michael friedman and the “marriage” of history and philosophy of science (and history of...
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Michael Friedman and the ‘‘marriage’’ of historyand philosophy of science (and history of philosophy)
Mary Domski and Michael Dickson (eds): Discourse on a newmethod:Reinvigorating the marriage of history and philosophy ofscience; with a concluding essay by Michael Friedman. Chicago:Open Court, 2010, viii+852pp, $89.95 HB
Thomas Sturm
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
The ‘‘marriage’’ of history and philosophy of science (HPS) that developed
especially after Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been called
‘‘intimate’’ but also a mere matter of ‘‘convenience.’’ Both of these characterizations
have their problems. For instance, it is hard to see that philosophers and historians of
science would always or necessarily need each other, given the wide range of issues
and problems they are dealing with. But we also know topics where close
interaction seems possible and fruitful, occasionally up to the point that it may
become unclear whether a specific project or product is historical or philosophical in
nature. So the ‘‘marriage’’ of HPS is not merely forced by the existence of academic
arrangements. How to best capture the relation implied by the notion of HPS has led
to repeated debates, with no end in sight (see, e.g., Schickore 2011; Arabatzis and
Schickore 2012). Right now, HPS has become a sequence of several marriages and
remarriages, partly because of the partners having developed their own new interests
and agendas. Like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, historians and philosophers were
first happily engaged, produced things that were welcomed by society (films and
theories of scientific progress, respectively), and then got fed up with one another
(e.g., because one side fell in love with certain kinds of sociology of knowledge,
while the other side flirted with cognitive science or met its old love, formal
methods, again). Unlike T & B, however, historians and philosophers did not
become exhausted after merely two marriages. Time and again, we revive our
relationship, and it is always a new and quite confusing experience. Today, many
different ways of doing HPS exist, as evidenced, for instance, by the new history of
philosophy of science (HOPOS) field, the international project on ‘‘&HPS,’’ or the
various approaches of ‘‘historical epistemology.’’
T. Sturm (&)
Department of Philosophy and Center for the History of Science (CEHIC), Autonomous University
of Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
e-mail: [email protected]
123
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DOI 10.1007/s11016-013-9845-8
A new version is presented by Mary Domski and Michael Dickson. While their
edited volume is a Festschrift to honor Michael Friedman’s work, it is also more
than that. Domski and Dickson aim at a new method for HPS, called ‘‘synthetic
history.’’ The volume provides a wide-ranging, and often impressive, snapshot of
current interactions between philosophy of science, history of science, and—this is
important here—history of philosophy. Following the interlocking themes of
Friedman’s oeuvre, the 24 chapters are grouped into five main sections:
(I) The Newtonian Era (with papers by Domenico Bertoloni Meli, William R.
Newman, Mary Domski, Andrew Janiak)
(II) Kant (Alison Laywine, Charles Parsons, Donald Sutherland, Daniel Warren,
Frederic Beiser)
(III) Logical Positivism and Neo-Kantianism (John M. Krois, Alan Richardson,
Paul Pojman, Thomas Ricketts, Don Howard)
(IV) History and Philosophy of Physics (John Norton, James Mattingly, Michael
Dickson, Scott Tanona, Thomas Ryckman)
(V) Post-Kuhnian Philosophy of Science (William Demopoulos, Richard Creath,
Noretta Koertge, Robert DiSalle, Mark Wilson)
Finally, as part VI of the volume, Friedman adds an extensive and detailed reply.
On roughly 240 pages, he updates his own account and reacts—in varying
degrees—to many of the contributions. (‘‘Buy one book, get two!’’ the publisher
might have advertised.) There are wonderful and thought-provoking pieces in this
volume. To mention but three entries from this rich and tasty menu, I was
particularly impressed by Laywine’s illuminating chapter on how Kant might have
taken over the idea of a geometrical ‘‘postulate’’ from the brilliant philosopher–
scientist Johann Heinrich Lambert and used it in his critical metaphysics, perhaps
even in the deduction of the categories; by Norton’s clear presentation of how non-
or even anti-Kantian thinkers such as Hume or Mach, through their view that
scientific concepts must be grounded in experience, inspired Einstein’s new idea of
the relativity of simultaneity; and by Creath’s succinct and witty discussion of how
far Friedman has helped us to keep irrationalism or relativism away ‘‘from our
door’’ (508). This selection reflects my personal preferences; others will prefer other
chapters. Since I cannot possibly explain all that is in the volume, I shall try to give
a comprehensive overview by looking at its structure and guiding ideas, adding
more information about other chapters and critical considerations as we go along.
Unfortunately, the introduction by Domski and Dickson does not explain the
contents and connections of the contributions. One might also have grouped the
individual chapters differently: by how they relate to Friedman’s particular
approach, or how they help to revive the marriage of HPS. The grouping according
to the first criterion, for instance, would bring together critical discussions of
Friedman’s claim that developments such as the Newtonian and Einsteinian
revolutions cannot be understood apart from the relativized a priori (Tanona,
Ryckman, Creath, Koertge, DiSalle, and Wilson; about that topic, more below).
Other papers criticize Friedman by providing alternative readings of the classical
authors discussed by him. Thus, Parsons develops further his own reading of Kant’s
philosophy of mathematics; Krois and Richardson describe what Friedman has
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missed in Ernst Cassirer (the notion of ‘‘symbolic pregnance,’’ and that Cassirer was
more a Hegelian than a Kantian, respectively); Howard presents Einstein as
espousing a holistic epistemology rather than as a defender of a relativized a priori.
The remaining articles complement or only indirectly address Friedman’s views
(Bertoloni Meli, Newman, Domski, Janiak, Laywine, Warren, Beiser, Pojman,
Ricketts, Norton, Dickson, Demopoulos).
What the editors instead provide in their introduction is, firstly, a brief overview
of the previous debate over HPS’s marital status, focusing especially on Ronald
Giere’s (1973) skeptical position according to which the marriage is merely one of
convenience. Secondly, they succinctly summarize Friedman’s core ideas as
presented most especially in Dynamics of Reason (2001). Thirdly, they characterize
their new idea of ‘‘synthetic history.’’ The first two aspects of the introduction I have
no quibbles with. Other chapters in the volume, for instance, by Howard, Tanona,
Creath, or DiSalle, also explain Friedman’s views clearly—as evidenced by the fact
that some of them bring him to revise certain of his ideas, even a quite central one.
Before I can get to these changes, a few remarks about Friedman’s views are in
place. Also, we need to grasp the idea of ‘‘synthetic history,’’ which is not
unproblematic.
Three points are central for understanding how Friedman’s approach attempts to
strengthen the connection of HPS. Firstly, as the editors show, he has argued
(Friedman 1993) that scientific developments were frequently connected to changes
in philosophical reflections on science. Stated differently, the history of philosophy
can be told better if one notices how philosophers responded to the emergence of
new theories by providing a deeper understanding of, as Domski and Dickson say,
‘‘the status and possibility of our knowledge of the natural world’’ (4). This is
opposed to those who, say, see early modern philosophy merely or primarily as an
attempt to refute Cartesian skepticism (a task that the editors also dubitably ascribe
to Kant—8). Friedman was right to claim that the history of philosophy should be
related closer to past science. (However, he was not the first to do so; cf., e.g.,
Kruger 1986.)
Friedman’s second core idea is that we can understand scientific change best (if
not only) if we reconstruct the historically changing, ‘‘relativized’’ a priori
frameworks of science or the ‘‘dynamics of reason.’’ Scientific theories are not
composed of knowledge-claims that are all revisable in the same way (although they
might all be revisable). Rather, some play a ‘‘constitutive’’ role: They are necessary
conditions for proper empirical claims. Because science changes over time,
philosophers have repeatedly tried to spell out these a priori frameworks in new
ways. Friedman has applied these notions especially to the Newtonian revolution
(for which a framework was provided by Kant in his Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science (1786)) and to the Einsteinian revolution (which Logical
Empiricists such as Carnap and Reichenbach and Neo-Kantians such as Cassirer
reflected on in different ways). These were, in Kuhn’s view at least, central
instances of the notorious ‘‘incommensurability’’ between successive paradigms of
natural science, and this thesis is one that Friedman rejects through his work. In his
concluding essay, he enriches his account: For instance, he relates it to his previous
work on Helmholtz, Poincare, or Mach and expands on his account of how Kant
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thought that matter fills space (603f.). There are also stimulating discussions of how
the Absolute Idealism of Schelling constituted an interesting response to new
developments in electricity, magnetism, or chemistry, or of how Husserl’s
understanding of geometry provided a response to the thorny question of how the
‘‘mathematical structure of general relativity successively acquires its empirical
meaning and application’’ (693). Friedman thereby thickens his narrative of the
joined history of philosophy and the sciences from Newton to Einstein. One
question still emerges: Why is there so much focus on the Germans-plus-Poincare?
What about the philosophies of Whewell, Peirce, or Russell, who also tried to
understand the natural sciences of their time?
Leaving this question aside, it is clear that the first two main points of Friedman’s
approach would only show that past science and past philosophy have interacted in
certain ways. But, as Domski and Dickson note, Friedman makes a third and
stronger claim: Science and philosophy should interact—the interaction ‘‘is not a
quirk of history, but an essential fact about the two disciplines’’ (7f.). But why
accept that? The editors note that perhaps Friedman went too far here. Not all of
philosophy is or should be driven by science and its problems. This is not merely
true for ethics, esthetics, or political philosophy. Like it or not, many areas and
topics in theoretical philosophy as well are pursued at more than arm’s length from
the history of science. Also, Friedman’s account provides no clear understanding of
cooperations between philosophy and, say, current cognitive science, economics, or
biology. Domski and Dickson defend Friedman’s historicism by claiming that he
wishes to ‘‘draw attention to an interaction between philosophy and science that has,
until very recently, attracted inadequate scholarly attention’’ and tries to give ‘‘old
questions new flavor’’ (8). True; but irrelevant for the issue at stake. Giere could
insist that while Friedman has provided a distinct approach to the history of
philosophy (more precisely, to the history of philosophy of science), that does not
tell us why philosophers of science today should depend upon history, much less
why historians are dependent upon philosophers.
At points, Friedman does not even seem to take up this daunting task.
Responding to an objection by Noretta Koertge, he says that his work primarily
provides a very rich ‘‘historical narrative’’ about how Kant and other philosophers
reacted to certain scientific developments from Newton to Einstein. In that sense,
characterizing it as a history of science–philosophy relations is quite in place. It is
not ‘‘intended to be a general theory of scientific change’’ (715; cf. 792 n. 317). Two
comments on this: On the one hand, Friedman is perhaps too modest here. The idea
of the relativized a priori developed by Reichenbach, or very similar ideas, come up
in other authors in the first decades of the twentieth century as well: for instance, in
philosopher–psychologists such as Karl Buhler (Popper’s teacher) or Kurt Lewin. I
bet that one can find still more. It might therefore have played a role in scientific
developments, or reflections thereof, beyond the cases that interest Friedman and the
contributors to this volume.
On the other hand, Friedman is clearly more ambitious about the potential of a
historicized philosophy of science. As he explicitly claims (573), history of
philosophy is not possible without history of science, and such an integrated history
in turn is required by philosophy of science. Hence, HPS or ‘‘synthetic history’’ is a
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must. Other contributors in the volume follow him here, if in somewhat different
ways. For instance, Domski studies Newton’s view that, pace Descartes, ancient
mathematicians were right about the distinction between algebra and geometry, and
that therefore Newton, much like Friedman, tried to ‘‘bring history to bear on our
contemporary philosophical problems’’ (82). But it is hard to see how reference to
(and reverence of) ancient authors constitutes a historical justification of a certain
philosophy. Again, several contributors view Kant’s transcendental philosophy as
being primarily or even exclusively concerned with providing a new foundation for
natural science and mathematics, think that he failed in this (e.g., Janiak on 94;
DiSalle on 529, 544), and—this is especially Friedman’s contention—that therefore
his transcendental project must be replaced by an ‘‘integrated intellectual history of
both the exact sciences and scientific philosophy’’ (Friedman on 702; cf. 599, 679,
697, 708, 713). I disagree with this reading of Kant’s first Critique, but there is a
stronger point behind Friedman’s claim to be discussed here. With such a history, he
aims at a reconciliation of ‘‘the necessity and a priority demanded by transcendental
philosophy with the unavoidable contingency of history’’ (698). Friedman here
employs two assumptions: First, the reconciliation concerns especially develop-
ments of mathematics, since that is a ‘‘(relatively uncontroversial) locus of apriority
and necessity’’; second, it deals with the historical ‘‘extension or continuation of
Kant’s original attempt to comprehend the application of mathematics to our
sensible experience’’ (699). Friedman then illustrates how this allows for an
integration of necessity/a priority and historical contingency. For instance, while it
is contingent when Kant was born and died, and even when he developed his
account, the account itself is not contingent insofar as it responds to the problems
Kant faced (infinite divisibility and extendibility, say) and the resources he used (the
Aristotelian logic of concepts). Kant’s view of the necessity of intuition for the
applicability of pure mathematics to empirical reality has an ‘‘inner logic’’ (700).
Similar points hold, mutatis mutandis, for Helmholtz’s, Poincare’s, and other
attempts to solve this problem.
Without going into details, several problems arise here. For instance, for the
integration of historical contingency with a priority or necessity in scientific
development, not just any old facts should be added to the narrative: Kant’s exact
lifedates are not only contingent, but also irrelevant. But if one focuses only on
resources and problems truly relevant to a particular solution concerning the
applicability of mathematics, or picks only solutions that are reactions to Kant, one
might wonder whether all elements of the account do not become necessary—not
necessary in an absolute sense, but epistemically necessary for the particular theory
at hand. What then are the contingent elements, which seem necessary for an
integrative HPS? Again, if one’s basic aim is to explain the different philosophies of
mathematics, their pros and cons, one might pretty much ignore who developed
them, when, where, and so on. A truly integrative HPS would quickly disappear.
Domski and Dickson’s concept of a ‘‘synthetic history’’ leads to other questions.
In introducing it, they accept Friedman’s claim concerning a close relation between
past science and past philosophy. Changes such as those from the Aristotelian–
Scholastic to the mechanical worldview, or from Newton to Einstein that were
somehow connected with different philosophies, can best be understood by taking
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into account this relation. Domski and Dickson add other examples, such as the
impact of geometry on philosophical accounts of knowledge since antiquity, that of
computer science on the philosophy of mind, or the role of the shift from classical
mechanics to quantum theory for the emergence of ‘‘irrationalist’’ philosophies (4).
Even though the last example is perhaps not entirely convincing, given the lifedates
and impact of Friedrich Nietzsche, I applaud such an extension of the list of topics
(and it would have been nice to have had a chapter on one of them). Also, as the
editors point out, accepting the demand to study the interaction between philosophy
and science does not commit one to Friedman’s claim that we need to reconstruct
the changing a priori frameworks of science (15f.).
Now, all contributions are said to exemplify ‘‘synthetic history’’ (11). But what
exactly is that? Domski and Dickson explain it using the famous dual methodology
of analysis and synthesis, which has a venerable (and confusing) history from
Aristotle to Newton and beyond. Their preferred explication of the distinction is that
while analysis helps to discover the (ideally basic) cause of a phenomenon,
synthesis ‘‘demonstrates, or expresses, or explains the unity of the various
components that constitute the phenomenon’’ (15). Somewhat surprisingly, the
editors say that their proposed method for HPS might also have been the analytic
one, because ‘‘the fundamental task of such history is to find and explore the causes
of specific unities between philosophy and science,’’ and that analysis ‘‘seeks the
cause of the unity between the parts.’’ Finally, they point out that different authors
might focus on just one of the two methods, and so ‘‘one might engage in the sort of
history of science we have in mind without explicitly ‘doing philosophy’’’; and
‘‘similar remarks hold, mutatis mutandis, for the history of philosophy, and for
philosophy itself’’ (ibid.). While the first two points here made me doubt the point of
calling the method a ‘‘synthetic’’ one, the last one seems to provide ammunition for
rather than against critics of HPS like Giere, and many philosophers who say they
do not need history of science at all. In any case, the editors’ concept of synthetic
history is clearly more moderate and more flexible than Friedman’s. That reflects
the diversity of approaches taken by the chapters in the volume, but it also leaves
the reader a bit puzzled about how deep the unity of ‘‘synthetic history’’ according
to Domski and Dickson really is.
In closing this unavoidably selective review, I present, as promised, some of
Friedman’s revisions. Among other things, he changes his views on Kant on
intuition and mathematics (586f., 597) and corrects an earlier claim about Carnap’s
Logical Syntax: Carnap had tried to solve the famous dispute over intuitionism and
classical mathematics by means of his ‘‘principle of tolerance’’—i.e., both
approaches should be studied using a syntactic metalanguage, and the choice
between them then made for pragmatic rather than philosophical reasons. But that
would involve the language of ‘‘total science,’’ which uses classical mathematics,
and so appears to be a circular argument against the intuitionist. However, Friedman
now claims that Carnap did not beg ‘‘the question of the choice between classical
and intuitionist mathematics’’ (671): Because of the discovery of paradoxes, and
Hilbert’s unsuccessful proof theory, Carnap actually thought that the classical
mathematician should take intuitionism seriously and consider weakening its rules
concerning consistency.
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There are other interesting changes of detail, but they do not lead to a revision of
Friedman’s basic approach. However, in one regard, he changes his mind in a more
substantive way, prompted by Thomas Ryckman and Scott Tanona. It concerns the
notion of ‘‘coordinating principles’’ taken from Reichenbach. Since he assumes that
the mathematical formalisms of modern science have no empirical content of their
own, certain principles are required that ‘‘coordinate’’ pure mathematics with
empirical phenomena. Friedman (2001, 76f.) followed him here. Examples of these
principles are the laws of motion in Newton’s physics, or the light principle in
special relativity, that is, the assumption of the constancy of the velocity of light in
any inertial reference frame. As Friedman now explains, he now finds the idea of
such principles ‘‘deeply problematic … in at least two important respects: it assumes
an overly ‘formalistic’ account of modern abstract mathematics, and, even worse, it
portrays such abstract mathematics as directly attached to intuitive perceptible
experience in one fell swoop’’ (697f.; cf. 727). To deal with the first problem,
Friedman turns to different accounts. For instance, according to Husserl, we apply
geometrical concepts by successive idealizations, from the inexact spatial descrip-
tions given in everyday Lebenswelt or from the initial, egocentric perspective here
on Earth. At later stages of scientific development, we replace this by other frames,
such as the heliocentric or relativistic frames. For Husserl, unlike for Kant, this
account of the application of mathematics has to be historical (686–695).
Friedman’s description of Husserl’s views is illuminating, although it leaves one
with the worry that this is still merely a genetic account, not one that would answer
the original question of whether the application of pure mathematics to empirical
reality is valid.
Friedman also accepts Tanona’s point that coordinating principles are theory-
laden: the light principle is itself an empirical truth but only ‘‘elevated’’ to the status
of a coordinating principle. But it can be shown that proving the constancy of the
velocity of light depends on laboratory experiments that, as Friedman says,
presuppose a frame ‘‘which is approximately inertial according to both Newtonian
and relativistic physics’’ (781 n. 268). Whatever one thinks of this claim, the result
is an even deeper historicism of Friedman’s approach (for more changes of the
‘‘dynamics of reason,’’ see the contributions and reply by Friedman in Suarez 2012).
It is good to know history. It is also true that history of science and history of
philosophy are too important to leave them to historians alone. But, given my
previous considerations, I do not find convincing the claims for a replacement of
non-historical modes of philosophizing by some kind of ‘‘synthetic history’’.
Perhaps we should settle for a peaceful coexistence between HPS, and more other
forms of philosophical reflection and argument, among which I would count Kant’s
transcendental philosophy, current analytic metaphysics, as well as less historicized
kinds of philosophy of science.
Acknowledgments Many thanks to Theodore Arabatzis, Tom Nickles, Michael Sokal, and Mauricio
Suarez for comments that helped to improve this essay. Completion of this essay was supported by the
Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation, through research award FFI 2008-01559/FISO.
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References
Arabatzis, T., and J. Schickore. 2012. Introduction: Ways of integrating history and philosophy of
science. Perspectives on Science 20: 395–408.
Friedman, M. 1993. Remarks on the history of science and the history of philosophy. In World changes:
Thomas Kuhn and the nature of science, ed. P. Horwich, 36–54. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Friedman, M. 2001. Dynamics of reason. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Giere, R. 1973. History and philosophy of science: Intimate relation or marriage of convenience? British
Journal for the Philosophy of Science 24: 282–297.
Kruger, L. 1986. Why do we study the history of philosophy? In L. Kruger, Why does history matter to
philosophy and the sciences? Ed. by T. Sturm, W. Carl & L. Daston, 231–254. Berlin: De Gruyter,
2005.
Schickore, J. 2011. More thoughts on HPS: Another 20 years later. Perspectives on Science 19: 453–481.
Suarez, M., and T. Uebel. 2012. Reconsidering the Dynamics of Reason: A symposium in honour of
Michael Friedman. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 43: 1–53.
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