Newton's Corollary VI, however, is not in the Principia for mere ornament. Newton needs it to establish that to a first approximation, the system of a planet and its satellites can be treated as an isolated gravitating system if one ignores the shared orbital motion around the sun. Thus we have a case--treating the sun's gravitational field in the region of the system in question as essentially homogeneous--of what Einstein was to call the "principle of equivalence." Indeed, Newton's sixth Corollary (which deals with a homogeneous field of acceleration), and Huygens's discussion of centrifugal force (which deals with an inhomogeneous one), together adumbrate the principle, exploited so fruitfully by Einstein, that the dynamical states and behavior of bodies in no way distinguish between, on the one hand, a certain kinematical state, and on the other, a second kinematical state implying the same distances and rates of' change of distance, together with a suitable applied field of force. It is a little surprising that Mach, with his relativistic view of motion and his interest in seventeenth-century mechanics did not at all notice these things.--Howard Stein "Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977): 20.
Last week, after my digression on Harman's rediscovery of Adam Smith, I mentioned in a correspondence with Nathan Ballantyne, that Howard Stein also had documented a case in which a philosophical move/insight/distinction had been lost (and then recovered). And after stating this confidently, I thought it prudent to re-read the Stein piece I had in mind (and only belatedly realizing I had blogged about this material before--today's post is thus a retracing of steps). Before I get to the Stein piece a few words of introduction.
Let's stipulate that due to linguistic or geographic isolation or the (deliberate and accidental) destruction of sources sometimes philosophical moves or distinctions are not available at a later date. These may well be cases of linguistic injustice (recall), but do no present further philosophical challenges.
Then there are cases -- now known as Kuhn-losses -- in the sciences, where insights in a discarded paradigm are not ready-at-hand in a new ruling, scientific paradigm. I use 'ready-at-hand' in order to make clear that not all such cases of Kuhn-loss have to involve strict incommensurability. The insight from the discarded paradigm may just be thought unintuitive or unlikely-to-work in a new paradigm. (This is especially likely to occur in complex policy contexts.) In so far as paradigms structure the availability of intellectual choices (we might call them theoretical affordances), Kuhn-losses are just a natural effect of the disciplining of an intellectual community by text-books and a shared sense of salient experiences (statistical regularities, decisive experiments, etc.). I say 'natural' because time and cognitive attention are scarce goods, and so at the margin there will be a trade-off between the cost of memory and the costs of advancing the paradigm (etc.). The previous sentence may seem abstract, but some such reasoning was (and is) often used to remove the history of the discipline from the graduate curriculum in a field of expertise/science. There is more to be said about such matters, but hopefully that's sufficient for present purposes.
Now, since philosophy does not have paradigms in the scientific sense, and since graduate education in philosophy is not standardized in the way the sciences and the discipline's history is preserved within the graduate curriculum, the existence of the philosophical analogue to Kuhn-loss in philosophy is prima facie a puzzle. Because Kuhn-loss is a term within the philosophy of science about science, and I both deny that philosophy is a science and -- more polemically -- think it a bad idea to think about philosophy in terms familiar from the philosophy of (Kuhnian) science (because unhealthy to the flourishing of philosophy), I use (after nudging from Ballantyne) 'throwing out the baby in the bathwater' when discussing prima facie puzzling cases of the loss of philosophical insight/moves, and distinctions.
And as I noted last week, Harman felt the force of the puzzle. As it turns out, in my reconstruction of the case, it was Sidgwick's strategy, to turn philosophy into a text-book-driven field with the aim of both (i) demarcating normative philosophy from empirical psychology and (ii) to treat ethics as aiming at (and now I use the felicitous phrase of Aaron Garrett) "comprehensive and coherent normative moral theories" that basically caused Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be dropped from quasi-standard reading lists in philosophy. And this entailed that some relatively cutting edge responses to objections to impartial spectator theories were not ready at hand when the topic was revived. This opened the door to what we may (in honor of Liam Kofi Bright) call historical arbitrage.
I think such arbitrage is needed when whole eras of philosophy are treated with disdain in subsequent ages. It's pretty clear that the early moderns actively promoted disdain toward and a lack of acquaintance with scholastic philosophy. And this meant that lots of distinctions and concepts developed by the scholastics were removed from philosophical vocabulary or emptied from a lot of previous significance. And without wishing to raise a prejudice against the practice, we can see that post-Kantian university philosophy in Germany and later in Anglophone world re-introduces a lot of these distinctions and terms back into mainstream philosophy. (To what degree these are really the same concepts given shifting background metaphysics I leave aside.)
Now, re-reading Stein (one of my doctoral supervisors) was instructive. First, I was reminded that my own rejection of the ban on using anachronistic terms -- a ban common among certain historians of philosophy (inspired by a species of contextualism)--, is anticipated by Stein (whose paper I read in graduate school). His version of the argument is instructive:
For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. (p. 14)
Stein is explicit that Mach is an example of such shallow empiricism. (p. 14; recall also.) But perhaps forms of operationalism may also be classified as such. Be that as it may, Stein is right that one can still be anachronistic in interpreting the past even if one only uses actor's categories. For, one may well add apply these categories in a way that is a-historical and at odds with the historical sources. I once claimed (rather too polemically in a NDPR review) that this had happened among scholars who polemically rejected looking at the past through the prism of contemporary issues, but who had tacitly projected a version of the fact-value distinction (in fact, I now understand it was Sidwick's) onto the past that was anachronistic. Moreover, as Daniel Schneider taught me, by using actor's categories, which may well be contested concepts, one is likely to take sides (without always realizing it) in past debates. So, Stein seems to me right that the deployment of anachronism can be illuminating of the historical actors' actual positions (etc.). Stein himself does this throughout the article.
Okay, now let's turn to the baby with the bath-water. First, in the major key (as it were), Stein himself is an anti-Kuhnian. He concludes his essay with the the claim that "I see, from the seventeenth century up to today a profound community of concerns and a progressive development that has involved both cumulative growth and deepening structural understanding." (27) Stein does not deny a 'conceptual revolution' by Einstein (building on Riemann).
Second, in the minor key (as it were), but my present interest, Stein recognizes that within this profound community of concerns, historical cul-de-sacs and forgetting are possible. Mach really misses something that was available to Newton and Huygens. And while Stein does not harp on this, plenty of folk influenced by Mach (even after the Einsteinian revolution) missed the point when describing seventeenth century relativity and its development. That the later folk do not see as clearly is especially striking because not only is the seventeenth century mathematical vocabulary is relatively impoverished relative to the later ones, but also there is intellectual continuity from late seventeenth century thinking through the nineteenth century. No major texts are lost and the philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century about physics and astronomy does not pose major difficulties to the nineteenth century mind.
Now, while Mach's case happens within science (broadly conceived), it also involves what we may call the metaphysical principles of science and so, also part of (natural) philosophy proper. (Mach's own institutional position reflects this in his own shifts from mathematics and physics to becoming one of the first professors in the history and philosophy of science.) I put it like that because full awareness of the implications of the "principle of equivalence" seems to have been missed. Now I don't think of myself as an expert on 19th century physics, so take this with a grain of salt. But it's pretty difficult to test empirically the principle of equivalence and so was, perhaps, not of active concern to practicing physicists and natural philosophers. In addition, and this seems to me crucial to Stein's argument, later reflection on relativity was shaped primarily by Leibniz's views (who was treated as the standard bearer for relativistic thinking).
I think this happened in part because of the effect of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence on philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This displaced interest in Huygens' views (some of which were hardly accessible) and let people to miss that Newton himself had important stuff to say on the topic. While I am pretty convinced that Leibniz-Clarke shaped people's views of Newton's natural philosophy (to this day, alas), I also say this with some nervousness because I don't know if anyone has checked in a systematic way what folk did with or commented on Newton's sixth Corollary. Of course, and this I feel confident in saying, in many places people studied physics through text-books that while Newtonian in some expanded sense did not follow Newton slavishly at all. Even so, because Newton's achievements were culturally so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is really striking that some of his most profound insights were only appreciated in the development of a physical theory that surpassed his.
At this point one may be impatient and suggest that in fact the case at hand while no Kuhn-loss is the effect of paradigmatic thinking in science, which can, in fact, obstruct the insights of (what we may call in homage to Kuhn) the scientific-legislator of the paradigm. And that by creating a division of labor in science (among different fields, but also among theory and experiment), it was left to relatively few to study relativistic theories while Newtonianism ruled. And, in fact, once Maxwell's equations and concerns about the ether opened the door, relativistic principles were explored by (say) Poincare in the late nineteenth century. So the critic may refuse to accept the example as a case about lost philosophical babies.
Fair enough. But, of course, one of the effects of the split between philosophy and science, and the relatively high status of physical science, is the tendency toward paradigmatic thinking in science and philosophy. And one may well conclude, as I do, that in so far as paradigmatic thinking and the prestige of science within philosophy as such shape philosophy we should expect the bathwater, even one nourished with the fruits of science, to carry away important insights. Of course, documenting such cases involves a kind of practical contradiction because in the very act of retrieval the baby is saved.
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