History of Science as Explanation by M. A. FinocchiaroReview by: William H. DrayPhilosophy of Science, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), pp. 331-333Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/186830 .

Accessed: 05/12/2014 05:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and Philosophy of Science Association are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy of Science.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.161 on Fri, 5 Dec 2014 05:42:40 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 331

ideas in greater detail. As a practicing physicist, he would be the first to acknowledge that, however valid the complaint that the woods cannot often be seen for the trees, it is individual trees that stop the traveller not the wood.

The introductory section on the meaning of physical theories and the mathematical tools used to develop them is followed by a general discussion of the foundation of physics under four broad headings: (a) reversible phenomena, (b) irreversible phenomena, (c) microphysics and (d) cosmology. The use of irreversibility to classify process is more intuitive and dialectically more helpful than the customary distinction between dynamical and statistical theories. What has to be sacrificed in a wcrk of this nature is a detailed discussion of the probability elements of statistical laws and the possibility of basing the uncertainty of statistical laws on the action of definite dynamical principles. In this way, the irreversibility manifest in some process could be eliminated. For instance, we can think of thermal diffusion or equalization of temperatures within a gas as the mixing of molecules having different kinetic energy, retaining the assumption that the motion of every individual obeys purely dynamical laws. The irreversibility attends only the behaviour of the gas as a whole and results from our inability to separate the individuals. A micro-cosmic being endowed with power of handling single molecules such as Maxwell's familiar demon (more fittingly called diavoletto or "little devil" in Italian) would be perfectly capable of performing the separation even without the expenditure of work. The fact that the assignment of dynamical laws together with detailed statements of the individual fate of all the molecules would introduce arbitrariness and violate the canon of simplicity does not make the distinction between reversible and irreversible phenomena logically necessary.

The author is, of course, aware of these limitations and he occasionally protests against unwarranted generalizations outside physics: "Extrapolations are sometimes used carelessly, without suscepting their unacceptability, by philosophers, historians, politicians and the like, but not by physicists (at least, not by good ones)" (p. 55). The glib confidence is the superiority of the scientist's mental equipment is refreshing in an age when science has lost much of its glamour but it also indicates that Toraldo di Francia does not agonize over the problems on which philosophers of science spend most of their time. Physicists should be aware of the philosophical assumptions that are present in physics but they are not to be given the impression that philosophy will solve any of their real problems. Scientists should travel light!

This work will shortly appear in English translation and it can be warmly recommended to the science undergraduate as a sensible and comprehensive introduction to the foundations of physics. William R. Shea, McGill University.

M. A. FINOCCHIARO. History of Science as Explanation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973. 286 pp. $15.95.

This book, which claims to be one of the first works on "history-of-science methodology according to the concept of explanation," is a slashing attack on what is seen as some current practices of philosophers writing history of science, largely in the name of a conception of historical inquiry attributed to Benedetto Croce and an analysis of the concept of explanation derived from Michael Scriven. Setting forth an extremely dense and tersely articulated structure of argument, and displaying an infelicity of expression of a kind that may well be suggested even by the phrase I have just quoted, the book is unusually difficult to read-this being somewhat ironical in view of the criticism it levels at historians of science for themselves producing unreadable books. Yet the work is not one to be lightly put aside. It contains a wealth of arguments and proposals to which one would certainly hope that designated opponents, especially Joseph Agassi and Thomas Kuhn, would feel obliged to reply.

The structure of Finocchiaro's book is as follows. He first attacks three theoretical assumptions which he finds widespread among historians of science who offer explana- tions of particular discoveries, all three expounded authoritatively by philosophers of science like C. G. Hempel, and all of them, according to Finocchiaro, highly

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.161 on Fri, 5 Dec 2014 05:42:40 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

332 BOOK REVIEWS

questionable. The first is that explanation is bound in some simple logical way to prediction; the second, that when completely stated, an explanation logically requires "covering laws"; the third, that explanation is always a response to a "why" question. Given the enormous literature relative to the first two of these, it is not surprising that, in two short chapters-although they are incisive ones-Finocchiaro produces little that seems particularly novel; and with regard to the third, he disappoints somewhat by considering only the alternative of answering "why not" questions-true as it may be that what is really puzzling about a discovery is often why it wasn't made long before. These, however, are logical preliminaries, preparing the way for an examination in depth of three actual cases of explanation that are considered representa- tive of received history of science. The first is Henry Guerlac's account, in Lavoisier-the Crucial Year, of how Lavoisier was led to carry out certain experiments on the burning of phosphorus and sulphur and the calcination of metals; the second is the explanation offered by Alexander Koyre, in his Etudes Galileennes, for certain errors made by Descartes and Galileo in investigating the problem of falling bodies, and for the eventual success of the latter; and the third, some familiar general reasons, both "internalist" and "externalist," often given for the rise of modern science, especially as discussed by A. R. Hall. Finocchiaro demolishes all of these in relentless detail. Typical of the way he concludes an analysis is the remark, directed at the dismembered body of Guerlac's account: "nothing of explanatory value is left."

His conclusion that the practice of explanation in history of science is, in general, "highly unsatisfactory," leads Finocchiaro to consider a thesis which he finds frequently advanced by those who would agree with this negative appraisal, namely that such explanations too often rest upon an inadequate theoretical framework: they are too remotely connected with any general theory of the nature of scientific thinking; they fail to recognize, with Agassi, that "philosophies of science are explanations of the facts of the development of science." Three live options among allegedly explanatory philosophies of science are critically considered-the inductivist, the conventionalist, and the hypothetico-deductivist-this leading to the conclusion, given the case studies already presented, that, far from such theories being unduly neglected, it is too often the very tendency to hew to them, even if not always consciously, that accounts for the weaknesses, and sometimes the sheer errors, of history-of-science explanations. At very least, Finocchiaro avers, no one such philosophy of science affords historians of science an adequate explanatory theory. At most, all suggest explanatory "possibil- ities" which they would do well to keep in mind, never forgetting that, in a given case, no such theory may be relevant at all: for "the study of history [itself] often reveals possibilities undreamed of by the logician-speculator." In fact, the relation between philosophies of science and history-of-science explanations, when there is one, is often the converse of that envisaged by Agassi: the former are derived from the latter. There is thus an important sense-and this is the central thesis of the book-in which history of science needs to be "liberated" from philosophy of science. The only completely general thing that can legitimately be said about history-of-science explanations is that, like all good explanations, they must make understandable what was not.

In the final chapters, Finnochiaro goes on to discuss some of the considerations rendered important by this thesis of the "autonomy" of explanation in history of science (using this word in a sense very close to the one in which R. G. Collingwood claimed all history to be autonomous). One of these is the need for the historian of science, especially when trying to account for discoveries, to keep a firm grasp on the difference between his own standpoint and that of the historical agent, the latter being the one from which explanation of the original actions must be sought. Finocchiaro accepts it as the merest truism that what people do depends on what they believe; and he accuses historians of science of breaching this principle time and again by characterizing the problem ascribed to scientists of the past in terms of concepts, and by reference to purposes, which they could not possibly have had. Thus Lavoisier could not have been devising an experiment "to test the antiphlogistic hypothesis," as Guerlac has him doing, since "he had almost certainly not conceived

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.161 on Fri, 5 Dec 2014 05:42:40 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 333

of this hypothesis." Guerlac is reading back into what he did a significance that lay in the future. At a more general level, Popper's talk of scientific knowledge growing by "conjecture and refutation," and Kuhn's reports of "scientific revolutions," similarly describe not "historical episodes" but "theoretical fictions": both are exercises in "hindsight." However, while this may be a point well taken, Finocchiaro seems inclined to overstate it, appearing often to restrict the "real" history of science to what can be said from the agent's standpoint alone. Taken strictly, this would surely leave him open to the charge of having rescued historical understanding from one straitjacket only to secure it firmly in another. In fact, he concedes that both agent's and historian's descriptions have their place in history of science, while observing that the problem of the proper relationship between them may have no "general solution." At this point, further liason with philosophy of history in general might have been useful: for example, the work of Arthur Danto, with its emphasis on retrospectivity as the distinctive mark of an essentially historical understanding.

The same could be said of Finocchiaro's treatment of a number of other issues touched on in connection with his autonomy thesis: for example, his embracing of the contrast between history and chronicle (although he perceptively refuses to equate this with the difference between pure description and the tracing of causal series); his acceptance of the idea that actions may have to be understood in terms of the rules they apply (he seems to confuse rules with laws when he holds that discoveries are nomologically inexplicable because necessarily rule-breaking); his warnings against confounding a scientist's practice with his own theory of his practice (the self-apprecia- tion of past agents thus not necessarily coinciding even with correct accounts of what they were doing from their own points of view); his denial that explanation is a "linguistic" category (while offering only hints of what he himself means by "compre- hensible connections" and explanations "to" an audience); and his claim that history, including history of science, naturally concerns itself with differences rather than similarities (this opening an allegedly "unbridgeable gap" between the logic and methodology of the sciences and the humanities). Such a random sampling can convey no more than an impression of the rich tangle of issues of critical philosophy of history with which Finocchiaro eventually gets involved. Indeed, his book may, in the end, especially on its more tentative, positive side, be seen as raising more questions than it answers. It is none the less to be welcomed for its attempt to orient philosophy of the history of science in directions that are likely to be fruitful. William H. Dray, University of Ottawa.

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.161 on Fri, 5 Dec 2014 05:42:40 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions