the Seventeenth Century inversion and the myriad false trails it sent us philosophers on. It tries to give some sense of the sources of the modern attempts to write history out of the scenario and some hints as to how a return to Aristotelian conceptions (as I conceive them) may help to write history back in.
There are some sketchy hints at the end about ‘natural kinds’ and why I, in my turn, am nervous (maybe without cause) about the use of developmental psychology in giving an account of them. As you will see, my own approach would be to see them as a variable matter between cultures and times, varying with the projects, practices and interests that characterise the ‘way of life’ of different times and cultures.
I’m sure you will find it interesting but hope that you will not find it as annoying and anathematic as I am equally sure a lot of people will.
All the best to Jehane
and yourself,
Yours,
Guy
Ten
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
1 April 95
Dear Tom
I seem to be peppering you with stuff, but I think you will be interested in this. In any case you’re responsible for it. Your criticism of my ‘Introduction’ when we met, sent me back to the Principia, where I discovered a proto-Wittgenstinian who wanted to found his mechanics and articulate it in terms of geometry that he describes as being ‘founded’ in practice and ‘the manual arts.’
It struck me while writing, that Popper was probably struggling toward some such notion of transmissible practices and skills that get an air of externality and objectivity from their being transmitted by a previous generation as something to be learned. But Popper ended with a Platonic looking ‘World Three’ because he wasn’t able to rid himself of that prejudice that comes down to us from the Seventeenth Century that ‘theory precedes practice’ in some absolute way. That prejudice comes from the twist that their individualist programme gives to their foundationalist needs. Practices as something shared and agreed could have no place there where the problem is seen as explaining how individuals get together in the first place.
Popper was nearly to the place where he could give house room to the notion of a dialectical development. I see that in his attempt to define ‘progress’ in terms of what has gone before rather than what is yet to come. But he was not prepared to admit any brotherhood to Hegel and Marx, and so his ‘World Three’ ends up as a mystified Platonic ‘realm’ which has some absolute, and almost transcendental externality.
Anyway, I have some confidence that you will find this piece interesting.
Yours,
Guy
1 April 95
Dear Tom
I seem to be peppering you with stuff, but I think you will be interested in this. In any case you’re responsible for it. Your criticism of my ‘Introduction’ when we met, sent me back to the Principia, where I discovered a proto-Wittgenstinian who wanted to found his mechanics and articulate it in terms of geometry that he describes as being ‘founded’ in practice and ‘the manual arts.’
It struck me while writing, that Popper was probably struggling toward some such notion of transmissible practices and skills that get an air of externality and objectivity from their being transmitted by a previous generation as something to be learned. But Popper ended with a Platonic looking ‘World Three’ because he wasn’t able to rid himself of that prejudice that comes down to us from the Seventeenth Century that ‘theory precedes practice’ in some absolute way. That prejudice comes from the twist that their individualist programme gives to their foundationalist needs. Practices as something shared and agreed could have no place there where the problem is seen as explaining how individuals get together in the first place.
Popper was nearly to the place where he could give house room to the notion of a dialectical development. I see that in his attempt to define ‘progress’ in terms of what has gone before rather than what is yet to come. But he was not prepared to admit any brotherhood to Hegel and Marx, and so his ‘World Three’ ends up as a mystified Platonic ‘realm’ which has some absolute, and almost transcendental externality.
Anyway, I have some confidence that you will find this piece interesting.
Yours,
Guy
Eleven
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
15 October 95
Dear Tom
Preparations for a trip to the States with a side-trip up to Northampton to fetch some furniture of Bee’s made me stop and think of you and Jehane and in that thinking, realize that though I bombarded you with a lot of stuff, I never dealt properly and adequately with your letter of last January and the tricky issues that it landed me with. That was bad of me and I’ll have to try to make up for the lapse.
The toughest part is to make out just what I mean by my rejection of theories and theorizing in philosophy and the sense that I want to give to the notion of a theory in making that rejection. The sense is in one way given by the grounds I originally gave for that rejection, namely, that if we regard theories as making claims about how things are and how they might not be (the ground of calling the theory ‘true’ or ‘false’) then it seems to me to be pretty plain that philosophy does not aim at revealing that kind of truth. It aims at the necessary, at what cannot be otherwise. The question is, what that amounts to. You feel committed to the notion of theories in this area because you say want to talk of ‘a theory of the meaning of kind terms’. Now I myself would like to give an account of kind terms and have made some gestures in that direction before now. The question that we both have to look at is: what is going on here? Anything that I might want to offer would fail that test above. It would not be trying to say how things were and how they might not be. I would not be offering a ‘fact’ about the universe, or even about language, for that matter, a fact, that is, that might have been otherwise but happens to be true.
The question of kind terms is particularly sensitive here because it is the point at which the ‘God’s-eye’ point of view gets its grip and we end with ways in which we have to look at the world, how it is all laid out for us, and so forth. Now I think you want avoid that sort of thing as much as I do. So what are we faced with? Well, we will want to give an account of kind terms that makes understandable how it is that we feel that we ‘come on’ such a set of terms and don’t make them up each of us for ourselves. Yet at the same time you and I don’t want to give an account of them that presents them as ‘standing outside’ of humanity as a whole in some transcendental realm like Platonic forms, or placed in each human by a beneficent God as part of our innate equipment, or forced upon each individual inexorably by an experience regarded as a causal process. You and I want to give none of those answers. But why not? Because they are false? I don’t think so. I don’t know what we would do to show that they are false. At least I don’t know what I would do.
On the other hand, I think that they are all senseless, that if one took them really seriously and followed them through to the bitter end, they would all turn out to be incoherent. I have tried at various times and in various ways to show that. And you, on your side, have shown alternative ways of looking at that externality we all feel, ways of understanding its source in the training that neophytes get, at the tests they must pass. It is at this point that Kuhn meets Wittgenstein: ‘Perhaps all that is given is forms of life.’ We are brought up into a form of life, a culture, we don’t meet and assess it. We haven’t the means to do that, to stand outside in that way. In being brought up into that way of life we are in the process of getting the means to do any assessing at all. Those kind words are among the basic tools of living we are being given, tools for living in this ‘form of life’. And of course we all know that different forms of life have different tools and different kind words.
The situation as I see it, is simply analogous at a deeper level to the situation of the trainee scientist being described in Structure. But the trainee scientist has at least some independent purchase on the world in which he has been brought up and in which he has lived. This has given him some means of assessment that lies outside the particular sub-form of life that he is entering. He isn’t learning everything as a babe at the breast. But there is no separate standpoint for the baby and the world will be constituted for it by what it is learning then.
There is lots and lots more to be said, but I want to stop and ask what has been going on here, because I want to return to the question of theories and theorizing. There is nothing in the above that I would want to describe as a theory of anything, nothing as I would regard as giving a truth where the alternatives gave falsehoods. I would say that this account made sense of things where the others, pushed hard enough, turn out to be nonsense.
There's a lot more to be said about that too, but I’ll leave it. A lot more to be said about other things in your letter, but I’ll leave that too for the moment.
I hope that you’re well and that your writing is going well. And the same for Jehane. I may ring when we’re in the States.
All the best,
Yours,
Guy
15 October 95
Dear Tom
Preparations for a trip to the States with a side-trip up to Northampton to fetch some furniture of Bee’s made me stop and think of you and Jehane and in that thinking, realize that though I bombarded you with a lot of stuff, I never dealt properly and adequately with your letter of last January and the tricky issues that it landed me with. That was bad of me and I’ll have to try to make up for the lapse.
The toughest part is to make out just what I mean by my rejection of theories and theorizing in philosophy and the sense that I want to give to the notion of a theory in making that rejection. The sense is in one way given by the grounds I originally gave for that rejection, namely, that if we regard theories as making claims about how things are and how they might not be (the ground of calling the theory ‘true’ or ‘false’) then it seems to me to be pretty plain that philosophy does not aim at revealing that kind of truth. It aims at the necessary, at what cannot be otherwise. The question is, what that amounts to. You feel committed to the notion of theories in this area because you say want to talk of ‘a theory of the meaning of kind terms’. Now I myself would like to give an account of kind terms and have made some gestures in that direction before now. The question that we both have to look at is: what is going on here? Anything that I might want to offer would fail that test above. It would not be trying to say how things were and how they might not be. I would not be offering a ‘fact’ about the universe, or even about language, for that matter, a fact, that is, that might have been otherwise but happens to be true.
The question of kind terms is particularly sensitive here because it is the point at which the ‘God’s-eye’ point of view gets its grip and we end with ways in which we have to look at the world, how it is all laid out for us, and so forth. Now I think you want avoid that sort of thing as much as I do. So what are we faced with? Well, we will want to give an account of kind terms that makes understandable how it is that we feel that we ‘come on’ such a set of terms and don’t make them up each of us for ourselves. Yet at the same time you and I don’t want to give an account of them that presents them as ‘standing outside’ of humanity as a whole in some transcendental realm like Platonic forms, or placed in each human by a beneficent God as part of our innate equipment, or forced upon each individual inexorably by an experience regarded as a causal process. You and I want to give none of those answers. But why not? Because they are false? I don’t think so. I don’t know what we would do to show that they are false. At least I don’t know what I would do.
On the other hand, I think that they are all senseless, that if one took them really seriously and followed them through to the bitter end, they would all turn out to be incoherent. I have tried at various times and in various ways to show that. And you, on your side, have shown alternative ways of looking at that externality we all feel, ways of understanding its source in the training that neophytes get, at the tests they must pass. It is at this point that Kuhn meets Wittgenstein: ‘Perhaps all that is given is forms of life.’ We are brought up into a form of life, a culture, we don’t meet and assess it. We haven’t the means to do that, to stand outside in that way. In being brought up into that way of life we are in the process of getting the means to do any assessing at all. Those kind words are among the basic tools of living we are being given, tools for living in this ‘form of life’. And of course we all know that different forms of life have different tools and different kind words.
The situation as I see it, is simply analogous at a deeper level to the situation of the trainee scientist being described in Structure. But the trainee scientist has at least some independent purchase on the world in which he has been brought up and in which he has lived. This has given him some means of assessment that lies outside the particular sub-form of life that he is entering. He isn’t learning everything as a babe at the breast. But there is no separate standpoint for the baby and the world will be constituted for it by what it is learning then.
There is lots and lots more to be said, but I want to stop and ask what has been going on here, because I want to return to the question of theories and theorizing. There is nothing in the above that I would want to describe as a theory of anything, nothing as I would regard as giving a truth where the alternatives gave falsehoods. I would say that this account made sense of things where the others, pushed hard enough, turn out to be nonsense.
There's a lot more to be said about that too, but I’ll leave it. A lot more to be said about other things in your letter, but I’ll leave that too for the moment.
I hope that you’re well and that your writing is going well. And the same for Jehane. I may ring when we’re in the States.
All the best,
Yours,
Guy
Twelve
Foulkstown, Ballinure, Thurles, Co. Tipperary
22 October 95
Dear Tom & Jehane
Herewith, as promised, something by way of answering the question about believing nonsense. At least it has something to say about the notion of nonsense that may be helpful in addressing the problem even though it doesn’t itself yet really address it. You will see two things about it - one is that it is by way of introduction to my own (scant) works and brings out how I see one whole way of doing philosophy (the correct one, naturally) as turning on the sense/nonsense axis as contrasted with the Cartesian view of it as a special kind of theorizing in pursuit of a special kind of truth. The other thing you will notice is that I make much use of your notion of incommensurable vocabularies, broadening it perhaps, to present any real language as a congeries of a myriad such vocabularies. The difference being that, unlike you, the incommensurable vocabularies that I am interested in are those that are not rivals. It is the transfers between these non-rival incommensurable vocabularies that I want to say is a source of metaphor and the mistaking of the metaphorical for the literal that is a source of nonsense.
I suspect that I am going to have to make my peace with Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum before I get any real grip on the notion of believing in nonsense. Incidentally, Jehane, my dictionary gives ‘discordant’, ‘harsh’ and ‘unreasonable’ for absurdus. ‘Offending the ear’ seems to be the root sense - I suppose deriving from the idea of talking like a deaf person talks and from the unjust assumption that a dumb person (as deaf people used generally to be) was ‘dumb’ and without sense. ‘Unreasonable’ is already a transferred sense.
I will be much interested to hear what you think, Tom, of the things I say about Newton and the difficulties that come from the fact that there is no construction that will introduce the notion of time into a mathematical model in the way that Euclid is able to introduce his notions by means of constructions. [The relation of Euclid’s definition of straight line to draughtsman’s practice is something I discovered sometime ago but have done nothing with. In fact all three definitions of straightness that Heath considers become plain when you see the practices that give rise to them. The carpenter sighting along his plank gives us Plato’s ‘That of which the middle obscures the ends’ and the chalk line (mentioned already in Homer) gives the ‘Shortest distance’ definition. It was the genius of Euclid to see that neither of the latter were apt or adequate, and to find one that was.]
I suspect you will agree with my locating one source of nonsense, absurdity or emptiness in the mistaking the function of a model, picture or map and using it in a way not recommended by the manufacturer. Of course, the manufacturer was often not too clear about its correct use either. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at The Copernican Revolution, but my memory is that Ptolemy was not always clear whether he was supplying a ‘Sprirograph’ kit for generating three-dimensional curves or a description or physical realities. It’s hard to know just what to say about Newton, about how much his theology did get tangled with his physics. I think one can argue that one back and forth.
Anyway, you’ll see from that introduction of mine just how far out of step I am with the way philosophy is generally done these days, and I am sure that the pieces collected will call down wrath on my head. Individually, they seem to have been mostly ignored - with the exception of one or two who have had their perspective shifted by one or two of them.
You seem to have had a year of it, Tom, (and, naturally you too, Jehane). I was sorry to hear that you had two cataract operations to face on top of everything else. I hope that by the time you get this they will be behind you and the way ahead will be clear of such things.
Bee and I have not yet settled our plans in detail, but the outlines are that we would like to converge on Massachussetts sometime at the end of the second or beginning of the third week of November. She will be driving a van of some sort up from Virginia and I will be flying in to meet up with her to load up some stuff in Northampton and drive it back down to Virginia to be stored/got rid of in some fashion. We want to get that well done before Thanksgiving takes hold. Thanksgiving itself will be a great gathering of the clans, my son and daughter-in-law down from New Rochelle, Bee’s daughter, now in Roanoke, and two of her brothers in that area as well as her mother. A first meeting for any of the two families.
Yours,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
October 31, 1995
Dear Guy:
I'm just back from a trip to Europe (my first since things fell apart three years ago) to find your letter waiting for me. It is useful, whether to define our differences or reduce them I don't know. In either case, thanks.
I know where your notion of a theory comes from, but it's very different from mine. For me, and for an increasing number of philosophers of science, theories are not propositional, not the sorts of structures that can be true or false. In this respect, they're very much like forms of life which, for the relevant community of believers, they help to constitute. Yes, they do change over time, both historical and individual, but so do forms of life. When that occurs, however, the displaced theory is not rendered false, just out of date, no longer recognizable as a form of life at all. (This is the point at which incommensurability enters.)
Propositions, the sorts of entities which have factual content and can be true or false, have no existence independent of the forms of life which permits their formulation. When you say, "the trainee scientists has at least some independent purchase on the world in which he is brought up," I don't know what you can have in mind. Surely it's the way he's brought up that gives him a world (though not any old world -- just one his predecessors have found viable). His independence is only within the limits that that upbringing allows. It's not, that is, independent of either time or culture. (You say all this in the paragraph where you speak of an "independent purchase" which greatly reinforces my confusion about what you have in mind.)
I agree with you that philosophy is not about matters of fact, but more nearly about necessities. But those necessities are constitutive of forms of life while nevertheless differing from one such form to another. I don't know how to get at them without theories, where by theory I mean the sort of thing Wittgenstein speaks of as a "picture of the world" in On Certainty, §94 (and cf. §92). My theory of kind-terms, for example, will attempt to show both why they must exist in sets that seem to give a God's eye view while being nevertheless subject (in groups, not individually) to change with time. I can't think that you want to exclude a theory of that sort from philosophy.
As ever,
Tom
22 October 95
Dear Tom & Jehane
Herewith, as promised, something by way of answering the question about believing nonsense. At least it has something to say about the notion of nonsense that may be helpful in addressing the problem even though it doesn’t itself yet really address it. You will see two things about it - one is that it is by way of introduction to my own (scant) works and brings out how I see one whole way of doing philosophy (the correct one, naturally) as turning on the sense/nonsense axis as contrasted with the Cartesian view of it as a special kind of theorizing in pursuit of a special kind of truth. The other thing you will notice is that I make much use of your notion of incommensurable vocabularies, broadening it perhaps, to present any real language as a congeries of a myriad such vocabularies. The difference being that, unlike you, the incommensurable vocabularies that I am interested in are those that are not rivals. It is the transfers between these non-rival incommensurable vocabularies that I want to say is a source of metaphor and the mistaking of the metaphorical for the literal that is a source of nonsense.
I suspect that I am going to have to make my peace with Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum before I get any real grip on the notion of believing in nonsense. Incidentally, Jehane, my dictionary gives ‘discordant’, ‘harsh’ and ‘unreasonable’ for absurdus. ‘Offending the ear’ seems to be the root sense - I suppose deriving from the idea of talking like a deaf person talks and from the unjust assumption that a dumb person (as deaf people used generally to be) was ‘dumb’ and without sense. ‘Unreasonable’ is already a transferred sense.
I will be much interested to hear what you think, Tom, of the things I say about Newton and the difficulties that come from the fact that there is no construction that will introduce the notion of time into a mathematical model in the way that Euclid is able to introduce his notions by means of constructions. [The relation of Euclid’s definition of straight line to draughtsman’s practice is something I discovered sometime ago but have done nothing with. In fact all three definitions of straightness that Heath considers become plain when you see the practices that give rise to them. The carpenter sighting along his plank gives us Plato’s ‘That of which the middle obscures the ends’ and the chalk line (mentioned already in Homer) gives the ‘Shortest distance’ definition. It was the genius of Euclid to see that neither of the latter were apt or adequate, and to find one that was.]
I suspect you will agree with my locating one source of nonsense, absurdity or emptiness in the mistaking the function of a model, picture or map and using it in a way not recommended by the manufacturer. Of course, the manufacturer was often not too clear about its correct use either. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at The Copernican Revolution, but my memory is that Ptolemy was not always clear whether he was supplying a ‘Sprirograph’ kit for generating three-dimensional curves or a description or physical realities. It’s hard to know just what to say about Newton, about how much his theology did get tangled with his physics. I think one can argue that one back and forth.
Anyway, you’ll see from that introduction of mine just how far out of step I am with the way philosophy is generally done these days, and I am sure that the pieces collected will call down wrath on my head. Individually, they seem to have been mostly ignored - with the exception of one or two who have had their perspective shifted by one or two of them.
You seem to have had a year of it, Tom, (and, naturally you too, Jehane). I was sorry to hear that you had two cataract operations to face on top of everything else. I hope that by the time you get this they will be behind you and the way ahead will be clear of such things.
Bee and I have not yet settled our plans in detail, but the outlines are that we would like to converge on Massachussetts sometime at the end of the second or beginning of the third week of November. She will be driving a van of some sort up from Virginia and I will be flying in to meet up with her to load up some stuff in Northampton and drive it back down to Virginia to be stored/got rid of in some fashion. We want to get that well done before Thanksgiving takes hold. Thanksgiving itself will be a great gathering of the clans, my son and daughter-in-law down from New Rochelle, Bee’s daughter, now in Roanoke, and two of her brothers in that area as well as her mother. A first meeting for any of the two families.
Yours,
Guy
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
October 31, 1995
Dear Guy:
I'm just back from a trip to Europe (my first since things fell apart three years ago) to find your letter waiting for me. It is useful, whether to define our differences or reduce them I don't know. In either case, thanks.
I know where your notion of a theory comes from, but it's very different from mine. For me, and for an increasing number of philosophers of science, theories are not propositional, not the sorts of structures that can be true or false. In this respect, they're very much like forms of life which, for the relevant community of believers, they help to constitute. Yes, they do change over time, both historical and individual, but so do forms of life. When that occurs, however, the displaced theory is not rendered false, just out of date, no longer recognizable as a form of life at all. (This is the point at which incommensurability enters.)
Propositions, the sorts of entities which have factual content and can be true or false, have no existence independent of the forms of life which permits their formulation. When you say, "the trainee scientists has at least some independent purchase on the world in which he is brought up," I don't know what you can have in mind. Surely it's the way he's brought up that gives him a world (though not any old world -- just one his predecessors have found viable). His independence is only within the limits that that upbringing allows. It's not, that is, independent of either time or culture. (You say all this in the paragraph where you speak of an "independent purchase" which greatly reinforces my confusion about what you have in mind.)
I agree with you that philosophy is not about matters of fact, but more nearly about necessities. But those necessities are constitutive of forms of life while nevertheless differing from one such form to another. I don't know how to get at them without theories, where by theory I mean the sort of thing Wittgenstein speaks of as a "picture of the world" in On Certainty, §94 (and cf. §92). My theory of kind-terms, for example, will attempt to show both why they must exist in sets that seem to give a God's eye view while being nevertheless subject (in groups, not individually) to change with time. I can't think that you want to exclude a theory of that sort from philosophy.
As ever,
Tom
Thirteen
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire
1 April 95
Dear Tom
I seem to be peppering you with stuff, but I think you will be interested in this. In any case you’re responsible for it. Your criticism of my ‘Introduction’ when we met, sent me back to the Principia, where I discovered a proto-Wittgenstinian who wanted to found his mechanics and articulate it in terms of geometry that he describes as being ‘founded’ in practice and ‘the manual arts.’
It struck me while writing, that Popper was probably struggling toward some such notion of transmissible practices and skills that get an air of externality and objectivity from their being transmitted by a previous generation as something to be learned. But Popper ended with a Platonic looking ‘World Three’ because he wasn’t able to rid himself of that prejudice that comes down to us from the Seventeenth Century that ‘theory precedes practice’ in some absolute way. That prejudice comes from the twist that their individualist programme gives to their foundationalist needs. Practices as something shared and agreed could have no place there where the problem is seen as explaining how individuals get together in the first place.
Popper was nearly to the place where he could give house room to the notion of a dialectical development. I see that in his attempt to define ‘progress’ in terms of what has gone before rather than what is yet to come. But he was not prepared to admit any brotherhood to Hegel and Marx, and so his ‘World Three’ ends up as a mystified Platonic ‘realm’ which has some absolute, and almost transcendental externality.
Anyway, I have some confidence that you will find this piece interesting.
Yours,
Guy
(The following letter crossed with the previous one.)
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
March 30, 1996
Guy Robinson
Foulkstown
Ballinure
Thurles
Co. Tipperary
Dear Guy
Tom asked me to write you a line, conscious that your recent mailing (Feb 28) is not the first he has left unanswered. He is in hospital, due for some chest surgery on Monday. This is expected to be much less drastic than the bout two-and-a-half years ago; the surgeon and physicians are now his old acquaintances, and the prospects are encouraging. Still, he will be away from his desk for a few months, and for longer than that he will have to leave many interesting things unread and letters unanswered. He sends you greetings, as do I; we know you will understand.
Health and good weather to all in your household
Yours
Jehane
1 April 95
Dear Tom
I seem to be peppering you with stuff, but I think you will be interested in this. In any case you’re responsible for it. Your criticism of my ‘Introduction’ when we met, sent me back to the Principia, where I discovered a proto-Wittgenstinian who wanted to found his mechanics and articulate it in terms of geometry that he describes as being ‘founded’ in practice and ‘the manual arts.’
It struck me while writing, that Popper was probably struggling toward some such notion of transmissible practices and skills that get an air of externality and objectivity from their being transmitted by a previous generation as something to be learned. But Popper ended with a Platonic looking ‘World Three’ because he wasn’t able to rid himself of that prejudice that comes down to us from the Seventeenth Century that ‘theory precedes practice’ in some absolute way. That prejudice comes from the twist that their individualist programme gives to their foundationalist needs. Practices as something shared and agreed could have no place there where the problem is seen as explaining how individuals get together in the first place.
Popper was nearly to the place where he could give house room to the notion of a dialectical development. I see that in his attempt to define ‘progress’ in terms of what has gone before rather than what is yet to come. But he was not prepared to admit any brotherhood to Hegel and Marx, and so his ‘World Three’ ends up as a mystified Platonic ‘realm’ which has some absolute, and almost transcendental externality.
Anyway, I have some confidence that you will find this piece interesting.
Yours,
Guy
(The following letter crossed with the previous one.)
Thomas S. Kuhn 985 Memorial Drive, Apt. 303, Cambridge, MA 02138-5740
March 30, 1996
Guy Robinson
Foulkstown
Ballinure
Thurles
Co. Tipperary
Dear Guy
Tom asked me to write you a line, conscious that your recent mailing (Feb 28) is not the first he has left unanswered. He is in hospital, due for some chest surgery on Monday. This is expected to be much less drastic than the bout two-and-a-half years ago; the surgeon and physicians are now his old acquaintances, and the prospects are encouraging. Still, he will be away from his desk for a few months, and for longer than that he will have to leave many interesting things unread and letters unanswered. He sends you greetings, as do I; we know you will understand.
Health and good weather to all in your household
Yours
Jehane
Fourteen
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire tel/fax 353 52 31604
9April 96
Dear Jehane
I am so sorry, we both are, to hear of Tom’s return to hospital for chest surgery. Though we are naturally grateful to hear that the surgery is to be less drastic than before, the news of a return is in itself upsetting. To relieve the sense of helplessness at this distance I am going to do what we often do, though infidels, what in such a situation seems appropriate here in Ireland, - have a mass said for his speedy and full recovery. I hope that will be OK and that Tom will understand the spirit of it.
By a bizarre coincidence I just this day dropped into the post in Clonmel a letter to Tom and an offprint of the published version of ‘On Misunderstanding Science’ and returned home to find your letter. I don’t know what moved me to write just when I did. The offprints have been here for a month or more.
Please carry to Tom our warmest feelings, regards and wishes.
Guy
9April 96
Dear Jehane
I am so sorry, we both are, to hear of Tom’s return to hospital for chest surgery. Though we are naturally grateful to hear that the surgery is to be less drastic than before, the news of a return is in itself upsetting. To relieve the sense of helplessness at this distance I am going to do what we often do, though infidels, what in such a situation seems appropriate here in Ireland, - have a mass said for his speedy and full recovery. I hope that will be OK and that Tom will understand the spirit of it.
By a bizarre coincidence I just this day dropped into the post in Clonmel a letter to Tom and an offprint of the published version of ‘On Misunderstanding Science’ and returned home to find your letter. I don’t know what moved me to write just when I did. The offprints have been here for a month or more.
Please carry to Tom our warmest feelings, regards and wishes.
Guy
Fifteen
Foulkstown Ballinure Thurles Co. Tipperary Eire tel/fax 353 52 31604
23 June 96
Dear Jehane
In phoning I feared the news that I got. But that has not made it one bit less devastating. I only met Tom I think three times. Though we went to the same school, Solebury, we missed one another by two years. So I can’t say that it is a close personal friend I have lost. Our contact was in letters, starting with the gracious and generous letter he wrote in response to a piece ‘On Misunderstanding Science’ that I had sent him. That was the kind of letter that anyone would be forever grateful for. It gave me the sense that I had reached out and touched and even grasped the thought of another, another whom I admired and whose thought I found important.
For many of us Tom in his Structure had opened a door wide and let in fresh air and concrete examples thought through concretely with a real sense of history to displace the stale wheezings of the traditional discussions of the philosophy of science. Those arguments turned always in the same circles. Naturally, that stale air has somehow seeped back in. As Wittgenstein has said, the ‘sickness of a time’ is not to be cured by the medicine invented by one man. But his work has been a start, and I like to think that I am trying to continue his style of replacing the choreographing of abstractions by concrete thought. Maybe that is why I shall miss him so much - as a fellow worker. We needed him. The times needed him.
I’d like to give thanks for him. But not being a believer, I have nowhere to send them. Can I send them to you?
Thanks
Guy
23 June 96
Dear Jehane
In phoning I feared the news that I got. But that has not made it one bit less devastating. I only met Tom I think three times. Though we went to the same school, Solebury, we missed one another by two years. So I can’t say that it is a close personal friend I have lost. Our contact was in letters, starting with the gracious and generous letter he wrote in response to a piece ‘On Misunderstanding Science’ that I had sent him. That was the kind of letter that anyone would be forever grateful for. It gave me the sense that I had reached out and touched and even grasped the thought of another, another whom I admired and whose thought I found important.
For many of us Tom in his Structure had opened a door wide and let in fresh air and concrete examples thought through concretely with a real sense of history to displace the stale wheezings of the traditional discussions of the philosophy of science. Those arguments turned always in the same circles. Naturally, that stale air has somehow seeped back in. As Wittgenstein has said, the ‘sickness of a time’ is not to be cured by the medicine invented by one man. But his work has been a start, and I like to think that I am trying to continue his style of replacing the choreographing of abstractions by concrete thought. Maybe that is why I shall miss him so much - as a fellow worker. We needed him. The times needed him.
I’d like to give thanks for him. But not being a believer, I have nowhere to send them. Can I send them to you?
Thanks
Guy
Monday, December 3, 2007
Reconstructing Science
Reconstructing Science
In a powerful and influential piece in The Monthly Review for March 1997 ('Against the Social De(con)struction of Science') Meera Nanda raises some tough, deep and important questions about 'the unity (i.e. the universality) of truth, reason, reality and science.' That rather impressive list of questions has occupied philosophers for some centuries and is obviously not going to be unraveled and made plain by the work of a day. Still, they are questions that are important from a Marxist perspective because of the ideological role that has been given to science in the modern era in supporting the world-view of that social system based on market relations that was growing up in Europe in step with the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the best we can aim at here is to try to disentangle the ideological use of that composite entity 'science' in founding the bourgeois world-view - from the actual human practices and activities which constitute the particular sciences.
The thrust of Nanda's argument is against what is called the 'social deconstruction of science' which gives us a cultural relativism that awards equal status to the knowledge systems of each culture. All that can be required of them, we are told by the deconstructionists is that they serve the needs of that culture and its way of life. Any claim of superiority for that system of scientific knowledge that grew up in Europe in the seventeenth century with the Scientific Revolution, with Galileo and Newton, is from this perspective branded as 'Western cultural imperialism'. Nanda's complaint is that this perspective sells the pass to the religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives in those countries in which the elites are forced to cling to non-capitalist forms of domination and oppression. She sees this perspective as helping to maintain oppressions of caste and gender because it neutralizes and subverts the power of a crucial weapon in the hands of progressive forces trying to overcome those oppressions by replacing the beliefs and the mind-set and undermining the myths that support those oppressive practices.
Nanda sees as a unifying, internationalizing and universalizing force, the practices and beliefs and canons of rationality and evidence of that science which evolved out of the Scientific Revolution. It is a force tending to undermine those separate, and in this case, oppressive cultural practices and tending to bring all of humanity into a single community of beliefs and practices.
The same, we need to remind ourselves, can be said of capitalism (as was also said of Christianity in the previous era). And as Marxists we may suspect that it is not a historical accident that the Scientific Revolution and the social revolution that replaced feudal relations with those based on the rationality of the market both of them occurred in the same era and in the same place. And we may suspect also that it may not be an accident that they both share in that internationalizing and universalizing character that recognizes neither status nor boundaries. However exploring those interesting questions fully is going to have to wait for another day.
What we have to look at now is the view of 'the unity (i.e. universality) of truth, reality, reason and science' that Nanda counterposes to the fragmented truth and reason that the social deconstructionists seem to be offering us. One can reject the idea of 'separate but equal' sciences, whether Vedic mathematics or Creationist biology, or whatever At the same time one can well think that the deconstructionists have badly misunderstood and misapplied T.S. Kuhn's notion of the 'incommensurability of paradigms' in coming to their conclusion that all paradigms are equally good. Yet at the same time we can find deeply problematic Galileo's image of 'The Book of Nature' in which the sciences are already ‘written in mathematical symbols’. Equally problematic is the picture of scientific progress as the approach to some ultimate and final truth. That view of a truth standing above and outside of all of humanity, human interests, human practices and human languages has a pretty clearly theological character that ought to ring some alarm bells amongst Marxists.
It is not that we have to find some via media between the 'realist' and the 'anti-realist'. We have to see that both positions are incoherent and unintelligible. To do that, I think we have to return to Marx himself.
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it in circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’
The Eighteenth Brumaire
That observation of Marx's gives us the starting point of the kind of dialectical understanding that is needed to escape the blind alleys, false projects and and incoherent notions that we have been led into by the one-sided and foundation-seeking conceptions of explanation and understanding that have dominated the modern era. The conception that truth and reality come from one side only and must be waiting there in all their fullness simply to be perceived by humans, by contrast to the dialectical, gives us those images of an absolute and ultimate reality which have definite theological overtones. In this picture, humanity can only stand passive in the face of a fully articulated reality, the only function left to humans being to open their eyes, to unstop their ears and to organize their thoughts so that they can arrive at conceptions that correspond to this ‘one true reality’.
It is this quasi-theological conception that the deconstructionists have tried to deconstruct, with the results that Meera Nanda complains of that they seem to have ended by giving equal status to a whole range of systems of knowledge or science that have been developed in different cultures or groups around the world, leaving us no way to choose among them.
All that the deconstructionists seem to require of these systems of knowledge is that they be grounded in and related to the way of life and needs of the culture and its people. This, she complains dismantles science as one great weapon in opposing the oppressions of gender and caste that deface many cultures. A prime example of such an oppression would be the repellent practice of female circumcision and the conception of property in the female and especially her womb that underlies it. In a manner parallel to the cultural relativism that the deconstructionists want to impose on the sciences, some people tell us we are meant to tolerate that appalling practice because it is part of the 'value system' of some culture, and that we are being culturally imperialist and imposing our own values when we condemn it.
What is common to these two forms of cultural relativism is the conception that each culture and way of life is completely enclosed and self-sufficient. If they were really so isolated and faced no form of external criticism or constraint, those cultures and ways of life would have no development and no history. They would be static and eternal.
But of course every culture, even those disappearing few which are sufficiently isolated not to face irruptions from other cultures such as our own, nevertheless faces a material world, a world that may be partly of its own making, but never entirely. Paradoxically, it is those cultures whose world is least of their own making, namely, nomadic ways of life, which leave the terrain much as they found it, that are perhaps the most conservative and resistant to change and development. This is only partly because of their nomadic way of life discourages accumulation, which is the great engine of change and development that fires the world of capital. Another contributor to that conservatism is the constant movement and occasional dispersal of those peoples which requires great stability of institutions, practices, rituals and shibboleths if the cultures are to maintain their identity and not face annihilation.
We can say, echoing Marx, that each culture produces its own world, but not from materials of its own making. Each generation receives from the previous one a world that has been transformed to some degree: fields that have been cleared, bridges that have been built, houses, tools and machinery and the skills and knowledge to use them. Each generation will also have received practices, institutions, traditions and attitudes and a whole language with which to think about, and negotiate a way through that world they have inherited. That world may be a human creation, but it is not a free creation as the deconstructionist might have us think. Its material constructions are made in a struggle with the materials that were identified and recognized by the previous generations through their own struggles to live and prosper, and its intellectual constructions are subject to the material criticism of practice, the criticism of the failure or success that meets its trials and attempts.
But that material and practical criticism of the way of life and the equipment, material and intellectual that a people has forged in its struggle to live in the world and carry out its projects, is not a criticism that comes from an abstracted and idealized 'ultimate reality', a single truth that stands outside and above its everyday working life. We never meet anything like that in our daily living and working, and no such abstraction could be the source of the admittedly universalizing force of that system of scientific rationality that developed in step with the development of the equally universalizing and dynamic system of market rationality that is spreading itself around the world.
That market rationality has also been represented as the one true and natural rationality for human society, a rationality that is rooted in that most mystified of notions, the notion of 'human nature'. Capital's ideologues have constantly appealed to 'human nature' in grounding and justifying the system and rationality of the market, and it is important for Marxists to be alive to the explanatory emptiness and nullity of that notion. It is simply a blank check on which any figures can be written without anyone being able to tell whether there are funds there to meet it .
It is neither Marxist nor helpful to picture scientific progress in the way Meera Nanda wants to, as 'increase in truthfulness', that is, as an approach to to some (presumably unattainable) ideal, an 'ultimate truth'. I have criticized this 'approach' model of progress elsewhere (also in Philosophy and Mystification - ch.11, 'On Misunderstanding Science'). Here I will say only that it is both undialectical and un-Marxist, and that we can make sense neither of the ideal nor of the notion of approaching it. (It has its political counterpart in the utopian socialisms that were roundly and rightly criticized by Marx and Engels.) The dialectical perspective, by contrast, sees progress as an improvement over some definite and concrete previous condition, not as an 'approach' to something indefinable and unattainable.
My progress in drawing or piano playing is hardly an approach to some ideal but simply an improvement over my previous playing or drawing. I can now negotiate passages or capture things fluidly that I could not previously. A dialectical account is a concrete one that is rooted here in this world and has no need of indefinable and unattainable ideals that lie in a Platonic heaven somewhere beyond it.
None of this should be taken as going against Meera Nanda's objections to the deconstructionist setting of all knowledge systems as equally valid and of equal value. That deconstructionist view is not so much a defense against cultural imperialism as a prescription for it, as we, from on high as it were, allow those other cultures to hang onto their particular belief systems that will never compete with our own scientific and technological power. They will be allowed to remain as quaint customs and beliefs for the amusement of intellectual tourists from the developed world.
The deconstructionist account is in any case mere attitudinizing, even though it may play into the hands of fundamentalist ideologues. Of what effect is it, really, to be told that we must treat all systems of knowledge as equal? Will this really stop the march of 'Western science', its penetration and displacement of local systems? That injunction will have no more effect than Hitler had in trying to displace and downgrade Einstein's relativity theory by calling it 'Jewish science'. He may have had a brief influence on some German scientists and held up for a time the work toward an atomic bomb, but not for long. In the same way the religious fundamentalists may have some temporary success in resisting the advances of capitalism and its 'universal' rationality of the market, but as we have seen in recent history, this is driving them to more and more extreme and destructive measures. Nowhere is this more evident than in Algeria, where the fundamentalists, with government complicity, have taken to slaughtering hoards of innocent women and children in aid of reestablishing the ‘purity’ of their way of life and faith. One wonders about the 'purity' and the 'faith' that can allow themselves to be restored in that way.
There is still an essential question to be dealt with: if we reject as unintelligible that picture of scientific progress as an approach to some grand, single, universal truth standing outside of, and confronting humanity and all its peoples equally, how are we to understand and account for the great universalizing force of science? That force, we are confident, has the potential to displace and overwhelm other competing belief systems. And it is no doubt a half-conscious recognition of this that has steeled the fundamentalists to take outrageous defensive measures. They are threatened by the universalizing force not only of science, but of capital and its rationality of the market. Embattled, they are turning up the volume on the oppression of women and tightening control on whole populations by increasingly brutal methods. We are seeing the reverse of that secularizing process which took place in Europe in the transition from the feudal to a market society.
My contention is that the notion of an 'external reality' goes no way toward explaining the notion of scientific progress nor can it help us to understand the universalizing force of the sciences. The phrase itself sets us onto a path of mystification. 'External to what?' we need to ask. External to me as a historical individual? Or external to humanity as such, humanity considered abstractly and ahistorically? This latter sense, the one which is needed for its would-be role in explaining the universalizing force of the sciences, that sense leads us straight away from history, the dialectic and Marx and into quasi-theological mystification. What we need is an understanding which appeals to concrete historical forces rather than one that sets before us mystical entities of which we can have no direct knowledge.
I think that the source of the universalizing force of science and of capital is much the same, and that to see this we have to start by looking at the difference between those social systems, institutions and practices, and systems of belief which have a strong inner dynamic for change and development, and those which are inherently defensive and conservative. Add to that self-critical and developmental dynamic of science, the orientation toward manipulation and control of the material world that issues in ever more powerful practices and products, and the sources of its appeal and its power are not hard to understand. Because that universalizing force of the sciences can be understood materially and concretely in a way that is independent of the metaphysical appeal to an 'external reality', we need have no worry that it will be in any way disabled or diminished by the deconstruction of that metaphysical story.
What I am saying in all this is that we need to make a concrete social and historical analysis of the working of science and to understand its interaction with other cultures and knowledge systems in a way that is parallel to the way that we understand the globalizing power of capital and its power to swamp other cultures - for example by turning hunting or agricultural peoples into pitifully paid wage-workers producing its jeans and trainers. As Marxists we would never accept the 'human nature' accounts of that global force of capital. As Marxists we should not accept appeals to the metaphysical abstractions of 'ultimate reality' or 'absolute truth' to explain the universalizing force of science any more than we should accept tales in terms of ‘human nature’ as explanations of the globalizing force of capital. Those notions are neither explanatory nor even coherent. Appealing to them also involves turning one's back on dialectical analysis and historical explanation, turning from the concrete to the abstract, from real to ghostly explanation.
There are many deep issues I have not touched on about our relation to other cultures and what respect for them might consist in. What it would not consist in would be encouraging the people of another culture to hold onto beliefs that are false and potentially stunting or damaging. It would not consist in condoning or encouraging practices that are oppressive and degrading to a section of their people.
But before setting out to remove the mote from our brother's eye, we had better first try to cast the beam out of our own, since no serious person could pretend that the rule of capital and of science has eliminated oppression and exploitation from the world in which they reign, and has brought 'liberty and justice for all'. The slogan 'Knowledge will make you free' which the Enlightenment emblazoned over our capitalist social order has about the same force as the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' that was set over the gate of the Nazi camps.
Guy Robinson
In a powerful and influential piece in The Monthly Review for March 1997 ('Against the Social De(con)struction of Science') Meera Nanda raises some tough, deep and important questions about 'the unity (i.e. the universality) of truth, reason, reality and science.' That rather impressive list of questions has occupied philosophers for some centuries and is obviously not going to be unraveled and made plain by the work of a day. Still, they are questions that are important from a Marxist perspective because of the ideological role that has been given to science in the modern era in supporting the world-view of that social system based on market relations that was growing up in Europe in step with the Scientific Revolution. Perhaps the best we can aim at here is to try to disentangle the ideological use of that composite entity 'science' in founding the bourgeois world-view - from the actual human practices and activities which constitute the particular sciences.
The thrust of Nanda's argument is against what is called the 'social deconstruction of science' which gives us a cultural relativism that awards equal status to the knowledge systems of each culture. All that can be required of them, we are told by the deconstructionists is that they serve the needs of that culture and its way of life. Any claim of superiority for that system of scientific knowledge that grew up in Europe in the seventeenth century with the Scientific Revolution, with Galileo and Newton, is from this perspective branded as 'Western cultural imperialism'. Nanda's complaint is that this perspective sells the pass to the religious fundamentalists and cultural conservatives in those countries in which the elites are forced to cling to non-capitalist forms of domination and oppression. She sees this perspective as helping to maintain oppressions of caste and gender because it neutralizes and subverts the power of a crucial weapon in the hands of progressive forces trying to overcome those oppressions by replacing the beliefs and the mind-set and undermining the myths that support those oppressive practices.
Nanda sees as a unifying, internationalizing and universalizing force, the practices and beliefs and canons of rationality and evidence of that science which evolved out of the Scientific Revolution. It is a force tending to undermine those separate, and in this case, oppressive cultural practices and tending to bring all of humanity into a single community of beliefs and practices.
The same, we need to remind ourselves, can be said of capitalism (as was also said of Christianity in the previous era). And as Marxists we may suspect that it is not a historical accident that the Scientific Revolution and the social revolution that replaced feudal relations with those based on the rationality of the market both of them occurred in the same era and in the same place. And we may suspect also that it may not be an accident that they both share in that internationalizing and universalizing character that recognizes neither status nor boundaries. However exploring those interesting questions fully is going to have to wait for another day.
What we have to look at now is the view of 'the unity (i.e. universality) of truth, reality, reason and science' that Nanda counterposes to the fragmented truth and reason that the social deconstructionists seem to be offering us. One can reject the idea of 'separate but equal' sciences, whether Vedic mathematics or Creationist biology, or whatever At the same time one can well think that the deconstructionists have badly misunderstood and misapplied T.S. Kuhn's notion of the 'incommensurability of paradigms' in coming to their conclusion that all paradigms are equally good. Yet at the same time we can find deeply problematic Galileo's image of 'The Book of Nature' in which the sciences are already ‘written in mathematical symbols’. Equally problematic is the picture of scientific progress as the approach to some ultimate and final truth. That view of a truth standing above and outside of all of humanity, human interests, human practices and human languages has a pretty clearly theological character that ought to ring some alarm bells amongst Marxists.
It is not that we have to find some via media between the 'realist' and the 'anti-realist'. We have to see that both positions are incoherent and unintelligible. To do that, I think we have to return to Marx himself.
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it in circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.’
The Eighteenth Brumaire
That observation of Marx's gives us the starting point of the kind of dialectical understanding that is needed to escape the blind alleys, false projects and and incoherent notions that we have been led into by the one-sided and foundation-seeking conceptions of explanation and understanding that have dominated the modern era. The conception that truth and reality come from one side only and must be waiting there in all their fullness simply to be perceived by humans, by contrast to the dialectical, gives us those images of an absolute and ultimate reality which have definite theological overtones. In this picture, humanity can only stand passive in the face of a fully articulated reality, the only function left to humans being to open their eyes, to unstop their ears and to organize their thoughts so that they can arrive at conceptions that correspond to this ‘one true reality’.
It is this quasi-theological conception that the deconstructionists have tried to deconstruct, with the results that Meera Nanda complains of that they seem to have ended by giving equal status to a whole range of systems of knowledge or science that have been developed in different cultures or groups around the world, leaving us no way to choose among them.
All that the deconstructionists seem to require of these systems of knowledge is that they be grounded in and related to the way of life and needs of the culture and its people. This, she complains dismantles science as one great weapon in opposing the oppressions of gender and caste that deface many cultures. A prime example of such an oppression would be the repellent practice of female circumcision and the conception of property in the female and especially her womb that underlies it. In a manner parallel to the cultural relativism that the deconstructionists want to impose on the sciences, some people tell us we are meant to tolerate that appalling practice because it is part of the 'value system' of some culture, and that we are being culturally imperialist and imposing our own values when we condemn it.
What is common to these two forms of cultural relativism is the conception that each culture and way of life is completely enclosed and self-sufficient. If they were really so isolated and faced no form of external criticism or constraint, those cultures and ways of life would have no development and no history. They would be static and eternal.
But of course every culture, even those disappearing few which are sufficiently isolated not to face irruptions from other cultures such as our own, nevertheless faces a material world, a world that may be partly of its own making, but never entirely. Paradoxically, it is those cultures whose world is least of their own making, namely, nomadic ways of life, which leave the terrain much as they found it, that are perhaps the most conservative and resistant to change and development. This is only partly because of their nomadic way of life discourages accumulation, which is the great engine of change and development that fires the world of capital. Another contributor to that conservatism is the constant movement and occasional dispersal of those peoples which requires great stability of institutions, practices, rituals and shibboleths if the cultures are to maintain their identity and not face annihilation.
We can say, echoing Marx, that each culture produces its own world, but not from materials of its own making. Each generation receives from the previous one a world that has been transformed to some degree: fields that have been cleared, bridges that have been built, houses, tools and machinery and the skills and knowledge to use them. Each generation will also have received practices, institutions, traditions and attitudes and a whole language with which to think about, and negotiate a way through that world they have inherited. That world may be a human creation, but it is not a free creation as the deconstructionist might have us think. Its material constructions are made in a struggle with the materials that were identified and recognized by the previous generations through their own struggles to live and prosper, and its intellectual constructions are subject to the material criticism of practice, the criticism of the failure or success that meets its trials and attempts.
But that material and practical criticism of the way of life and the equipment, material and intellectual that a people has forged in its struggle to live in the world and carry out its projects, is not a criticism that comes from an abstracted and idealized 'ultimate reality', a single truth that stands outside and above its everyday working life. We never meet anything like that in our daily living and working, and no such abstraction could be the source of the admittedly universalizing force of that system of scientific rationality that developed in step with the development of the equally universalizing and dynamic system of market rationality that is spreading itself around the world.
That market rationality has also been represented as the one true and natural rationality for human society, a rationality that is rooted in that most mystified of notions, the notion of 'human nature'. Capital's ideologues have constantly appealed to 'human nature' in grounding and justifying the system and rationality of the market, and it is important for Marxists to be alive to the explanatory emptiness and nullity of that notion. It is simply a blank check on which any figures can be written without anyone being able to tell whether there are funds there to meet it .
It is neither Marxist nor helpful to picture scientific progress in the way Meera Nanda wants to, as 'increase in truthfulness', that is, as an approach to to some (presumably unattainable) ideal, an 'ultimate truth'. I have criticized this 'approach' model of progress elsewhere (also in Philosophy and Mystification - ch.11, 'On Misunderstanding Science'). Here I will say only that it is both undialectical and un-Marxist, and that we can make sense neither of the ideal nor of the notion of approaching it. (It has its political counterpart in the utopian socialisms that were roundly and rightly criticized by Marx and Engels.) The dialectical perspective, by contrast, sees progress as an improvement over some definite and concrete previous condition, not as an 'approach' to something indefinable and unattainable.
My progress in drawing or piano playing is hardly an approach to some ideal but simply an improvement over my previous playing or drawing. I can now negotiate passages or capture things fluidly that I could not previously. A dialectical account is a concrete one that is rooted here in this world and has no need of indefinable and unattainable ideals that lie in a Platonic heaven somewhere beyond it.
None of this should be taken as going against Meera Nanda's objections to the deconstructionist setting of all knowledge systems as equally valid and of equal value. That deconstructionist view is not so much a defense against cultural imperialism as a prescription for it, as we, from on high as it were, allow those other cultures to hang onto their particular belief systems that will never compete with our own scientific and technological power. They will be allowed to remain as quaint customs and beliefs for the amusement of intellectual tourists from the developed world.
The deconstructionist account is in any case mere attitudinizing, even though it may play into the hands of fundamentalist ideologues. Of what effect is it, really, to be told that we must treat all systems of knowledge as equal? Will this really stop the march of 'Western science', its penetration and displacement of local systems? That injunction will have no more effect than Hitler had in trying to displace and downgrade Einstein's relativity theory by calling it 'Jewish science'. He may have had a brief influence on some German scientists and held up for a time the work toward an atomic bomb, but not for long. In the same way the religious fundamentalists may have some temporary success in resisting the advances of capitalism and its 'universal' rationality of the market, but as we have seen in recent history, this is driving them to more and more extreme and destructive measures. Nowhere is this more evident than in Algeria, where the fundamentalists, with government complicity, have taken to slaughtering hoards of innocent women and children in aid of reestablishing the ‘purity’ of their way of life and faith. One wonders about the 'purity' and the 'faith' that can allow themselves to be restored in that way.
There is still an essential question to be dealt with: if we reject as unintelligible that picture of scientific progress as an approach to some grand, single, universal truth standing outside of, and confronting humanity and all its peoples equally, how are we to understand and account for the great universalizing force of science? That force, we are confident, has the potential to displace and overwhelm other competing belief systems. And it is no doubt a half-conscious recognition of this that has steeled the fundamentalists to take outrageous defensive measures. They are threatened by the universalizing force not only of science, but of capital and its rationality of the market. Embattled, they are turning up the volume on the oppression of women and tightening control on whole populations by increasingly brutal methods. We are seeing the reverse of that secularizing process which took place in Europe in the transition from the feudal to a market society.
My contention is that the notion of an 'external reality' goes no way toward explaining the notion of scientific progress nor can it help us to understand the universalizing force of the sciences. The phrase itself sets us onto a path of mystification. 'External to what?' we need to ask. External to me as a historical individual? Or external to humanity as such, humanity considered abstractly and ahistorically? This latter sense, the one which is needed for its would-be role in explaining the universalizing force of the sciences, that sense leads us straight away from history, the dialectic and Marx and into quasi-theological mystification. What we need is an understanding which appeals to concrete historical forces rather than one that sets before us mystical entities of which we can have no direct knowledge.
I think that the source of the universalizing force of science and of capital is much the same, and that to see this we have to start by looking at the difference between those social systems, institutions and practices, and systems of belief which have a strong inner dynamic for change and development, and those which are inherently defensive and conservative. Add to that self-critical and developmental dynamic of science, the orientation toward manipulation and control of the material world that issues in ever more powerful practices and products, and the sources of its appeal and its power are not hard to understand. Because that universalizing force of the sciences can be understood materially and concretely in a way that is independent of the metaphysical appeal to an 'external reality', we need have no worry that it will be in any way disabled or diminished by the deconstruction of that metaphysical story.
What I am saying in all this is that we need to make a concrete social and historical analysis of the working of science and to understand its interaction with other cultures and knowledge systems in a way that is parallel to the way that we understand the globalizing power of capital and its power to swamp other cultures - for example by turning hunting or agricultural peoples into pitifully paid wage-workers producing its jeans and trainers. As Marxists we would never accept the 'human nature' accounts of that global force of capital. As Marxists we should not accept appeals to the metaphysical abstractions of 'ultimate reality' or 'absolute truth' to explain the universalizing force of science any more than we should accept tales in terms of ‘human nature’ as explanations of the globalizing force of capital. Those notions are neither explanatory nor even coherent. Appealing to them also involves turning one's back on dialectical analysis and historical explanation, turning from the concrete to the abstract, from real to ghostly explanation.
There are many deep issues I have not touched on about our relation to other cultures and what respect for them might consist in. What it would not consist in would be encouraging the people of another culture to hold onto beliefs that are false and potentially stunting or damaging. It would not consist in condoning or encouraging practices that are oppressive and degrading to a section of their people.
But before setting out to remove the mote from our brother's eye, we had better first try to cast the beam out of our own, since no serious person could pretend that the rule of capital and of science has eliminated oppression and exploitation from the world in which they reign, and has brought 'liberty and justice for all'. The slogan 'Knowledge will make you free' which the Enlightenment emblazoned over our capitalist social order has about the same force as the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' that was set over the gate of the Nazi camps.
Guy Robinson
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
