Digressions&Impressions

Newton and Passivity of Matter

In an unpublished manuscript sheet, which was part of Newton’s preparations for the second edition of the Principia, Newton recorded that the most wise order of things could not have arisen “from matter alone and motion or from the nature of things [a materia sola et motu aut a rerum Natura].”102 Newton argued that God regulates the natural world by means of certain “active Principles,” which cause—inter alia—gravitation, fermentation, and cohesion.103 Correspondingly, in an unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, he wrote,

Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its ↓laws of↓ motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in or selves a power of moving our bodies by or thought ↓Life & thinking ↓will↓ are active Principles by wch we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us↓==Newton [CUL Add. Ms. 3970, 619r [drafts prepared for Opticks (1717)].]

The above remarks square nicely with Newton’s denial that motion results from qualities that are inherent to matter itself and with his belief that for their motions bodies require divinely governed secondary causes, which serve as the immaterial sources of activity and motion. Steffen Ducheyne, "Newton on Action at a Distance." Journal of the History of Philosophy 52.4 (2014): 691-692

As I noted yesterday, inspired by, and partially correcting, Howard Stein, according to my interpretation of Newton, as Newton developed the ideas of the Principia in the 1680s, Newton came to the following position: a body has (at least) two dispositions: (i) a “passive” disposition to respond to impressed forces which is codified in the second law of motion; (ii) whereas an “active” disposition to produce gravitational force is treated as a distinct interaction codified in the third law of motion. And the “cause” of the action is “the conspiring nature of both” bodies. For the “conspiring” to occur, the bodies must share a “nature.” (For the full defense of these ideas see here and here.) And I argue that for Newton the disposition to gravitate is a universal, albeit contingent, relational quality of matter.  Despite grounding my views in a textial analysis Treatise of the System of the World (a work that appeared shortly after Newton died), my view has not generated consensus.

Among my critics, Ducheyne is most inclined to draw on archival material. And the passage quoted above is especially important to his (2014) attempt to refute my position. He refers back to it twice more (on pp. 692-693). The reason why it is important to Ducheyne's argument is that it seems to give him the smoking gun he needs. It's one of the few places where Newton explicitly says that matter is passive.

Now, I had already (in 2011) responded to this passage, in a (2009) criticism of Hylarie Kochiras (who had criticized an early version of my argument). (Looking back, I am quite amazed by how polemical we all were!) I wrote (now quoting myself): "Yet, the published version of the Opticks, is agnostic on this matter. In Query 31 he contrasts the “passive principle by which the bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted” with “active principles, such as are the cause of gravity, by which planets and comets keep their motions in their orbits, and bodies acquire great motion in falling; and the cause of fermentation,” and so on. Shortly thereafter, he lists “gravity, and that which causes fermentation, and the cohesion of bodies” among the “active principles” (Newton, 1952, pp. 400–401)." 

My response to Kochiras clearly did not convince Ducheyne (who cites Kochiras' exchange with me, so he is aware of it). So, normally I would now throw up my hands and leave it to others to figure out who gets the better of the burden shifting. But two distinct new, additional arguments occur to me. The first argument would be to concede Ducheyne's (and Kochiras's!) reading of this passage, and fall back on the acknowledgment that Newton changed his mind and that after 1700 he was more inclined to accept the passivity of matter as the draft suggests. This response would be open to me because officially I am primarily committed to attributing to Newton the view sketched above to the mid 1680s (as he was drafting the Principia). In the Principia itself he is explicitly agnostic, after all--and this is agreed by everybody.

This (first) concessive response fits would also allow me to take on board some of Ducheyne's arguments about the theological significance of embracing the passivity of matter; or at least recognizing that Newton actively distanced himself from being taken to embrace active matter after the initial reception of the Principia. These theological issues and the question of the nature of mature are related to the challenge to Newton being taken as a kind of neo-Epicurean (and Kant and Adam Smith hint) or a(adherent of "blind fate") crypto-Spinozist (as Leibniz suggested at the start of his correspondence with Clarke). I have explored this connection in various places; see here & and forthcoming.

But as Ducheyne correctly notes in his paper, I have been greedy; I have also used other passages from different periods in Newton's life as converging evidence for my  interpretation of his view in the mid 1680s. And so I have kind of suggested that except for when Newton toys with ether theories, my reconstruction of his dispositional account of gravity is Newton's fall-back position. And so now I would have give up on that material.

However, another position, is not to be concessive at all. So, second, I can also simply deny that in the unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, Newton is presenting his own view about the passivity of matter at all. For it seems to me that one can read the italicized passage (the italics are Ducheyne's [here is an image of the manuscript; [here is a transcription] as Newton simply reporting or summarizing the Cartesian position on matter. Before I explain that let me quote a wider version of the passage (with a lot of editorial markings removed--Newton obsessively corrected his own texts): 

Qu. 23. By what means do bodies act on one another at a distance. The ancient Philosophers who held Atoms & Vacuum attributed gravity to Atoms without telling us the means unless perhaps in figures: as by calling God Harmony & representing him & matter by the God Pan & his Pipe, or by calling the Sun the prison of Jupiter because he keeps the Planets in their orbs. Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its laws of motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thought Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.

So, Newton here is taking on the question of action at a distance. And he first describes the innate gravity position of the ancient atomists. He also calls attention to the possibility that they used esoteric and figurative speech to explain the mechanism behind their position. (This sentence inspired one of the most famous papers by McGuire and Rattansi in contemporary Newton scholarship.) He sums up his treatment of the ancients by suggesting they thought God was needed to account for the laws of motion and the existence of matter.

As an aside, something of this view of the Ancients survives in the General Scholium added to the second (1713) edition of the Principia. Against the evidence of the Ancients, who freely speculated about to what degree God/Gods are dispensable to the Epicurean natural philosophy (and who claimed that the Gods were introduced to modify larger population), Newton reads them here as natural philosophical theists of a certain sort.  My own view is that he is doing this in order to try out saying that the a-typical epicureanism people are attributing to him need not be "Atheists" in character. (And he may have even sincerely thought that this was a solid reading of the Epicureans.) That fits a lot of other material in this manuscript (which offers a robust assertion, inter alia, for the reality of final causes in experience).

He then moves on to describing the cartesian position. Now on the reading advanced by Ducheyene (and Kochiras) the description of the cartesian position is a sentence: "The Cartesians make God the author of all motion." This would attribute to the Cartesians, in effect, Malebranche's interpretation of Descartes (or at least his own preferred position) being a kind of occasionalists such that God is the author of all motion. But there is an equally respectable Cartesian interpretation in which occasionalism is not the proper Cartesian position, but rather that  God is responsible (or the author of) the laws of motion, that's the next half of the sentence ("its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion.")

And on the reading advanced by Ducheyne and Kochiras, Newton then moves on to state his own view. But it is equally plausible, and in fact, I think more plausible (yes, really), that here Newton gives a summary of the Cartesian metaphysics of nature: "Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed." So, pace Ducheyne and Kochiras, I think the natural reading here is that what they take to be Newton's position is really just Newton giving a quick and dirty summary of the Cartesian natural philosophy he rejects! 

To be sure, I do not mean to deny that in this manuscript Newton does shift to explaining features of his own position--he regularly invokes the authority of experiments. And where exactly he does that is a matter of judgment. But at the same time he also keeps shifting toward describing alternative views he rejects. 

So, if we read the manuscript in the way proposed by Kochiras and Ducheyne then Newton draws a sharp contrast between entities with minds, who can be active, and passive entities that lack such power. In fact, Kochiras and Ducheyne end up treating Newton by implication as a property dualist (with living things being the only kind of entities that can be substances). 

But Newton himself is much more cautious than that in the manuscript quoted. He makes it clear that all living things are active. And it is, for Newton in this very document, an open question whether (as the Stoics thought) all of nature is alive in that relevant sense: "We find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts ] & see the same power in other living creatures but how this is done & by what laws we do not know. We cannot say that all Nature is not alive. not know her laws or powers any further then we gather them from Phænomena." (Emphasis added.) Nobody has doubted that this is Newton's own position. And this suggests to me that Newton is  much more agnostic about the nature of matter in this document than Kochiras and Ducheyne have allowed. Because Newton allows (as Spinoza did) that there may be as of yet undiscovered principles and laws that can explain the materiality of living things. On my reading, these would also be laws and principles of matter.

What Newton does explicitly deny is that vis inertia can explain the generation of (new) motion: "vis inertiæ they continue in their state of moving or resting & receive motion proportional to the force impressing it & resiste as much as they are resisted, but they cannot move themselves; & without some other principle hen the vis inertiæ there could be no motion in the world." For reasons I do not fully understand Ducheyne thinks this shows that for Newton matter is passive. But that's not right. For even I assert -- and this also follows naturally from the second law of motion -- that vis inertiæ is a passive principle, but does not constitute the whole of Newton's matter theory in the Principia. 

 

 

 

 

How Berkeley Invented the germs of Empiricism by (deliberately) conflating Newton and Locke

98....For my own part, whenever I attempt to frame a simple idea of time, abstracted from the succession of ideas in my mind, which flows uniformly and is participated by all beings, I am lost and embrangled in inextricable difficulties.--Berkeley A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)

Locke [1632–1704] undertook and successfully carried through what Newton had not dared to do, or perhaps would have found impossible. It can be said that he created metaphysics, almost as Newton had created physics.--Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1751) Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab

When Berkeley published the Principles  (1710), Newton had already published the first edition of the Principia, but not yet the General Scholium. So the proper metaphysical interpretation of the Principia was still up in the air. (In addition to the General Scholium, Cotes’s editorial preface to the second edition of Principia was also not published yet.)[1] Newton was keeping his metaphysical views close to his chest. Toland (who in his Letters to Serena combined instrumentalism with Spinozism) and Clarke (who in in his Demonstration defended a species of rationalism) had offered competing visions. In his correspondence with Stillingfleet, Locke had intimated that his views had become akin to  Newton’s (especially on gravity), but as Mary Domski, Lisa Downing, and Howard Stein have taught us, we should be cautious about conflating the view of Locke and Newton (despite their close friendship). 

In sections 110-111, Berkeley is explicit, that in fact that sections 97-8 are targeted against Newton: "111. As for Time, as it is there taken in an absolute or abstracted sense, for the duration or perseverance of the existence of things, I have nothing more to add concerning it after what has been already said on that subject. Sect. 97 and 98. For the rest, this celebrated author holds there is an absolute Space." (In 110 he had claimed the celebrated author is the author of "a certain celebrated Treatise of Mechanics. In the entrance of which justly admired treatise, Time, Space, and Motion are distinguished into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and vulgar; which distinction, as it is at large explained by the author, does suppose these quantities to have an existence without the mind."  A clear reference to scholium of the definitions of Newton's Principia.)

Even so, the quoted passage from section 98 at the top of the post does not describe Newton's position. For, first, there is no evidence that Newton thinks there is a simple idea of duration in the way that Locke does (Essay 2.15.9). It is not obvious that for Newton a finite mind can actually behold infinite duration, which, I have argued, is only introduced for theological reasons in the Principia. It secures for Newton God’s eternal existence in time (even though time is a necessary consequence of God’s existence).

Second, and more important, Berkeley is treating the simple idea of time as an abstraction. This is not an implausible reading of Locke's position (2.15.8). But there is no reason to believe that Newton thinks time-keeping or absolute time involves an abstraction (in either Locke’s or Newton’s sense). For, while Newton does take abstraction seriously in his physics -- he is explicit that “places and motions” are abstractions --, he does not claim this about time.

Third, Newton and Locke have different views of what abstraction is. Locke's account of abstraction, to simplify, relies on the way words can be signs of general ideas "and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence." (3.3.6) By contrast, in the Principia, Newton uses the traditional conception of abstraction by which we abstract from sensible qualities by removing or stripping features in order to focus only on those features of experience that are capable of being treated by quantities (recall my treatment of Buffon).

So, if Berkeley really has Newton in mind he is conflating Newton's position with features of Locke's in an incompetent fashion. It is not impossible, of course, that Berkeley is confused. But, while Berkeley can be sloppy about such matters, I see no reason to believe that he would conflate Locke and Newton as such. Rather, it is more likely that he is treating Newton on duration as an exemplary (and celebrated) instance of the problems that are generated by the doctrine of abstraction which he does explicitly associate with Locke (the metaphysician) in the Introduction, section 11. In fact, it strikes me that there are two main aims in Berkeley’s argument (in section 98): first, to attack the Lockean doctrine of abstraction and, second, to drive a wedge between Newtonian mathematical natural philosophy and the Lockean interpretation of it. On the first aim: this is, in fact, one of the main aims of the Principles as such. So, it is possible that Berkeley here treats a refutation of Lockeanized Newton as a strike against Locke’s metaphysics. 

The second aim may have been inspired by the Toland's rhetorical strategy in the fourth and fifth Letters to Serena. Once the Lockean interpretation has been discredited, Berkeley can offer his own re-interpretation of Newtonian mathematical philosophy along instrumentalist (or pragmatist) lines—that’s ultimately the project of De Motu and by then (1921) it’s clear that Berkeley is disagreeing with Newton’s own metaphysics. (This is pre-figured in the Principles.)

The historiographic significance is this: in the French Enlightenment, coupling Newton and Locke had become trope. (I have quoted d'Alembert above, but one can also cite Voltaire.) I had thought that this systematic coupling originates in Voltaire's teacher, the Dutch Newtonian 's Gravesande. But it is worth noting that Berkeley may have been the first to create a Lockean Newton in order to show that the Lockean metaphysical program leads to absurdity. In so doing he produced an intellectual dynamic that we have come to associate with "Empiricism'' such that Hume and Adam Smith (recall) had to offer their own view on the complex relationship among ordinary experience, abstraction, and scientific practice.*

 

On Meaning More Than Is Intended (on Plantinga, Hazony, and Prophecy)

[T]he principal author of the Bible—the entire Bible—is God himself. Of course each of the books of the Bible has a human author as well; still, the principal author is God. This impels us to treat the whole more like a unified communication than a miscellany of ancient books…. [T]he fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one can’t always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind…. [W]e can’t just assume that what the Lord intends to teach is identical with what the human author had in mind; the latter may not so much as have thought of what is, in fact, the teaching of the passage in question.[6][--Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief]

[In Warranted Christian Belief,] Plantinga thus moves from the identification of Scripture as revelation—that is, as a communication from God—to the view that the entire corpus of biblical works, both Jewish and Christian, are to be viewed as essentially a “unified communication” since they have only one “principal author,” which is God himself. The fact that the different works in the biblical corpus were written over a period of many centuries, often arguing with one another and seeking to advance points of view that are at odds even on central issues, is not something that Plantinga is unaware of.[7] But he deals with this problem by proposing that what the biblical authors—Moses or Jeremiah, say—believed to be God’s word to them is not always “in fact, the teaching of the passage in question.” Indeed, the “meaning of a given passage,” which is “what the Lord intends to teach,” may well be something that Moses or Jeremiah “may not have so much as thought of.” For this reason, we may be seeking in vain for the biblical teaching if we are trying to “determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.”

...

Now, this view—and similar views that one finds among Jewish writers[10]—works systematically to undermine the possibility of what I have been calling the philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. For on the view that I have proposed, what should be of interest to us when we take up the study of the Bible is precisely “what the human author had in mind” (or, if this is deemed impossible, then what the human final editor had in mind) in creating the text that we now have before us. Indeed, the whole aim of my book was to persuade readers that we should be at least as concerned to reconstruct what Isaiah or Jeremiah “had in mind” as we are to reconstruct what Parmenides or Plato “had in mind.” This, I suggest, is because Isaiah and Jeremiah were towering figures in the history of ideas, whose works deserve our respect and consideration. We should wish to recapture the unique ways in which they understood God, man’s nature, and the moral and political realm. We should wish to properly assess the impact and influence of their ideas, and to seek the relevance of their insights to our own lives and world today. And we should desire this not a whit less than in the case of the early Greek philosophers who came centuries after them, upon whom academic scholarship has lavished such a prodigious intellectual effort--Yoram Hazony, Jerusalem Letters: What is Revelation? [Recall also Friday's post.]

I have already noted that Hazony's position is in a certain limited respect not far removed from Spinoza. They both allow that the Hebrew Bible can be taken to express a unified point of view ultimately rooted in the intentions of the "human final editor." For Hazony this editor has allowed an unfolding of different political and moral perspectives in a search for a politics grounded in ethics as well as a shining through of the presence of distinctive (even philosophical) individual voices (e.g., Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) [see also this].+ Leaving aside Hazony's views on the nature of revelation, his insistence that the Hebrew Bible has a unity and integrity of its own puts him on a collision course with Christian (and Islamic) teachings that insist that its (that is, the Hebrew Bible's) meaning/teaching is (re-)shaped by a larger unity of which it is thought to be a part.

At first sight Hazony's interpretive stance on inferring meaning from authorial intent echoes Quentin Skinner's (1969) hermeneutics, although Hazony is more willing than Skinner originally was to extract enduring lessons from the original meaning of the text. But Hazony's position is a bit unstable because he cannot fully object to Plantinga's principle that a Biblical passage's teaching may transcend what the author of the passage had in mind because even the Hebrew Bible is sometimes based on and contains bits of texts whose authors' intentions are almost certainly left opaque (e.g., the Book of Jashar (recall); the Book of the Wars of the Lord, etc.). Even Hazony allows that the meaning and aim of the Hebrew Bible as a whole can transcend at least some of the intentions of some of the authors of some of its texts; according to him the whole is an "artful compendium," which includes diverging, more parochial "viewpoints." (Hazony, p. 41) So his disagreement with Plantinga is not wholly about hermeneutics nor only about the status of a purported distinction between reason and revelation, but also about what counts as the proper unity (for teaching/meaning purposes): the Hebrew Bible as such or the "entire Bible."* (For Plantinga on such unity, see p. 385.) Obviously, there are connections among the disagreements between Plantinga and Hazony because one may be tempted (as Plantinga seems to be) to treat revelation as a source of authority in settling what counts as the proper unity.

While I have considerable affinity with Hazony's enterprise, I have already noted that I am doubtful that, as is, he has the resources to insist that the Hebrew Bible is the sole proper unity to which the texts that compose it belong. Moreover, against a critic, who insists that the whole Bible has a “principal author” who “is God,” it is not sufficient to show that such a critic’s views are not in accord with the manifest (or inferred) teaching of the Hebrew Bible (as Hazony does, for example, with Swinburne’s account of revelation).** For, even if one denies the existence of such a principal author or the identification of the principal author with God, if the Hebrew Bible can be included in (if not superseded by) a larger unity, then Hazony's arguments, even if they exhibit -- as I think they do -- the philosophical fruits of the Hebrew Bible, do not wholly succeed against the critic (yet). 

It is, thus, always possible that a later text can incorporate an earlier text into a larger, shared unity and thereby change the meaning and significance of the earlier text (even if for various purposes we can still try to study, for example, the earlier text on its own terms); such a new unity is not inevitable, of course, and it may be contested. That is to say, I agree with Plantinga (as well as the mathematical economists Khan and Schlee) that a text can say more than its (human) author intended to say; this principle forms the basis for what I call "philosophical prophecy."

 

 

On fetishizing Actors's Categories.

A preface (co-written with Zvi Biener), defending the title 'Newton and Empiricism,' has come under fire from the Otago-school (see this post by Kirsten Walsh). The Otago-school insists that 'empiricism' is anachronistic and that we need to use a distinction between experimental and speculative philosophers (they use the acronym ESD) in order to do justice to even Newton. Here's Walsh:

Over the last four years, we have provided many arguments for the superiority of the ESD over the RED. An important line of argument has been to show that ‘experimental philosophy’ and ‘speculative philosophy’ were the key terms of reference used by the actors themselves, and that they characterised their own work in terms of this division. For example, I have argued here, here, here and here that Newton is best understood as an experimental philosopher.

It's true there are features of Newton's enterprise that fit the 'experimental' paradigm (as understood by early modernists) nicely--the Opticks is characteristic this (as I.B. Cohen recognized a long time ago). The problem is 'Otago' has never come to terms to the fact that Newton's Principia is much better understood in terms of Huygens's Horologium Oscillatorium, which is presupposed in a lot of the technical discussions of the Principia. Huygens' book does not fit the ESD at all. Strikingly in her blog post, Walsh misses this point even though it was signalled in the very first paragraph of our introduction: "Newton...explicitly affiliated himself in the Principia with the mathematical-experimental tradition of Galileo and Huygens." That is to say, the ESD fits the mainstream in the Royal Society (say between 1660-1685) very well, but is un-illuminating in other respects.* Sure, it's legitimate to claim that in some respects Newton is a "development of the experimental philosophy," (emphasis in original) but if you systematically overlook the Horologium, you can't even begin to do justice to Newton's Principia. It's like discussing Virgil in the context of Roman poetry without ever mentioning Homer.

They Never Sleep

Like a great many articles published in our journals, some of these essays adopt a variation of what Jonathan Bennett promoted as "the collegial approach" to the history of philosophy. In this approach we treat the Great Ones as our contemporaries and hold them accountable in the same way as we would our colleagues. The special variation often employed today is to take it as given that the Great Ones can be defended against any alleged confusions, incoherencies, or lapses. As a result, we publish many essays and articles that cleverly defend the Great Ones against problems and objections that not only never entered their heads, but probably could never have entered their heads, given their time and place and the normal constraints operating on any human being trying to do philosophy. In truth, no one can think things through as thoroughly as many of us would like to believe. Sometimes, even a Spinoza or a Leibniz nods. It is an odd thing to do, these daring rescues of the Great Ones. I sometimes wonder whether, as we read and interpret, we ought to recall more frequently the familiar limits of history and human capacity.--Charlie Huenemann [emphases added--ES].

I disagree with my friend Huenemann.

First, a situational claim. Those of us that are trained as analytical philosophers are skilled puzzle solvers and conceptual slicers & dicers.  Our very best are also amazing at thinking many moves and counter-moves deep. But we are not trained as systematic philosophers ([recall my post on Thomas Nagel] although I am open to the idea that this is changing with the rise of analytical metaphysics). In particular, we are not trained to discern systematic trade-offs and the way fundamental constraints interact with each other. So, what may seem to us to require an impossible skill in another, may well just be a limitation that is a consequence of our perspective (which has its own virtues).

Second, it is of great instrumental value to try to figure out what a very good philosopher would say to an objection. When I was starting out in the profession -- and in the thrall of extreme antiquarianism --, I would frown on, even ridicule papers that would pose to, say, Descartes, 'what if he rejects P' (whereby P is anachronistic, etc.).  But the fact is such exercises can be very fruitful: one often learns, thereby, unsuspected features of another philosopher's position that mortal you had overlooked on earlier readings. With luck, one even starts to find evidence that some textual evidence that historical predecessor to P was, in fact, reflected on by (say) Descartes (in correspondence, or in the Passions of the Soul, etc.).*

There is a further way in which such an exercise is very fruitful: one learns to develop a systematic sensitivity. I know this may sound as special pleading on  behalf of the history of philosophy, but I believe one reason to expose advanced students of philosophy (folk like you and me) to the history of philosophy is to help think in critical conversation with systematic thinkers. (Alan Nelson has defended such a view.) Not all historically important philosophers were systematic thinkers. But even some of the most persistent anti-systematic-philosophers [i.e., my own philosophical ancestors] have to become adept at recognising the moves of the enemy.

On the Carnap-Strawson debate and the soul of Analytical Philosophy during the Cold War

If the reader is shocked or offended by the two last-mentioned procedures, I hasten to assure him that they, occur, of course, only in the more barbarous regions, like America, where the sacrilege of tampering with the holy tradition of language is sometimes connived at.--Carnap "P.F. Strawson on Linguistic Naturalism" (937)

The distinction I used above between the way things happen in the world, and our own natures, is here, though vague, important. For it is a part of our nature that, things other than ourselves being as they are, it is natural for us to have the conceptual apparatus that we do have. But human nature is diverse enough to allow of another, though related, use of philosophical imagination. This consists in imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus; Some metaphysics is best, or most charitably, seen as consisting in part in exercises of this sort...Of course, even when it can be so interpreted, it is not presented as a conceptual or structural revision by means of which we might see things differently; it is presented as a picture of thing as they really are, instead of as they delusively seem. This presentation with its contrast between esoteric-reality and daily delusion, involves, and is the consequence of, the unconscious distortion of ordinary concepts, i.e. of the ordinary use of linguistic expressions. So metaphysics though it can sometimes be charitably interpreted in the way I suggest, in fact always involves paradox and perplexities of the kind I first mentioned; and sometimes embodies no rudimentary vision, but merely rudimentary mistakes. Strawson (1963) "Carnap's Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy," (516; [emphases in original--ES])

Branden Fitelson wrote me a lovely, critical letter in response to viewing my lecture, "Anti-Mathematicism and Formal Philosophy" at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy available online. In it he reminded me of an exchange by Strawson and Carnap that he uses in teaching. The papers represent philosophical fireworks of the highest order--they are, as Strawson's title indicates, a debate over the very soul of analytical philosophy. The papers repay repeated re-readings, and both sides make many  insightful observations on the philosophical merits of formal philosophy (a topic I regularly post about, see here and here). In particular, one is reminded -- and this is especially noteworthy in a philosophical age in which the guide to graduate education provided by the PGR does not even consider expertise in philosophy of education as worthy of note -- that one of the central philosophical issues is the nature of philosophical education.*

As a speculative aside, prompted by some remarks by Jason Stanley, the displacement of philosophical education as worthy of any attention was, in part, due to the success of Strawson's and Carnap's students and their intellectual allies in discrediting the non-scientific wing of Pragmatism associated, say, with Dewey. Subsequently, even Plato scholarship was reconstituted as unrelated to philosophical education. (The Meno and Theaetetus are then taught as obviously belonging primarily to the history of epistemology, etc.)

To return to my main point, in his response to Strawson, Carnap construes the debate as one between (linguistic) "naturalists" (that is Strawson, although this is not Strawson's term) and "constructionists" (Carnap). This construction allows Carnap to recycle some of his anti-Quine-ean moves against an opponent that has fewer resources to respond. He then offers effective responses to most of Strawson's charges, showing that they rely on unreliable distinctions/assumptions, misrepresentations of Carnap's program, and, crucially, that even where Strawson's positive program has merit, the two programs can be mutually supportive. Now, due to Strawson's title and the way the dialectic is construed it seems that what is at stake is ultimately the respective roles of natural language (and empirical observations on use), and the role of formal languages (and the merits of explication).+ Because Carnap has the last word in the Schilpp volume, he also gets away ignoring a feature of Strawson's argument (the passage quoted above) that Strawson admittedly qualifies as not being "central," (515), but does characterize as "inportant" and "a wide field open to philosophical imagination." (516)

I have quoted Strawson's defense of the role of "imagining ways in which, without things other than ourselves being different from what they are, we might view them through the medium of a different conceptual apparatus." Now the first thing to note is that this is presented as an extremely modest enterprise. There is no sense that an alternative conception of reality might be a guide to action or generate a vision of reality worth attaining (see philosophical prophecy). Given that Strawson makes disparaging remarks ("grandiose plan of logical atomism") of Carnapian "planners," the conservative implications are deliberate here. Strawson's version of descriptive analysis and descriptive metaphysics, self-consciously leaves things alone (recall yesterday's post). No doubt there will be howls of derision from Oxford -- if they pretended to care about my digressions -- but this is (further) evidence of the ignoble effects of the cold war on philosophy's self-image.

On using Earlymoderntexts.org in scholarship (with notes on translation)

There is much that could be said in criticism of this paper, but the primary reason for rejection is that the whole argument turns upon a misquotation.

The author's main claim is that the two arguments which appear on p.135 of the Penguin Classics (ed. Woolhouse) edition of the Three Dialogues (pp.185-6 of Jessop & Luce, which is the standard reference for Berkeley and it is annoying that the author does not use it) have different conclusions. The first, allegedly, concludes the falsity of ‘VII. Mind-independent sensible things have those qualities that they are perceived to have’, whereas the second the falsity of ‘VI. Sensible qualities are parts of [inhere in] mind-independent sensible things’. The author quotes the first argument at length on p.8 prior to reconstructing it, a quotation which ends ‘From all of this, shouldn’t it seem to follow that all colors are equally apparent, and that none of the ones that we see are really in any outer object?’. This text is what appears in Jonathan Bennett’s  www.earlymoderntexts.org edition of Berkeley, which does not claim to be faithful to the original and in this case is quite clearly not faithful. What Berkeley actually wrote was: ‘From all of which, should it not seem to follow, that all the colours are equally apparent, and that none of those which we perceive are really inherent in any outward object?’. Apart from the utterly outrageous sloppiness of using a paraphrastic edition aimed at undergraduates in a research article submitted to an elite scholarly journal, and the intellectual dishonesty of giving a reference to the impeccably edited Penguin Classics edition rather than the actual source of the quoted passage, this error shows the author’s argument to be simply mistaken: Berkeley takes VII, the claim about inherence, to be part of the conjunctive conclusion of the first argument.

I would be loathe to impute deliberate deception here, but it is worth noting that while both the quotations illustrating the alleged two versions of the Argument from Perceptual Relativity come from earlymoderntexts.org, the quotations from the Principles on p.1 of the manuscript do appear to come from the Penguin Classics edition, making clear the author had it or a similarly accurate text to hand and wasn’t working entirely from the Bennett paraphrastic edition."--Referee, or Anonymous.

A distinguished philosopher [Anonymous] forwarded the excerpt from the referee report s/he wrote on a recent assignment to me. I quote with permission (even encouragement). I have not read the original paper (and luckily I am not the author!) nor have I double-checked all the relevant sources, so I cannot judge how fair Anonymous is, but I would share Anon.'s irritation if I discovered that a text relied on a suppressed translation (which is known to be un-scholarly). I should mention that Anonymous is not a hyper-specialist historian of philosophy (you know who those are!), but also makes contributions to more 'contemporary' areas. In follow up exchange Anonymous suggested that there are two key issues here:

1. Someone in the profession not being able to see the dangers of using earlymoderntexts.org and what this says about (i) academic standards (why think anything less than the best scholarly edition will do*) in Philosophy as a discipline and (ii) how earlymoderntexts.org might be misleading our students about how scholarship is to be done.

 

2. Referencing a print edition when you have actually used an online source (and without checking the accuracy of the online source).

 

This behaviour would be regarded as highly unprofessional and cast doubt on someone's suitability for an academic job in other humanities disciplines, but seems to be tolerated in (anglophone?) philosophy.

I  agree with Anonymous, although I will qualify my agreement below. First, all translation is an interpretation. Translating complex philosophical texts is much, much harder than figuring out 'gavagai.' This is so, even if you have written the text yourself and are fluent in both languages. You should try translating some time; even if you are not a meaning holist, you'll discover that a lot of philosophical jargon is not stable and uniform across cultural and temporal contexts. (Surprisingly enough, this is even  true of works in the history of physics.) So, leaving aside honest mistakes, all translations involve non-trivial judgments and trade-offs with a complex interplay among style, content, jargon, sentence structure, and even argumentative structure (this list is not exhaustive).

The Role(s) of Formal Philosophers in Physicists Dissing Philosophers

One aspect of this situation is especially ironic. A philosophical reform movement [logical positivism--ES] instituted by a theoretical physicist [Mach-ES] to cleanse his own discipline philosophically, has succeeded alienating a sizeable proportion of the practitioners of that very craft from an interest in either philosophers or philosophical matters...A second problem involves the positivist language itself. Modern symbolic logic has itself matured into a discipline with highly developed systrem of techniques and processes. In order even cursorily to follow relevant discussions by modern logically-minded philosophers, scientists must become fluent in the symbolic language. Since they cannot be expected to do so, it becomes incument upon philosophers themselves to initiate and maintain communication and interaction...In fact, it appears that interest in logical analysis and other formal questions has quite isolated a sizeable segment of the philosophical community, keeping them from being concerned with issues that concern their scientific colleagues. As physicist James Cushing has noted, this sort of interest has introduced issues into the philosophy of science that do not occur in actual science. Thus, scientific questions which might once have been of interest no longer attract philosophers, in part because they lie outside current philosophical practice...But even more important is what has happened to professional philosophers as a result of the incricacies of the logical calculus they have adopted as an instrument. In effect, philosophers have been enticed away from the problems of interpreting science in order to focus on problems internal to the means of interpretation [of logic--ES] rather than the substance [of science--ES]."--George Gale (1984) in Nature.

A whole list of famous physicists (Hawking, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Dawkins, Krausse, etc.) have made dismissive remarks about philosophy in recent times. The has lead to robust discussion among informed philosophers, including a whole range of very sensible and judicious responses (e.g., Lewis Powell’s "Open Letter to Neil de Grasse Tyson," and Massimo Pigliucci’s "Neil de Grasse Tyson and the Value of Philosophy," reblogged at The Huffington Post; Wayne Myrvold and and Eric Winsberg NewAPPS). I would love to learn from somebody informed about the sociology of physics what role dismissing philosophy plays in physics and its current relationships to wider academy and society. But here I want to note that to the best of my knowledge only Wayne, an awe-inspiring good philosopher of physics, has commented on philosophy's contribution to the current state of affairs. Wayne makes sensible observations about the difficulty of getting dual degrees. But the following passage shows the hold of a fatal historical self-conception on even our very best:

Philosophy does carry with it a risk of getting bogged down in questions that are either pointless or meaningless, and it always has. There is, of course, a long tradition of philosophers saying just that. Insert your favourite examples here; my greatest hits list includes the resounding closing paragraph of Hume’s Enquiry, and Kant’s challenge to metaphysicians in the Prolegomena. The logical empiricists, of course, tried to demarcate between sense and nonsense in such a way as to keep science on one side and the sorts of pointless metaphysical disputes they wished to avoid on the other. Most philosophers these days think that there isn’t any simple way to draw a line between sense and nonsense. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as nonsense. Fill in your own favourite example of a dispute in contemporary philosophy that is either pointless or nonsensical.--Myrvold.

Note that in Wayne's potted history the "logical empiricists" are on the side of sense. Even if one grants that in their time the choices were morally courageous (recall my post on Glymour's manifesto a few days ago [see also Jeff Bell's post on Carnap/Heidegger]) and philosophically the least worst option on the table, one would wish for more critical reflection on where they took us. Luckily Gale sent me his 1984 piece after I posted on the abuses of formal philosophy a few days ago.

Stigler's Scientific Revolution

Economists generally share the ruling values of their societies, but their professional competence does not consist in translating popular wishes into an awe-inspiring professional language. Their competence consists in understanding how an economic system works under alternative institutional frameworks. If they have anything of their own to contribute to the popular discussion of economic policy, it is some special understanding of the relationship between policies and the results of policies. The basic role of the scientist, therefore, is that of establishing the costs and benefits of alternative institutional arrangements. (Stigler, Presidential Address at the AEA, The American Economic Review, 1-2)

George J. Stigler was a Chicago-economist who won the Nobel prize (1982) "for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation." But this citation does not quite capture what he become known for in the economics profession. In addition to an acerbic wit and a very robust defense of markets, he "deserves a great deal of the credit for getting economists to look at data and evidence." (The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics) Moreover, the entry on Stigler continues,"one could examine the actual effects of regulation, and not just theorize about them. Stigler devoted his entire 1964 presidential address to the American Economic Association to making this point. He argued that economists should study the effects of regulation and not just assume them."*

Yesterday, I noted the significant afterlife for the idea that "economists generally share the ruling values of their societies," which is a core assumption for the technocratic political ideal. Here I focus on the fact that that Stigler really is one of the economists that turned economics from relying on "the telling anecdote," (Stigler, 12) into a data-driven discipline (although his presidential address notes non-trivial predecessors on this score).** While Stigler may not have been able to foresee the extent to which economics would become data-mining, Stigler himself declared that "it is a scientific revolution of the very first magnitude-indeed I consider the so-called theoretical revolutions of a Ricardo, a Jevons, or a Keynes to have been minor revisions compared to the vast implications of the growing insistence upon quantification." (Stigler 17; the Kuhnian language is no accident--in fact, Stigler had theorized about scientific revolutions before Kuhn, and warmly welcomed Kuhn's Structure.) This declaration, he claims, "is prophecy, not preaching." (Stigler 17)

On Moorean facts (David Lewis), and Poincaré’s Mistake

Poincaré, with all this virtue, made a serious philosophical mistake. In Poincaré’s own work, this error seems to me to have kept him from several fundamental discoveries in physics. (Howard Stein "Physics and Philosophy Meet: the Strange Case of Poincaré," 1.)

One way to describe this mistake--which I think is related to a wider philosophical tradition--is to say that Poincaré construed the function of theoretical work as essentially administrative--an activity of information-processing. The job of the theorist par excellence..-is to find the simplest and most systematic arrangement for storing scientific information--within the limits defined by those assumptions so entrenched as to function as a priori principles, i.e., as “definitions in disguise.”  (Stein, 16)

This mistake is a characteristic one in the empiricist tradition. It involves what seems to me a very odd paralogism. One recognizes--and I cannot say too strongly how right I think this is--that experience is our only touchstone of true information. One observes, with Hume, that the data of experience do not logically entail knowledge of “objective existence” or of the future. In application to the results of science, one draws sophisticated conclusions about the merely hypothetical status of the objects and agencies of scientific theory--e.g., atoms or the ether. But one neglects thereby the earlier insight--the Berkeleyan insight, which precedes Hume--that in a fundamental empiricist epistemological analysis all the objects and agencies of common sense and ordinary life have that same status. In effect, this is to distinguish, whether tacitly or explicitly, between the “reality”--or just persuasiveness--of what the ordinary processes of common sense make of the empirical data, and the reality or persuasiveness of the conclusions reached by the sophisticated processes of science. (Stein 17)

[A]n inadequacy in what may be called Poincaré’s conception of the dialectic of scientific concepts and theories, and of their relation to experiment. And that inadequacy I have earlier associated with what I called a very odd paralogism that recurs in the empiricist tradition: in effect, a double standard of epistemological critique, which occurs with some frequency among empiricist and instrumentalist philosophers of science.....

There is no warrant at all in the instrumentalist view for grading the entities of a theory in degrees of reality or fictitiousness--regarding particles as more real than the ether. This is a double standard that recurs in the empiricist tradition, (Stein, 22, and Stein quoting himself.)

Some over-sensitive historians dislike using judgments like 'mistake' in treating of the past. They mistakenly believe that such judgments are a form of anachronism or hindsight bias. Howard Stein, the greatest living philosophical historian of science,* certainly is not afraid to introduce anachronism when it suits his purposes (including in the quoted passages above). But, that's not what is going on in his judgment that a mistake has been made. Agents, except, perhaps, a divine one, can make mistakes, and worse. Even Homer nods. For, one can specify circumstances in which an agent ought to have known better (given existing best practices, regulations, etc.). Malpractice lawyers make a fine living arguing the details.