Revolutions in a Griceian Key

From Quinton, "From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein"

--- on the origin of modern science and its revolution:

Some commented excerpts:

Quinton writes:

"The scientific revolution which created the ['modern'] world is rightly described as taking place in the seventeenth century."

"Certainly the first signal achievement, the publication of Copernicus's heliocentric theory, occurred in 1548. But the main work was done in the following century. Copernicus's theory of the heavens was comparatively speculative, even if it benefited from improvements in observational astronomy which had come about in response to the needs of navigation. But the work of Kepler, Galileo and, culminatingly, Newton, was based on an altogether more exalted variety of empirical evidence about the movements of heavenly bodies."

One is reminded of Newton's "Hypotheses non fingo", a favourite motto of my teacher in early modern philosophy.

Quinton goes on:

"Galileo's main contribution was in mechanics, the mathematically formulated theory of the movement of matter, starting out from the study of projectiles and failing bodies. It lent support to the helio-centrism of Copernicus. So did Galileo's use of his improved telescope to discover imperfections on the sun and moon which undermined the old theory that the heavens are made of different material from the earth and are subject to different laws. Newton's Principia brought the movements of matter in the heavens and on the earth under a single scheme of laws which seemed to have attained an unimprovable completeness."

From cosmologia to anthropologia:

"The implication of seventeenth-century physics that the physical universe as a whole is a vast machine was extended to cover the human body. The first step here was Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which was actually observed by Leeuwenhoek, who also used the microscope to observe micro-organisms."

--- Hypothesis and hypostasis:

"The central feature of these advances is that they involve the explanation of straightforwardly observable things by what is not straightforwardly observable. In some cases the unobserved explanatory factors turn out to be discoverable by instrumentally assisted observation — hitherto unknown planets by the telescope, spermatozoa by the microscope. In other cases the hidden factor is an
intuitively unobvious order which makes systematic sense of what appears at first to be a confused variety, as in celestial mechanics."

Apperance and reality:

"The lesson of these dey elopments is that the world is not what it appears to be. The earth is not at rest but is in axial and orbital rotation. And there is more to the world than there appears to be: the corpuscles that prefigure the developed atomism of nineteenth-century physics and chemistry and the micro-organisms that prefigure the cells of nineteenth-century biology."

Ontology:

"This, more or less ontological aspect of the scientific revolution is bound up with its most important methodological characteristic: the application of mathematics to natural fact embodied in the practice of exact numerical measurement. There were new mathematical developments which directly served the investigation of nature. Some of these were notational: Stevin's decimals and Napier's logarithms.
Others were substantive new disciplines: Descartes' analytic geometry, Pascal's probability theory and, above all, the calculus of Newton and Liebniz."

----- R. B. Jones has extended on the idea of Leibniz's 'characteristica universalis', elsewhere, which somehow prefigures Frege's conceptual script or notation.

Quinton:

"The general upshot was the idea that the essential determinants of natural happenings are the measurable properties of things, many of them beyond the range of unassisted observation, acting in accordance with mathematically formulated laws whose values are to be established by or inferred from observation and experiment.

The proof of the pudding:

"The immediate technological fruit was not so much productive as instrumental. The theory of projectiles was of use to artillerymen; the theory of chances to gamblers. But the primary technological application of the new scientific knowledge was in the production of instruments for the acquisition of further knowledge and not for
the Baconian purpose of the, relief of man's estate: accurate pendulum clocks, reliable compasses, telescopes, microscopes, barometers, thermometers. It was only in the eighteenth century that the absolutely transforming event of the introduction of steam power took place. The first steam engines were used to pump water out of mines and so enable immense new deposits of coal to be mined. Then came the use of steam to convey railway wagons and to drive textile machinery, which thus become independent of human muscles and a convenient supply of failing water. The development of mechanical power enormously accelerated in the nineteenth century. Oil supplemented coal as a source of steam. The petrol-burning internal combustion engine increased human mobility on land and in the air. Electricity was recruited to supply light, heat and, eventually, power. A scientific revolution in chemistry took place in the nineteenth century in close association with the development of the chemical industry, a process, beginning with synthetic dyes, that was soon to supply mankind with a host of new, artificial materials. Electromagnetic theory led to the discovery of radio waves with the result of enormously increased long-distance communication and, in due course, a major change in the human use of leisure."

The underlying principle: mechanism.

"The governing idea behind this complex of Western scientific and technological advances is that the natural world and everything in it is mechanical in character, that every natural process, from the Movements of the planets to the circulation of the blood, operates in accordance with mathematically formulated laws, which we must rely on observational or experimental measurement to establish."

The pre-moderns:

"Aristotle's physics was qualitative and unsystematic. It registered the evident distinguishing features of different natural kinds and classified them on the basis of their evident similarities. It could explain what happened sufficiently to
appease a curiosity that was not too penetrating by saying that things act as they do because it is their nature to do so."

"But if it was cognitively comforting it was practically useless since it was unable to predict."

"All action is directed towards the future. As agents we want to know what will happen if we do this or do not do that. Explanation that is not tied to prediction gratifies a merely contemplative appetite."

Plato, the mathematician:

"In the Renaissance the authority of Plato had been invoked to combat that of Aristotle. For the most part the effect of this revival of Plato was confined to the humanities. Dog-Latin, syllogistic logic and metaphysical theology were discarded for Ciceronian Latin, rhetoric and scholarly cultivation. It is an historical mistake, which many have absorbed from the Renaissance humanists, to suppose that the authority of Aristotle in the Christian West stretches right back to the beginning of the Middle Ages."

"Although a fragment of [Aristotle's] logic was available from the first, the main body of his writings did not come into the possession of the turopean West until it was retrieved from the Arabs from the mid-twelfth century onwards and that was after the deaths of the first generation of truly medieval philosophers: Anselm, Abelard, and Peter Lombard, compiler of the Sentences which became the formal basis of the bulk of later medieval thought."

"Before the recovery of Aristotle, medieval thought had been Platonic and, in particular, neo-Platonic. The Platonic dialogue most influential in the early Middle Ages was the Timaeus, Plato's Pythagorean cosmological speculation, which puts forward a mathematical conception of the world as fashioned by a Demiurge out of geometrical figures. For Plato [...], the physical world is not wholly real. All that is real, all that can be truly known, is timeless. [... T]he physical world, to the extent that it can be known, must be understood by pure mathematical speculation."

EMPIRICISM.

"The conscious opposition of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to Aristotle's doctrine of the physical world received some impulsion from the fifteenth and sixteenth century revival of Plato. But the Pythagorean mysticism which holds that all that exists is made of numbers was brought down to earth by the idea that the numbers which matter are the measured characteristics of empirically observable things."

"It was a crucial moment in the process of deliverance from Platonism when Kepler was forced by his devotion to truth to admit that the planets move, not in perfect circles, but in elliptical orbits."

"The main thesis that I wish to propose is that [the character of modern science] can be attributed to [religion], in particular to the cosmological element, the general theory of the nature of the world, which in each case the ... religion embodies." "[Neo-platonic] Christianity ... accepts the reality of the sensible world: on the other hand, it affirms a supernatural order in which the omnipotent creator of the natural world is located, together with other spiritual beings, intervening in nature once he has created it by means of miracles and other revelations of his existence and purposes, and, most dramatically, by his
personal incarnation in it in human form."

"In the reverse direction, so to speak, the immortality of the soul is linked in Christianity with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. One of the first heresies proscribed by Christianity is Gnosticism with its conception of the
natural world as evil, and although during the neo-Platonic phase of Christian theology the secondary, derivative, more or less minimal reality of the natural world is affirmed, it was never declared to be an illusion."

"Two aspects of the orthodox Christian cosmology serve as foundation stones for the great Western scientific constructions of the seventeenth century."

"First there is the idea of God as a rational intelligence setting his creation to work in accordance with a unitary scheme of intelligible laws."

---- Grice was fascinated by this and would literally "play 'God'", i.e. in his words: 'use 'God' as an explanatory device'. Notably in metaethics, this has come to be seen as the theory of the ideal observer. Grice preferred to call it the 'genitorial programme'.

Quinton:

"Secondly, there is the idea of God as something behind the perceptible surface of the world but constantly involved with it. Under these assumptions the sensible world is neither a chaos nor autonomous. It works in accordance with unobvious laws and the ultimate cause of what happens is also unobvious, hidden behind its perceptible surface."

"The scientific revolution naturalises these two notions: the underlying causes of what is perceived are not absolutely or metaphysically transcendental, but simply
beyond the reach of straightforward observation."

-----


mental laws in accordance with which the perceptible world works
are not perceptible regularities, but laws of the behaviour of hidden
explanatory factors. Newton's first law of motion illustrates the
.second point: nothing that we perceive is in direct conformity with
it, nothing that we perceive continues permanently in the same state
of motion, since everything we perceive is subject to impressed forces
of some kind or other.

The three cosmologies — Confucian immanence, Hindu transcen-
dence and Christian dualism — correspond to three distinct attitudes
to the life of mankind on earth. For the Confucian, the right mode
of life is one of peaceful coexistence with nature, taking such conve-
nient advantage of it as one can, but for the most part
accommodating oneself harmoniously to it. For the Hindu, nature
is a kind of bad dream to which one should take up an attitude of
passive submission, principally concerning oneself while it lasts with
the search. for liberation from it, like a prisoner who does not seek
to make himself comfortable in jail, but is always preoccupied with
thoughts of escape. Indian magical beliefs are a marginal mitigation
of this cast of mind, like the unpredictable benevolence of a guard,
a chink in the system that leads nowhere beyond itself. For the
Western, nature is a field of opportunity, for adventure and enter-
prise, a gift to be made use of. The technological implications of these
attitudes hardly need to be set out in detail.

There is a final parallel which I shall mention briefly. In the history
of philosophical reflection on scientific knowledge three main
competing theories have been developed. The first of these, which
takes a formal deductive system as the ideal model of a science, rests
such knowledge on the rational intuition of axiomatic first princi-
ples. The second, instrumentalism, takes the theoretical elements of
science to be a kind of conceptual shorthand for propositions about
what can be directly perceived. The third, realistic doctrine, takes
scientific theory to be inferred but literal truth about the hidden, fine
structure of the physical world. Intuitionism, the doctrine of Plato
and Descartes, has an affinity with Indian assumptions about nature
and our knowledge of it. Instrumentalism, the theory of scientific.
knowledge of the pragmatists, and before them of Berkeley and Ernst
Mach, is Chinese in spirit. (So also is the practice of Aristotle, even
if in theory he shows his dependence on Plato by endorsing an
axiomatic theory of the nature of scientific knowledge.) Realism is
broadly the position of Locke in all its none too coherent good sense.
I must confess that I share the belief attributed to my distinguished
Oxford predecessor, H.A. Prichard: 'In the end, when the truth is
known, I think it will turn out to be not very far from the philos-
ophy of Locke.' Locke regards the hidden reality of the material
world as altogether too inaccessible and takes too subjective a view
of the direct objects of perception. But no major structural modifi-
cations are needed.

It could be objected to what I have been arguing that all I have
done is to show some rough general parallel between the cosmolo-
gies of Confucianism, Hinduism and Christianity on the one hand
-and, respectively, the sciences of China, India and the West on the
other. But I have surely wanted to claim more than that, specifically
that the religious cosmologies are causally related to the corre-
sponding bodies of scientific knowledge and belief. I do indeed want
to make that claim. The principal justification for doing so must be
that which must support any such claim: in each case the alleged
cause is precedent in time and contiguous in space to the alleged
effect. Together with the fact — and I have tried to make out that it
is a fact — of the near-identity of content between the cosmological
teaching of the religions and the operating assumptions of the corre-
sponding sciences, that ought to be enough.

But to prevent some possibilities of misinterpretation, some qual-
ifications must be made. In particular, I am not claiming that the
cosmologies are the sole and entire cause of the forms of science to
which they are connected, nor am I claiming that they are the indis-
pensably necessary conditions of the sciences that correspond to
them. My claim, in other words, is limited by acknowledging the two
factors called by Mill the complexity and the plurality of causes.

The cosmological assumptions I have picked out as causes are, as
is usual in such cases of explanation, each only one of the factors
which, in the circumstances of each case, had to be present for the
effect to ensue. There are plenty of societies with traditional religious
cosmologies which have not produced any science at all, nothing
even to be compared with the comparatively limited or partial scien-
tific achievement of the Chinese and Indian civilisations. Clearly
social factors must also be taken into account: stability, a degree of
prosperity to provide the requisite leisure for scientific work, some
urbanisation to provide for the development of a critical community
of investigators, a fairly substantial amount of literacy.

Some historians of thought, attracted to more or less Marxist
styles of historical explanation, have attributed the rise of modern
Western science to the existence of a confident and secure merchant
class, not preoccupied with politics and war, nor constrained by the
disciplines imposed by priestly status, their minds broadened by the

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