deGrasse Tyson...philosophy and science

"Neil deGrasse Tyson, Philosophy & Science"

by

Mike LaBossiere

May 12th, 2014

The Philosophers' Magazine

In March of 2014 popular astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson did a Nerdist Podcast. This did not garner much attention until May when some philosophers realized that Tyson was rather critical and dismissive of philosophy. As might be imagined, there was a response from the defenders of philosophy. Some critics went so far as to accuse him of being a philistine.

Tyson presents a not uncommon view of contemporary philosophy, namely that “asking deep questions” can cause a “pointless delay in your progress” in engaging “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” To avoid such pointless delays, Tyson advises scientists to respond to such questioners by saying, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”
 
Since Tyson certainly seems to be a deep question sort of guy, it is tempting to consider that his remarks are not serious—that is, he is being sarcastic. Even if he is serious, it is also reasonable to consider that these remarks are off-the cuff and might not represent his considered view of philosophy in general.

It is also worth considering that the claims made are his considered and serious position. After all, the idea that a scientist would regard philosophy as useless (or worse) is quite consistent with my own experiences in academics. For example, the politically fueled rise of STEM and the decline of the humanities has caused some in STEM to regard this situation as confirmation of their superior status and on some occasions I have had to defuse conflicts instigated by STEM faculty making their views about the uselessness of non-STEM fields clear.

Whatever the case, the concern that the deep questioning of philosophy can cause pointless delays does actually have some merit and is well worth considering. After all, if philosophy is useless or even detrimental, then this would certainly be worth knowing.

The main bite of this criticism is that philosophical questioning is detrimental to progress: a scientist who gets caught in these deep questions, it seems, would be like a kayaker caught in a strong eddy: she would be spinning around and going nowhere rather than making progress. This concern does have significant practical merit. To use an analogy outside of science, consider a committee meeting aimed at determining the curriculum for state schools. This committee has an objective to achieve and asking questions is a reasonable way to begin. But imagine that people start raising deep questions about the meaning of terms such as “humanities” or “science” and become very interested in sorting out the semantics of various statements. This sort of sidetracking will result in a needlessly long meeting and little or no progress. After all, the goal is to determine the curriculum and deep questions will merely slow down progress towards this practical goal. Likewise, if a scientist is endeavoring to sort out the nature of the cosmos, deep questions can be a similar sort of trap: she will be asking ever deeper questions rather than gathering data and doing math to answer her less deep questions.

Philosophy, as Socrates showed by deploying his Socratic method, can endlessly generate deep questions. Questions such as “what is the nature of the universe?”, “what is time?”, “what is space?”, “what is good?” and so on. Also, as Socrates showed, for each answer given, philosophy can generate more questions. It is also often claimed that this shows that philosophy really has no answers since every alleged answer can be questioned or raises even more questions. Thus, philosophy seems to be rather bad for the scientist.

A key assumption seems to be that science is different from philosophy in at least one key way—while it raises questions, proper science focuses on questions that can be answered or, at the very least, gets down to the business of answering them and (eventually) abandons a question should it turn out to be a distracting deep question. Thus, science provides answers and makes progress. This, obviously enough, ties into another stock criticism of philosophy: philosophy makes no progress and is useless.

One rather obvious reason that philosophy is regarded as not making progress and as being useless is that when enough progress is made on a deep question, it is perceived as being a matter for science rather than philosophy. For example, ancient Greek philosophers, such as Democritus, speculated about the composition of the universe and its size (was it finite or infinite?) and these were considered deep philosophical questions. Even Newton considered himself a natural philosopher. He has, of course, been claimed by the scientist (many of whom conveniently overlook the role of God in his theories). These questions are now claimed by physicists, such as Tyson, who regard them as scientific rather than philosophical questions.

Thus, it is rather unfair to claim that philosophy does not solve problems or make progress—since when excellent progress is made, the discipline is labeled as science and no longer considered philosophy. However, the progress would have obviously been impossible without the deep questions that set people in search of answers and the work done by philosophers before the field was claimed as a science. To use an analogy, to claim that philosophy has made no progress or contributions would be on par with a student taking the work done by another, adding to it and then claiming the whole as his own work and deriding the other student as “useless.”

At this point, some might be willing to grudgingly concede that philosophy did make some valuable contributions (perhaps on par with how the workers who dragged the marble for Michelangelo’s David contributed) in the past, but philosophy is now an eddy rather than the current of progress.

Interestingly enough, philosophy has been here before—back in the days of Socrates the Sophists contended that philosophical speculation was valueless and that people should focus on getting things done—that is, achieving success. Fortunately for contemporary science, philosophy survived and philosophers kept asking those deep questions that seemed so valueless then.

While philosophy’s day might be done, it seems worth considering that some of the deep, distracting philosophical questions that are being asked are well worth pursuing—if only because they might lead to great things. Much as how Democritus’ deep questions led to the astrophysics that a fellow named Neil loves so much.

Neil deGrasse Tyson...a philistine?

Philosophy of science is real

"Doing philosophy of science, an example"

by

Massimo Pigliucci

September 5th, 2013

Instititute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

I have recently been to the European Philosophy of Science Association meeting, where my colleague Maarten Boudry and I have hosted a symposium on our recently published book on the Philosophy of Pseudoscience. I have, of course attended several other sessions and talks, as is customary on these occasions (it is also customary to enjoy the local sights, food and drinks, which I dutifully subjected myself to…).

One of these talks was entitled "Explanatory fictions and fictional explanations," by Sorin Bangu, of the University of Bergen (Norway). I want to use it as a stimulating example of one way of doing philosophy of science. Before we get into it, however, a couple of crucial caveats. As you probably know, some scientists (Lawrence Krauss immediately comes to mind as a major offender) declare philosophy of science to be useless. By this they mean useless to scientists, as apparently their limited imagination cannot conceive of how something could possibly be interesting if it doesn't contribute to science (Shakespeare, anyone? Jazz?? Soccer???). I have argued for a time now that philosophy of science is interesting in at least three senses:

1. It is a self-contained exercise in reconstructing and understanding the logic of science. (E.g., discussions of paradigms and scientific revolutions, or what you are about to read below.)

2. It is useful to science theorizing when it deals with issues at the borderlines between science and philosophy. (E.g., discussions of species concepts in biology, or of interpretations of quantum mechanics in physics.)

3. It is socially useful either as science criticism or in defense of science, whenever science either makes questionable claims or is under attack by reactionary forces. (E.g., criticism of exaggerated claims by evolutionary psychologists or fMRI enthusiasts, defense against creationism and Intelligent Design so-called "theory.")

Now, nn. 2 and 3 should be pretty obvious (ok, not to Krauss, but still). The first mode of doing philosophy of science, however, is naturally a bit more obscure to the outsider, as is the case for pretty much any intellectual endeavor (trust me, there is a lot of science being handsomely funded about which you would scratch your head and ask "who cares?"). So what follows is just a taste of philosophy of science done as an intellectual activity in its own right, aiming at reconstructing the logic of how science works. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, this is my example, if you don't like it, I have others...

The question which got Bangu started is that of how fiction can have explanatory power. And by "fiction" Bangu means pretty much any scientific theory or model, which are by definition human imaginative inventions, i.e., fictions. Scientists, of course, are fine with a positive answer to that question, indeed my bet is that they would scoff at it as a non-question. Traditionally, however, many philosophers have answered in the negative for a variety of reasons. Bangu, however, is cautiously optimistic that one can positively deal with the problem. If you are still with me, let's be clear on what exactly is being attempted here: no philosopher is suggesting that somehow scientists have been wrong all along in using "fictional" accounts in their understanding of the world. The question is logical, not practical: how can a notion that is, strictly speaking, false (a theoretical model, which is always approximate) successfully account for something that is true (the world as it really is)? If this isn't your cup of tea (fair enough), you may want to skip to a more interesting post. If your intellect is even slightly tingled, read on...

If the way I framed the issue so far still sounds bizarre (and it might), then consider clear cases in which fictions don't, in fact, explain facts. For instance: no, Santa (a fiction) didn't bring the presents (a truth) last Christmas. The general logical point is that fictions cannot explain because falsehoods do not explain. But of course in science we are talking about idealizations and approximations, not outright falsehoods, i.e., fictions "concerned with the truth." Bangu's project, then, is to unpack in what (logical) sense the Santa falsehood differs from the the type of falsehood-concerned-with-truth that scientists traffic in.

There are several ways of tackling this problem, but the particular starting point considered by Bantu is that in science not just the explanans (i.e., the thing that does the explaining) but also the explanandum (the thing to be explained) has fictional content. But, wait, what does that mean? Are we sliding toward some form of idealism in metaphysics, where reality itself is somebody's (God? The Big Programmer in the Sky?) mental construction? Nothing of the sort (besides, an idealist would simply reply that mental constructions are real, just not physically so!). Instead, Bantu reminded us that data - the raw starting point of any scientific analysis - is immediately shaped by scientists into phenomena, that is, phenomena are constructed from data, they are not "out there," they are posited. To put it into more formal language: fictions in the explananda is what allows the successful use of fictions in the explanans. Bantu refers to this idea as the "Monopoly principle": you can't buy real property with fictional money (well, unless you are Goldman Sachs, of course), but there is no problem in buying fictional property with fictional money...

Okay, enough with the preliminaries, let's consider an actual example of scientific practice. The one Bantu picked was the answer to the deceptively simple question: why does water boil? The explanandum is water's (or other substances) capacity to undergo "phase transitions." The explanans these days is couched in terms of statistical mechanics. In current practice, a phase transition can be explained by invoking a role for (mathematical) singularities of the function describing the temperature curve of the system transitioning between phases, assuming that the system contains an infinite number of particles. But singularities are "fictional," and of course no real system actually contains an infinite number of particles. Nevertheless, the role of singularities is to represent the phenomenon to be explained, and they do a very good job at it. Moreover, physicists - at least for now - simply do not have a definition of phase transition that doesn't invoke singularities/infinities.

There are of course a number of further issues raised by Bantu's talk. I have already mentioned that a scientist would immediately point out the difference between idealizations and fictions. It turns out, however, that this only kicks the can a bit further down the road without solving the problem, since now we would have to unpack the (perceived) difference between idealizations and fictions. One could, for instance, think of idealizations as a sub-class of fictions; or maybe one can cash out the idea of idealization in terms of verisimilitude (truth-likeness, which is another philosophically more-difficult-than-you-think idea). And of course there is the broader question of how widely applicable Bantu's account of the relationship between truth and fiction in science actually is: are all scientific theories "fictional" in the philosophical sense of the term?

However you go about it, two things are important to keep in mind: a) no, this isn't the type of philosophy of science that should concern or worry scientists (who can go on using their tools without having to deal with how those tools logically work); but b) yes, this is an interesting intellectual puzzle in its own right, if your intellectual curiosity happens to be stimulated by logical puzzles and epistemic problems. If not, you can always go back to types 2 and 3 philosophy of science described above.

[Massimo Pigliucci has a Doctorate in Genetics from the University of Ferrara (Italy), a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Tennessee. He has done post-doctoral research in evolutionary ecology at Brown University and is currently Chair of the Philosophy Department at Lehman College and Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research interests include the philosophy of biology, in particular the structure and foundations of evolutionary theory, the relationship between science and philosophy, the relationship between science and religion, and the nature of pseudoscience.]

Thomas Kuhn at 50

 "Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science"

Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase 'paradigm shift'

by

John Naughton
        
August 18th, 2012   

The Observer

Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. It is also one of the most cited academic books of all time. So if ever a big idea went viral, this is it.

The real measure of Kuhn's importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world. Before Kuhn, our view of science was dominated by philosophical ideas about how it ought to develop ("the scientific method"), together with a heroic narrative of scientific progress as "the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors", as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy puts it. Before Kuhn, in other words, we had what amounted to the Whig interpretation of scientific history, in which past researchers, theorists and experimenters had engaged in a long march, if not towards "truth", then at least towards greater and greater understanding of the natural world.

Kuhn's version of how science develops differed dramatically from the Whig version. Where the standard account saw steady, cumulative "progress", he saw discontinuities – a set of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases in which communities of specialists in particular fields are plunged into periods of turmoil, uncertainty and angst. These revolutionary phases – for example the transition from Newtonian mechanics to quantum physics – correspond to great conceptual breakthroughs and lay the basis for a succeeding phase of business as usual. The fact that his version seems unremarkable now is, in a way, the greatest measure of his success. But in 1962 almost everything about it was controversial because of the challenge it posed to powerful, entrenched philosophical assumptions about how science did – and should – work.

What made it worse for philosophers of science was that Kuhn wasn't even a philosopher: he was a physicist, dammit. Born in 1922 in Cincinnati, he studied physics at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude in 1943, after which he was swept up by the war effort to work on radar. He returned to Harvard after the war to do a PhD – again in physics – which he obtained in 1949. He was then elected into the university's elite Society of Fellows and might have continued to work on quantum physics until the end of his days had he not been commissioned to teach a course on science for humanities students as part of the General Education in Science curriculum. This was the brainchild of Harvard's reforming president, James Conant, who believed that every educated person should know something about science.

The course was centred around historical case studies and teaching it forced Kuhn to study old scientific texts in detail for the first time. (Physicists, then as now, don't go in much for history.) Kuhn's encounter with the scientific work of Aristotle turned out to be a life- and career-changing epiphany.

"The question I hoped to answer," he recalled later, "was how much mechanics Aristotle had known, how much he had left for people such as Galileo and Newton to discover. Given that formulation, I rapidly discovered that Aristotle had known almost no mechanics at all… that conclusion was standard and it might in principle have been right. But I found it bothersome because, as I was reading him, Aristotle appeared not only ignorant of mechanics, but a dreadfully bad physical scientist as well. About motion, in particular, his writings seemed to me full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation."

What Kuhn had run up against was the central weakness of the Whig interpretation of history. By the standards of present-day physics, Aristotle looks like an idiot. And yet we know he wasn't. Kuhn's blinding insight came from the sudden realisation that if one is to understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which Aristotle worked. One must understand, for example, that for him the term "motion" meant change in general – not just the change in position of a physical body, which is how we think of it. Or, to put it in more general terms, to understand scientific development one must understand the intellectual frameworks within which scientists work. That insight is the engine that drives Kuhn's great book.

Kuhn remained at Harvard until 1956 and, having failed to get tenure, moved to the University of California at Berkeley where he wrote Structure… and was promoted to a professorship in 1961. The following year, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. Despite the 172 pages of the first edition, Kuhn – in his characteristic, old-world scholarly style – always referred to it as a mere "sketch". He would doubtless have preferred to have written an 800-page doorstop.

But in the event, the readability and relative brevity of the "sketch" was a key factor in its eventual success. Although the book was a slow starter, selling only 919 copies in 1962-3, by mid-1987 it had sold 650,000 copies and sales to date now stand at 1.4 million copies. For a cerebral work of this calibre, these are Harry Potter-scale numbers.

Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover."

The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on.

This brutal summary of the revolutionary process does not do justice to the complexity and subtlety of Kuhn's thinking. To appreciate these, you have to read his book. But it does perhaps indicate why Structure… came as such a bombshell to the philosophers and historians who had pieced together the Whig interpretation of scientific progress.

As an illustration, take Kuhn's portrayal of "normal" science. The most influential philosopher of science in 1962 was Karl Popper, described by Hacking as "the most widely read, and to some extent believed, by practising scientists". Popper summed up the essence of "the" scientific method in the title of one of his books: Conjectures and Refutations. According to Popper, real scientists (as opposed to, say, psychoanalysts) were distinguished by the fact that they tried to refute rather than confirm their theories. And yet Kuhn's version suggested that the last thing normal scientists seek to do is to refute the theories embedded in their paradigm!

Many people were also enraged by Kuhn's description of most scientific activity as mere "puzzle-solving" – as if mankind's most earnest quest for knowledge was akin to doing the Times crossword. But in fact these critics were over-sensitive. A puzzle is something to which there is a solution. That doesn't mean that finding it is easy or that it will not require great ingenuity and sustained effort. The unconscionably expensive quest for the Higgs boson that has recently come to fruition at Cern, for example, is a prime example of puzzle-solving because the existence of the particle was predicted by the prevailing paradigm, the so-called "standard model" of particle physics.

But what really set the cat among the philosophical pigeons was one implication of Kuhn's account of the process of paradigm change. He argued that competing paradigms are "incommensurable": that is to say, there exists no objective way of assessing their relative merits. There's no way, for example, that one could make a checklist comparing the merits of Newtonian mechanics (which applies to snooker balls and planets but not to anything that goes on inside the atom) and quantum mechanics (which deals with what happens at the sub-atomic level). But if rival paradigms are really incommensurable, then doesn't that imply that scientific revolutions must be based – at least in part – on irrational grounds? In which case, are not the paradigm shifts that we celebrate as great intellectual breakthroughs merely the result of outbreaks of mob psychology?

Kuhn's book spawned a whole industry of commentary, interpretation and exegesis. His emphasis on the importance of communities of scientists clustered round a shared paradigm essentially triggered the growth of a new academic discipline – the sociology of science – in which researchers began to examine scientific disciplines much as anthropologists studied exotic tribes, and in which science was regarded not as a sacred, untouchable product of the Enlightenment but as just another subculture.

As for his big idea – that of a "paradigm" as an intellectual framework that makes research possible –well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.

The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn's thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as "normal" science within the new paradigm. But already the anomalies are beginning to accumulate. Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. And while physics was undoubtedly the Queen of the Sciences when Structure… was being written, that role has now passed to molecular genetics and biotechnology. Does Kuhn's analysis hold good for these new areas of science? And if not, isn't it time for a paradigm shift?

In the meantime, if you're making a list of books to read before you die, Kuhn's masterwork is one.

 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Wikipedia]

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

by

Thomas S. Kuhn

ISBN-10: 0226458083
ISBN-13: 978-0226458083

The world...merely a roll of the dice?

"Interpretations of Probability"

by

Jason Rosenhouse

October 11th, 2011

scienceblog

Here's Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist, from his book Mathematics: A Very Short Intorduction:

However, there certainly are philosophers who take seriously the question of whether numbers exist, and this distinguishes them from mathematicians, who either find it obvious that numbers exist or do not understand what is being asked.

Everyone knows there is friction between scientists and philosophers of science. Richard Feynman spoke for many scientists when he quipped that, “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” From the other side, it is not uncommon for philosophers to lament the philosophical naivete of scientists (for example, in this recent book review.)

I am not aware of any similar tension between mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics, for the simple reason that I do not know any mathematicians who take any interest at all in the philosophy of their discipline. Perhaps this reflects badly on us as a community, but it is what it is. In my own case, every once in a while I get motivated to dip my toe into the philosophical literature, but it's rare that I find myself enriched by the experience.

There have been exceptions, however. While writing the BMHB (that's The Big Monty Hall Book) I found myself moved to read some of the literature about Interpretations of Probability. The reason was that in writing the book's early chapters I found myself very casually making use of three different approaches to probability. In discussing the most elementary methods for solving the problem I used the classical interpretation, in which probabilities record the ratio of favorable outcomes to possible outcomes, assuming the possibilities are equiprobable. Later I discussed the use of Monte Carlo simulations to determine the correctness of our abstract reasoning, and this suggested a frequentist approach to probability. In this view a probability is something you measure from the data produced by multiple trials of some experiment. Later still I discussed matters from the perspective of a contestant actually playing the game. In this context it was convenient to take a Bayesian view of probability, in which a probability statement just records a person's subjective degree of belief in some proposition.

The literature I found about interpreting probability was fascinating, and I certainly found plenty of food for thought. But for all of that I'm still not really sure what people are doing when they speak of interpreting probability. Probability theory is an abstract construction no different from anything else mathematicians study. No one talks about interpreting a perfect circle; instead we ask whether the idea of a perfect circle is useful in a given context. Frankly, as a pure mathematician I say that if you run into philosophical difficulties when applying the theory to a real-world situation, that just serves you right for trying to apply it to anything.

More seriously, the most important criterion for assessing any particular model of probability must surely be usefulness. That my Monty Hall experience led so naturally to three different interpretations suggests that no one interpretation can capture everything we have in mind when we use probability language. For that reason I tend to favor an ecumenical approach to probability: If your interpretation is helpful and leads to correct conclusions, then you just go right ahead and stick with it. The existence of other situations where your interpretation does not work so well is neither here nor there. Why should we even expect one interpretation to cover every facet of probability?

In perusing some of the literature on interpretations of probability, I noticed a bit of a cultural difference between defenders of rival schools of thought. In particular, Bayesians, to a greater degree than their rivals, really really care about this. They also tend to be a bit contemptuous of other approaches, especially the poor frequentists, who they regard with great pity. A case in point is this post by Ian Pollock, over at Rationally Speaking. He writes:

Stop me if you've heard this before: suppose I flip a coin, right now. I am not giving you any other information. What odds (or probability, if you prefer) do you assign that it will come up heads?

If you would happily say “Even” or “1 to 1” or “Fifty-fifty” or “probability 50%” -- and you're clear on WHY you would say this -- then this post is not aimed at you, although it may pleasantly confirm your preexisting opinions as a Bayesian on probability. Bayesians, broadly, consider probability to be a measure of their state of knowledge about some proposition, so that different people with different knowledge may correctly quote different probabilities for the same proposition.

If you would say something along the lines of “The question is meaningless; probability only has meaning as the many-trials limit of frequency in a random experiment,” or perhaps “50%, but only given that a fair coin and fair flipping procedure is being used,” this post is aimed at you. I intend to try to talk you out of your Frequentist view; the view that probability exists out there and is an objective property of certain physical systems, which we humans, merely fallibly, measure.

My broader aim is therefore to argue that “chance” is always and everywhere subjective -- a result of the limitations of minds -- rather than objective in the sense of actually existing in the outside world.

It's hard to see how this could be true. It is simply a fact that a great many physical systems produce outcomes with broadly predictable relative frequencies. A fair coin flipped in a fair way really does land heads about half the time and tails about half the time. The ball in an honest roulette wheel finds each number roughly one thirty-eighth of the time. Those are objective properties of those systems, and it seems perfectly reasonable to use probability language to discuss those objective properties.

So let's see what Pollock has in mind:

The canonical example from every textbook is a coin flip that uses a fair coin and has a fair flipping procedure. “Fair coin” means, in effect, that the coin is not weighted or tampered with in such a way as to make it tend to land, say, tails. In this particular case, we can say a coin is fair if it is approximately cylindrical and has approximately uniform density. ??How about a fair flipping procedure? Well, suppose that I were to flip a coin such that it made only one rotation, then landed in my hand again. That would be an unfair flipping procedure. A fair flipping procedure is not like that, in the sense that it's ... unpredictable? Sure, let's go with that. (Feel free to try to formalize that idea in a non question-begging way, if you wish.)

I don't know what level of description Pollock wants here. If he would care to come to my office, I will simply show him what I mean by a fair flipping procedure. But he knows what I would show him, since it's the same procedure everyone uses when they are not deliberately trying to cheat someone. The case of a roulette wheel is perhaps even clearer. By a fair procedure I mean, “The way it's done in your classier casinos, you know, with the ball going in one direction and the wheel going in the other.”

Let's move on:

Given these conditions, frequentists are usually comfortable talking about the probability of heads as being synonymous with the long-run frequency of heads, or sometimes the limit, as the number of trials approaches infinity, of the ratio of trials that come up heads to all trials. They are definitely not comfortable with talking about the probability of a single event -- for example, the probability that Eugene will be late for work today. Will Feller said: “There is no place in our system for speculations concerning the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow. Before speaking of it we should have to agree on an (idealized) model which would presumably run along the lines 'out of infinitely many worlds one is selected at random...' Little imagination is required to construct such a model, but it appears both uninteresting and meaningless.”

The first, rather practical problem with this is that it excludes altogether many interesting questions to which the word “probability” would seem prima facie to apply. For example, I might wish to know the likelihood of a certain accident's occurrance in an industrial process -- an accident that has not occurred before. It seems that we are asking a real question when we ask how likely this is, and it seems we can reason about this likelihood mathematically. Why refuse to countenance that as a question of probability?

As it happens, I am among those who are uncomfortable with applying probability language to one-off situations. It's fine to speak informally about the likelihood (or odds, or probability) of a one-off event, but if the idea is to assign actual numbers to events and then apply the formal theory of probability to them, then I no longer understand what you are doing. It's unclear to me what it means to say, “Given the information I have I believe the probability of this one-off event is one-third,” unless we can view the event as one among a long sequence of trials.

Let's consider Pollack's examples. Informally I might say that, given what I know about Eugene, it's highly likely that he will be late to work today. But it's hard to imagine what it would mean to assign an actual number to the probability that Eugene will be late, unless we have long experience with Eugene's habits on days that are comparable to this one. Likewise, I could make an informal assessment of how likely it is that an industrial accident will occur, but I don't know how to assign an actual number to the probability of it occurring. Of course, we might look at a specific mechanical part used in the industrial process and say something like, “This part has been used in tens of thousands of industrial processes and empirically it fails roughly one time in five thousand...” Now I know what we're talking about! But if we're truly talking about a one-off event that is completely divorced from any possible long sequence of trials, then I just don't know what it means to assign a probability to its occurrence.

Moving on:

The second, much deeper problem is as follows (going back to coin flipping as an example): the fairness (i.e., unpredictability) of the flipping procedure is subjective -- it depends on the state of knowledge of the person assigning probabilities. Some magicians, for example, are able to exert pretty good control over the outcome of a coin toss with a fairly large number of rotations, if they so choose. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the substance of their trick has something to do with whether the coin starts out heads or tails before the flip. If so, then somebody who knows the magicians' trick may be able to predict the outcome of a coin flip I am performing with decent accuracy -- perhaps not 100%, but maybe 55 or 60%. Suppose that a person versed in such tricks is watching me perform what I think is a fair flipping procedure. That person actually knows, with better than chance accuracy, the outcome of each flip. Is it still a “fair flipping procedure?”

I'm afraid I don't see the problem. I certainly agree that a skillful magician can fool me into thinking he is using a fair procedure when he really isn't. The fact remains that there are flipping procedures that produce stable relative frequencies of heads and tails. If I know you are using one of those, then I can make an objective statement about what will happen in a long-run of trials.

You might retort that I can never really know what procedure you're using, and that is where the subjectivity comes in. But that same argument could be used against any claim to objective knowledge. It's hardly a weakness unique to probability. Any fact you assert is inevitably based on a pile of assumptions about how the world is, and a determined skeptic could challenge you on any of those assumptions. But if we're ever comfortable talking about objective knowledge, then I don't see why, “A fair coin flipped in a fair way will land heads roughly half the time in a long sequence of trials,” should not be considered objective.

So it breaks down like this: It is an objective fact that certain physical systems produce outcomes with broadly stable relative frequencies. Probability theory is very useful for understanding such situations. Plainly, then, there is an objective aspect to probability. In practice I can be mistaken about certain facts that are relevant to making correct probability assignments. Thus, there is also a subjective aspect to probability. That is why, depending on the situation, it might be useful to think of probability in terms of the objective properties of physical systems, or in terms of our subjective knowledge of what is taking place.

This problem is made even clearer by indulging in a little bit of thought experimentation. In principle, no matter how complicated I make the flipping procedure, a godlike Laplacian Calculator who sees every particle in the universe and can compute their past, present and future trajectories will always be able to predict the outcome of every coin flip with probability ~1. To such an entity, a “fair flipping procedure” is ridiculous -- just compute the trajectories and you know the outcome!

Generalizing away from the coin flipping example, we can see that so-called “random experiments” are always less random for some agents than for others (and at a bare minimum, they are not random at all for the Laplacian Calculator), which undermines the supposedly objective basis of frequentism.

I disagree. That a godlike Laplacian Calculator can perfectly predict the outcome of any coin toss has no relevance at all to the objective basis of frequentism. The thing that's objective is the stable long-run frequency, not the outcome of any one toss. Our godlike Calculator will presumably predict that heads will occur half the time in a long sequence of trials.

Pollack goes on to discuss quantum mechanics and chaos theory, but I won't discuss that part of his post.

The three interpretations of probability I have mentioned are clearly related to one another. The classical interpretation defines probability without any reference to long runs of trials, but the ratio you compute is understood to represent a prediction about what will happen in the long run. And Bayesians don't think that long run data is irrelevant to probabilistic reasoning. They just treat that data as new information they use to update a prior probability distribution. And no one would deny that our judgements about how likely things are to happen in the future depends on the information we have in the present.

Given that different interpretations are plainly useful in different contexts, I don't understand the mania for trying to squeeze everything about probability into just one interpretation. You have lost something important by declaring that any probability assignment is purely subjective. Let's not forget that probability was invented in the context of games of chance, and in that context it developed models that permit fairly detailed predictions about long-run frequencies. That I can never be absolutely certain, in a given situation, that my model applies does not imply that all probability statements are purely subjective.

[Jason Rosenhouse received his PhD in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2000. He subsequently spent three years as a post-doc at Kansas State University. Observing the machinations of the Kansas Board of Education led to his unhealthy obsession with issues related to evolution and creationism. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, VA.]

An apologetic for Hawking?

"To adapt a quotation by Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. At any rate it is rendered perilously apt to mistake the seductions of pure hypothetical invention for the business of formulating rationally warranted, metaphysically coherent, and – if only in the fullness of time – empirically testable conjectures."

Hawking is better off writing about the adventures of George.

"Hawking contra Philosophy"

Christopher Norris presents a case for the defence.

July-August 2011

Philosophy Now

Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth. Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude.

Predictably enough the journalists went off to find themselves media-friendly philosophers – not hard to do nowadays – who would argue the contrary case in a suitably vigorous way. On the whole the responses, or those that I came across, seemed overly anxious to strike a conciliatory note, or to grant Hawking’s thesis some measure of truth as judged by the standards of the natural science community while tactfully dissenting with regard to philosophy and the human sciences. I think the case needs stating more firmly and, perhaps, less tactfully since otherwise it looks like a forced retreat to cover internal disarray. Besides, there is good reason to mount a much sturdier defence on principled grounds. These have to do with the scientists’ need to philosophize and their proneness to philosophize badly or commit certain avoidable errors if they don’t take at least some passing interest in what philosophers have to say.

Science is Philosophical

Professor Hawking has probably been talking to the wrong philosophers, or picked up some wrong ideas about the kinds of discussion that currently go on in philosophy of science. His lofty dismissal of that whole enterprise as a useless, scientifically irrelevant pseudo-discipline fails to reckon with several important facts about the way that science has typically been practised since its early-modern (seventeenth-century) point of departure and, even more, in the wake of twentieth century developments such as quantum mechanics and relativity.

Science has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions. Such were those ‘idols of the theatre’ that Bacon warned against in his New Organon of 1620, and such – albeit in a very different philosophic guise – those delusive ideas that, according to Kant, were liable to lead us astray from the path of secure investigation or truth-seeking enquiry. This was sure to happen, he warned, if the exercise of pure (speculative) reason concerning questions outside and beyond the empirical domain were mistakenly supposed to deliver the kind of knowledge that could be achieved only by bringing sensuous intuitions under adequate or answering concepts. While in no way wishing to lumber science with the baggage of Kantian metaphysics I would suggest that this diagnosis, or something like it, applies to a great many of the speculative notions nowadays advanced by theoretical physicists including proponents of string theory (Hawking among them) and some of the more way-out quantum conjectures. These thinkers appear unworried – blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say – by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification as required by Karl Popper and his followers. After all, it is the peculiar feature of such theories that they posit the existence of that which at present, and perhaps forever, eludes any form of confirmation by observation or experiment.

True, science has achieved some of its most notable advances precisely by venturing beyond the furthest limits of evidential proof. It has often broken new ground by following some speculative line of thought that involves a readiness, at least for the time being, to make do without the props and securities of ‘good’ scientific method. Indeed, this reliance on theoretical commitments that exceed the utmost scope of empirical testing is something that some philosophers would attribute even to basic physical laws or widely taken-for-granted scientific truths. On their view there is no such thing as plain empirical self-evidence, since observations are always to some degree theoretically informed. By the same token, scientific theories are always ‘underdetermined’ by the best evidence to hand, meaning that the evidence is always open to other, equally rational interpretations given some adjustment of this or that ‘auxiliary hypothesis’ or negotiable element of background belief. All the same, I don’t want to push that line of argument too far, because among some philosophers of science it has now become an article of faith; a dogma maintained just as fixedly as any precept of the old, unreconstructed positivist creed. Moreover it has given rise to a range of relativist or ‘strong’ sociological approaches which use the theory-ladenness and underdetermination theses to cast doubt on any distinction between true and false theories, valid and invalid hypotheses, or science and pseudo-science.

Very likely it is notions of this kind – ideas with their home ground in sociology, or cultural studies, or on the wilder shores of philosophy of science – which provoked Professor Hawking to issue his pronouncement. However they are in no way germane to my point about the speculative element involved in many episodes of major scientific advance and how philosophy has played its jointly enabling and regulative part in that process. By this I mean its role as a source of new ideas or creative hypotheses and also as a source of guiding precepts with respect to such matters as empirical evidence, logical validity, inductive warrant, corroboration, falsification, hypothesis-testing, causal reasoning, probability-weighting, and so forth. These serve to keep science securely on track and prevent it from taking the seductive turn toward pure, evidentially unanchored speculation or sheer science-fiction fantasy. That scientists can mostly do this for themselves is no doubt true enough although, I should add, it is very largely the long-term result of the work of philosophers. Ever since Aristotle there has existed a close though historically fluctuating relationship between the natural sciences and those branches of philosophy that took it as a part of their task to provide science with a clearer grasp of its own methodological bearings. Moreover it has sometimes been primarily a shift of philosophical perspective that has brought about some epochal change of scientific paradigm such as those whereby, in the insouciant phrase of American philosopher W.V. Quine, “Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle.”

I have no quarrel with Hawking’s aversion to philosophy of science in so far as it is provoked by the kind of wholesale paradigm-relativism that Quine was seeking to promote. On Quine’s account (and that of Thomas Kuhn) we should think of scientific theory-change as involving so radical a shift of conceptual schemes as to render the history of science rationally unaccountable and philosophy of science a poor (since entirely dependent) relation of sociology and behavioural psychology. If that were the sole position available to present-day philosophers owing to some large-scale failure of intellectual nerve then Hawking would be fully justified in launching his anti-philosophy salvo. However this ignores the strong turn toward a realist and causal-explanatory approach that has been the single most conspicuous feature of philosophy of science during the past two decades. In place of that earlier relativist drift these thinkers advocate a robust conception of natural kinds along with their essential structures, properties, and causal dispositions. Crucially in the present context their approach offers a critical purchase on the issue of what properly counts as scientific enquiry and what should more aptly be classed as metaphysical conjecture or (at the limit) mere invention.

So philosophy of science now looks set to reoccupy its native ground by getting back in touch with physics. This is not just a relatively trivial semantic point about the physical sciences having been described as so many branches of ‘natural philosophy’ until quite recently. Rather it is the point that scientific theories – especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking – involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth. This had better be recognised if we are not to be taken in by a false appeal to the authority of science as if it possessed the kind of sheer self-evidence or indubitable warrant that could rightfully claim to evict ‘philosophy’ as a relic from the pre-scientific past.

Least of all should philosophers carry their justified respect for science and its many impressive achievements to the point of ceding all authority over issues that lie within their own sphere of competence. Thus it is counter-productive for everyone concerned, philosophers and physicists alike, when Quine and others suggest that we should always be willing to change the ground-rules of logic so as to help us find room for certain otherwise puzzling, anomalous, or downright baffling results. Perhaps the seeming quantum paradox of wave/particle dualism can have its sting temporarily removed by lifting the classical rules of bivalence or excluded middle, i.e., those that would require that we accept either the statement ‘light propagates as waves’ or the statement ‘light is a stream of particles’ but surely not both on pain of logical contradiction. However the revisionist ‘solution’ gives rise to yet more intractable problems since it leaves both scientists and philosophers stuck with a huge normative deficit. After all, if they accepted Quine’s proposal then they would lack the most basic conceptual resources for assessing statements, theories or hypotheses in point of their internal (logical) consistency or even concerning the extent to which they hung together properly with other items of scientific lore.

Here again philosophers would do much better to stick to their guns, reject this particular line of least resistance, and hold out for the indispensability (on empirical as well as ‘purely’ rational grounds) of a due respect for the classical rule of bivalent truth/falsehood. Not that it could ever achieve what Hawking seems to envisage in the final paragraph of his book when he marvels at the thought of how ‘abstract logic’ could have thrown up the sheer wondrous profusion of present-day scientific knowledge. Here the point needs making – one to which his own book bears ample witness – that the knowledge in question has resulted from a disciplined yet often highly inventive project of enquiry wherein ‘abstract’ reasoning plays a crucial though far from all-encompassing or self-sufficiently productive role. This project combines the basic procedures of logical, e.g., hypothetico-deductive thought and inductive reasoning on the evidence with a whole range of ancillary resources such as analogy, thought experiments, rational conjecture, and – subsuming all these – inference to the best, most adequate explanation.

Hawking offers numerous examples of the use of each of these philosophical tools in the course of his book, along with other cases where their joint operation is the only thing that could possibly explain how science has been able to achieve some particular advance. All the same he is compelled by the ‘abstract logic’ of his own doctrinaire science-first approach to push that evidence temporarily out of sight when declaring the total irrelevance of philosophy for anyone possessed of an adequate (i.e., scientifically informed) worldview. Indeed it may be good for philosophers occasionally to remind scientists how their most productive thinking very often involves a complex interplay of empirical data, theories, working hypotheses, testable conjectures and even (sometimes) speculative fictions. Likewise absent from Hawking’s account is philosophy’s gatekeeper role in spotting those instances where science strays over without due acknowledgement from one to another mode, or – as frequently happens nowadays – where certain evidential constraints are lifted and empirically informed rational conjecture gives way to pure fabulation.

Besides this, there are supposedly cutting-edge theories which turn out, on closer inspection, to unwittingly replicate bygone notions from the history of thought that have been criticised and eventually laid to rest. Hawking’s book puts forward two such theories. One is his linchpin ‘M-theory’ having to do with the multiple dimensions – eleven at the latest count – that are taken to constitute the ultimate reality beyond appearances despite our sensory perception being limited to the three-plus-one of our familiar spatio-temporal world. On this account there cannot be a single, comprehensive ‘Theory of Everything’ of the kind favoured by sanguine types like Steven Weinberg but we can hope to get a whole range of specially tailored, region-specific theories which between them point toward the nature and structure of ultimate reality. The other, closely related to that, is Hawking’s idea of ‘model-dependent realism’ as an approach that makes allowance (as per orthodox quantum mechanics) for the effect of observation on the item observed but which nonetheless retains an adequate respect for the objectivity of scientific truth.

Here Hawking’s argument shows all the signs of a rudderless drifting between various positions adopted by different philosophers from Kant to the present. He spends a lot of time on what seems to be a largely unwitting rehash of episodes in the history of idealist or crypto-idealist thought, episodes which have cast a long shadow over post-Kantian philosophy of science. That shadow still lies heavy on Hawking’s two central ideas of M-theory and model-dependent realism. They both look set to re-open the old Kantian split between a ‘noumenal’ ultimate reality forever beyond human knowledge and a realm of ‘phenomenal’ appearances to which we are confined by the fact of our perceptual and cognitive limits. So if Hawking is right to charge some philosophers with a culpable ignorance of science then there is room for a polite but firm tu quoque, whether phrased in terms of pots calling kettles black or boots on other feet. For it is equally the case that hostility or indifference toward philosophy can sometimes lead scientists, especially those with a strong speculative bent, not only to reinvent the wheel but to produce wheels that don’t track straight and consequently tend to upset the vehicle.

A firmer grasp of these issues as discussed by philosophers during the past few decades might have moderated Hawking’s scorn and also sharpened his critical focus on certain aspects of current theoretical physics. My point is not so much that a strong dose of philosophic realism might have clipped those speculative wings but rather that philosophers are well practised in steering a course through such choppy waters, or in managing to navigate despite all the swirls induced by a confluence of science, metaphysics, and far-out conjecture. After all, physics has increasingly come to rely on just the kind of disciplined speculative thinking that philosophers have typically invented, developed, and then criticised when they overstepped the limits of rationally accountable conjecture. Such are those ‘armchair’ thought-experiments that claim to establish some substantive, i.e., non-trivial thesis concerning the nature of the physical world by means of a rigorous thinking-through that establishes the truth (or, just as often, the demonstrable falsehood) of any statement affirming or denying it.

No doubt there is room to debate whether these are really (and remarkably) instances of scientific discovery achieved through an exercise of a priori reasoning or whether they amount, as sceptics would have it, to a species of disguised tautology. However there are just too many impressive examples in the history of science – from Galileo’s marvellous thought-experiment showing that Aristotle must have been wrong about falling bodies to a number of crucial quantum-related results – for anyone to argue convincingly that results obtained in the ‘laboratory of the mind’ can only impress philosophers keen to defend their patch. Indeed, there is a sense in which the scientific enterprise stands or falls on the validity of counterfactual-conditional reasoning, that is to say, reasoning from what necessarily would be the case should certain conditions obtain or certain hypotheses hold. In its negative guise, this kind of thinking involves reasoning to what would have been the outcome if certain causally or materially relevant factors had not been operative in some given instance. Hawking constantly relies on such philosophical principles in order to present and justify his claims about the current and likely future course of developments in physics. Of course he is very welcome to them but he might do better to acknowledge their source in ways of thinking and protocols of valid argumentation that involve distinctly philosophical as well as scientific grounds.

This brings us back to the point likely to provoke the most resistance from those scientists – chiefly theoretical physicists – who actually have the most to gain from any assertion of philosophy’s claim to a hearing in such matters. It is that scientists tend to go astray when they start to speculate on issues that exceed not only the current-best observational evidence but even the scope of what is presently conceivable in terms of testability. To speak plainly: one useful job for the philosopher of science is to sort out the errors and confusions that scientists – especially theoretical physicists – sometimes fall into when they give free rein to a speculative turn of mind. My book Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism found numerous cases to illustrate the point in the statements of quantum theorists all the way from Niels Bohr – a pioneering figure but a leading source of metaphysical mystification – to the current advocates (Hawking among them) of a many-worlds or ‘multiverse’ theory. To adapt the economist Keynes’ famous saying: those scientists who claim to have no use for philosophy are most likely in the grip of a bad old philosophy or an insufficiently thought-out new one that they don’t fully acknowledge.

There is a large supply of present-day (quasi-)scientific thinking at the more – let us say – creative or imaginative end of the scale that falls into just this hybrid category of high-flown metaphysical conjecture tenuously linked to certain puzzling, contested, or at any rate far from decisive empirical results. Nor is it mere hubris for philosophers to claim a special competence in judging when thought has crossed that line from the realm of rational, scientifically informed but so far unproven conjecture to the realm of unanchored speculation or outright science fiction fantasy. One has only to pick up a copy of New Scientist or Scientific American to see how much of the latest thinking inhabits that shadowy border-zone where the three intermingle in ways that a suitably trained philosopher would be best equipped to point out. Nowhere is this more evident than in the past hundred years of debate on and around the seemingly paradoxical implications of quantum mechanics. Those paradoxes include wave/particle dualism, the so-called ‘collapse of the wave-packet’, the observer’s role in causing or inducing said collapse, and – above all since it appears the only way of reconciling these phenomena within anything like a coherent ontology – faster-than-light interaction between widely separated particles.

I shall risk the charge of shameless self-advertisement and suggest that readers take a look at my book for the case that these are pseudo-dilemmas brought about by a mixture of shaky evidence, dubious reasoning on it, fanciful extrapolation, and a flat refusal to entertain alternative theories (such as that of the physicist David Bohm) which considerably lighten the burden of unresolved paradox. At any rate we are better off trusting to the kinds of advice supplied by scientifically-informed philosophers with a well-developed sense of how speculative thinking can sometimes go off the rails than the kinds – including the advice ‘let’s put a stop to philosophy’ – issued by philosophically under-informed scientists.

Conclusions

No doubt there is a fair amount of ill-informed, obtuse, or ideologically angled philosophy that either refuses or tries but fails to engage with the concerns of present-day science. One can understand Hawking’s impatience – or downright exasperation – with some of the half-baked notions put around by refuseniks and would-be engageniks alike. All the same he would do well to consider the historically attested and nowadays more vital than ever role of philosophy as a critical discipline. It continues to offer the sorts of argument that science requires in order to dispel not only the illusions of na ïve sense-certainty or intuitive self-evidence but also the confusions that speculative thought runs into when decoupled from any restraining appeal to regulative principles such as that of inference to the best explanation. To adapt a quotation by Kant in a different though related context: philosophy of science without scientific input is empty, while science without philosophical guidance is blind. At any rate it is rendered perilously apt to mistake the seductions of pure hypothetical invention for the business of formulating rationally warranted, metaphysically coherent, and – if only in the fullness of time – empirically testable conjectures.

[Christopher Norris is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University.]

Further Reading:

Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design: new answers to the ultimate questions of life (Bantam Press, 2010)

Christopher Norris, Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: philosophical responses to quantum mechanics (Routledge, 2000)

David Papineau (ed.), The Philosophy of Science (O.U.P., 1996)

Thanks to stringer Tim for the article.

"Isis"--journal: philosophy of science

If you have interest in the philosophy of science you may be interested in the journal Isis. It is mostly a journal by subscription but many times select articles are for free. Here is a sample.

Focus: Historicizing “Popular Science”

by

Jonathan R. Topham

Abstract:

While historical studies of “popular science,” variously conceived, have grown in number and sophistication, they have sometimes seemed marginal to the discipline. James Secord's recent call to reintegrate the histories of both science popularization and science in popular culture within a more comprehensive history of “knowledge in transit” promises to overcome this marginalization. At the same time, however, Secord suggests that “popular science” should be abandoned as a “neutral descriptive term” because it is historically freighted, not least with “diffusionist baggage.” This Focus section explores the historical and historiographical implications of abandoning an essentialist definition of “popular science” and of examining instead its complex and varied history as an actors' category during the last two centuries. The essays emphasize the importance of transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives in exploring the very diverse ways in which the discourses and practices of “popular science” have been employed. In addition, they consider the implications of the modernity of such discourses and practices for the history of science in the longue durée.

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF “POPULAR SCIENCE”—viewed variously as science popularization and as science (or natural knowledge) in popular culture—have not only proliferated in recent decades; they have also become increasingly sophisticated in their historiographies. For many within the history of science, however, they have continued to appear marginal rather than fundamental to the discipline. In part, this has resulted from the difficulty of establishing a larger theoretical framework in which such work can be related to the discipline as a whole. Indeed, in a now‐classic article, published in 1994, Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey strove to demonstrate that “the history of popular science” was inevitably fragmented. The coherence that had previously been achieved by making “science popularization” the object of study was false, they claimed, since it privileged “authorized science” and “stunted the investigation of science in popular culture as a result.” At the same time, they argued, “science in popular culture” could not be made the object of study of a separate subdiscipline, since doing so would involve a naive disregard of the manner in which the “élitism of scientific discourse immediately delegitimizes popular experiences and epistemologies of ‘nature.’” In the one case, the slippage between “popular science” in the dative case (science for the people) and “popular science” in the genitive and ablative cases (the science of or by the people) had led to the perpetuation of a diffusionist mentality. In the other case, the attempt to separate the two had proved ill founded, since all natural knowledge—even the radical transmutationism of street demagogues or the Mosaic geology of biblical literalists—was unavoidably entangled with established science, itself often known through popularization. These are serious, if not necessarily insuperable, concerns, and they have left the subject “bereft of master narratives.”1 Nevertheless, it is surely desirable that historians transcend the fragmentation of isolated case studies and discover common themes and methods that allow research to progress within a larger framework that facilitates comparative perspectives.

One way of achieving this, while remaining alive to Cooter and Pumfrey's concerns, is to reintegrate the histories both of science popularization and of science in popular culture within a reconceptualized history of science in which science is understood, to use James Secord's phrase, as “a form of communicative action.” In “Knowledge in Transit,” Secord urges the importance of applying to our historical practice the well‐established theoretical insight that there is no genuine separation between the making and the communication of knowledge. Questions of “how knowledge travels, to whom it is available, and how agreement is achieved” are, he points out, fundamental to the making of knowledge, and in this sense the process of knowledge making involves communication, rather than merely being followed by it. Secord's new approach thus places the practices of science popularization firmly within the process of knowledge making, alongside such other communicative practices as talking and note taking in laboratory or field, writing research papers, defending research findings within learned societies and congresses, advising on government policy as an expert witness, and teaching students in classrooms and laboratories. Similarly, it makes the place of science in popular culture central to understanding how the knowledge claims of scientific elites were established in relation to the full range of competing knowledge claims within a culture. In Secord's hands, the history of popular science disappears as a disciplinary subfield, only to reappear at the heart of the discipline. Moreover, he goes so far as to advocate (as I have done elsewhere) that “‘popular science’ and its cognates” would be better abandoned as “neutral descriptive term[s],” since they have “an exceptionally rich and multivocal history” and tend to carry “diffusionist baggage” with them.2

Secord's radical proposal regarding the reintegration of the history of popular science within a larger history of “knowledge in transit” offers a powerful means of establishing a coherent framework of analysis, while avoiding the pitfalls identified by Cooter and Pumfrey. It is this approach, of course, that underpins his signal achievement in Victorian Sensation, in which, by studying the processes of communication associated with Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation—a work formerly understood primarily as part of a history of popular science—he is able to provide a radically revisionist account of the “Darwinian revolution.” Subjecting Vestiges to “the most comprehensive analysis of the reading of any book other than the Bible ever undertaken,” he shows how the engagement of a wide range of individuals and groups with the book, made possible as a consequence of the industrial transformation in the supply of print media, was a “turning point” in the process by which evolution took a pivotal role in the public arena in Britain. Moreover, rather than creating a crisis, Darwin's Origin of Species helped resolve the tensions between scientific specialists critical of Vestiges' science and those for whom its developmental cosmology represented the basis for a reformation of society. Thus, he claims, “what once made sense as the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ must be recast as an episode in the industrialization of communication and the transformation of reading audiences.”3 In my view, this worked example amply demonstrates the value and robustness of Secord's solution to the “popular science” conundrum.
WHY HISTORICIZE “POPULAR SCIENCE”?
Jump to Section

If, like Secord, we are to believe that what historians once studied as “popular science” should now be studied as part of a wider economy of “knowledge in transit,” why should Isis devote a Focus section to “popular science” at all? The answer lies in Secord's observation that, as an actors' category, “popular science” has a complex and varied history and has accomplished diverse ends for those who have used it. While it may fail us as a fixed and supposedly neutral descriptive vocabulary to be applied retrospectively to past events, the lexicon of “popular science,” and the work that it has done for historical actors, is itself richly deserving of historical study. Just as historians have increasingly paid attention to the work done by such key historical concepts as “genius” and “objectivity,” so there is much to be gained by historicizing “popular science” and cognate concepts.4 When and where did such notions originate? What ambiguities and complexities have they exhibited, and in what diverse and perhaps conflicting ways have they been used? How has their meaning and use changed over time, and what differences and continuities have their histories exhibited in different regions, countries, and languages?

It is not the object of this Focus section to answer such questions systematically but, rather, to reflect on the consequences of historicizing “popular science” in this way. Taken as actors' categories, the diverse international lexicons of “popular science,” “science populaire,” and “Populärwissenschaft” (to mention just three linguistic variations) have been used to organize scientific activity and discourse for barely two centuries. They are unmistakably phenomena of modern times. To some extent, they share common origins in Europe and North America in such large‐scale changes as the industrialization of print communication and the emergence of the disciplinary sciences. Yet, as several of the contributors emphasize here, highly diverse factors also operated in their histories in different countries and language groups. Furthermore, while there were identifiable moments in history at which such notions as “popular science” began to be used to organize the production and status of knowledge, they were contested from the outset, acquiring multiple meanings and being endlessly reinvented over time. Indeed, just as the discourses and practices of “popular science” came into currency at a historically specific moment, there is no reason why they may not pass out of currency again and become obsolete. In an age in which competing neologisms from PUS (Public Understanding of Science) to PEST (Public Engagement in Science and Technology) are offered as alternatives to “popular science,” we are particularly obliged, as Bernadette Bensaude‐Vincent points out in her contribution to this Focus section, to be historically reflexive.

It was to the broad historiographical ramifications of recognizing this short, modern history of “popular science” that the contributors to this Focus section were invited to address themselves. Moreover, by involving scholars whose historical expertise encompassed several disciplines and a number of temporal and geographical loci—ranging over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and including Britain, France, Germany, and the United States—the section was intended to develop comparative perspectives. The essays that follow thus provide a rich array of historiographical reflections on the significance of the historicity of “popular science” for the history of science. First, Andreas Daum examines certain “imbalances” in the existing historiography of “popular science” to urge the need for more comparative and transnational perspectives, concluding that the field ultimately needs to be integrated into a larger interdisciplinary history of public knowledge. Ralph O'Connor's essay continues this interdisciplinary emphasis, drawing valuable insights from cultural and literary history in order to provide an incisive reassessment of how “popular science” should be handled, both as an actors' and as a historians' category. Katherine Pandora's essay returns to the transnational theme, examining “popular science” in the antebellum United States to emphasize both its temporal and geographic diversity and its fundamental importance to the scientific enterprise. Finally, Bernadette Bensaude‐Vincent uses the recent changes in the conceptualization of “popular science” to illuminate its history over the last two centuries, before suggesting the need to develop a longue durée history of science and its “others.” While the contributors' perspectives are thus productively diverse, I seek in this introduction to draw out several common themes that run through them. First, I review the importance of transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives in developing the history of “popular science.” Second, I consider how such a time‐delimited history might be situated in relation to the historical longue durée. Finally, I conclude with a brief assessment of the value to the discipline at large of these historicized approaches to “popular science.”
TRANSNATIONAL AND INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES
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In seeking to explore the historicity of “popular science” and its cognates, several of the contributors are able to draw on increasingly well‐developed national histories of popular science to emphasize the radically different manner in which these discourses and practices have been developed and deployed in different countries. This is particularly evident in relation to linguistic differences in the vocabulary of “popular science,” as both Bensaude‐Vincent and Daum have previously noted. For instance, the neologism “vulgariser,” which Bensaude‐Vincent and Anne Rasmussen see as supplanting the more inclusive “populariser” in late nineteenth‐century France, has no proper equivalent in English. Similarly, the nineteenth‐century German vocabulary of “Wissenschaftspopularisierung” cannot properly be rendered as “science popularization” because, as Daum points out, the meaning of “Wissenschaft” extends so much further than the English word “science.”5 Such linguistic fractures emphasize the multiform history of “popular science.” However, even in two countries that share a common language and heritage, the development of the notion of “popular science” clearly exhibits significant differences. An excellent example of this is found in Pandora's account of the radically divergent notions of “popular science” that developed in early nineteenth‐century Britain and the antebellum United States, notwithstanding that the terminology and some of the key publications were imported from one to the other. For Pandora, the comparison not only points up the distinctive democratizing republican ethos of the antebellum United States but also highlights the singularity of the British context, which has sometimes (as Daum points out) seemed normative.

Such transnational studies, involving not merely comparisons between nations but also an appreciation of their interconnectedness, clearly have much to offer the historian of “popular science”—as of science more generally. However, despite the burgeoning of studies of “popular science” in different national contexts, little has yet been done to establish such perspectives. In the vanguard has been the research group “Science and Technology in the European Periphery” (STEP), which has fostered research on the transmission of scientific knowledge between centers and peripheries in Europe and has recently turned its attention to “popular science.” For these scholars, popularization is “one of the practices of appropriation” by which scientific and technological knowledge has moved around and been transformed within Europe. One of their key findings is that “popular science” had a significant role to play in the “discourse of modernity” and “the construction of the perception of a national scientific culture” in several “peripheral” countries, in a way quite distinct from its role in France, Germany, and Britain. In a somewhat analogous manner, Eugenia Roldán Vera's study of the export of William Pinnock's educational catechisms to newly independent Spanish‐American countries in the early nineteenth century exposes the manner in which “science popularization” was there “linked to the needs of legitimacy of the new political elites” and “was inscribed in a process of import of foreign scientific models and in the context of a relation of economic domination by the emerging European powers.”6 By outlining the ideological malleability and transnational appropriation of notions of “popular science,” these pioneering studies help to expose both the historical contingency and the interconnectedness of such notions in different contexts.

In addition to highlighting the manifold ideological constructions of “popular science” in different geographical contexts, several of the essays here also emphasize the extent to which the “scientific” element of it has varied historically and geographically. In English, of course, the term “science” was long applied to any formal department of learning, but in the early nineteenth century it came increasingly to be applied exclusively to “natural and physical science.” It was in this highly restricted sense that “popular science” and “science popularization” came into English usage (in stark contrast, as we have seen, to “Wissenschaftspopularisierung”). Moreover, as O'Connor points out, this transformation was accompanied by related changes, including the development of the distinction between “scientific” and “literary” productions. Such changes in the map of knowledge again require the historian to de‐essentialize “popular science” and to examine carefully its shifting and contested boundaries with other aspects of culture. Several of the contributors to this Focus section urge the importance of these interdisciplinary perspectives. For instance, O'Connor points out the extent to which the history of “popular science” can benefit by appreciating the literary craft of “popular science” writing and by applying to it a more adequate understanding of genre. Similarly, Pandora points out interesting parallels between increasingly expert‐dominated notions of popular science in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and what Lawrence Levine calls the “sacralization of culture.” Both of these contributors emphasize how much is to be learned about the history of “popular science” from historians of other aspects of “popular” culture. As Daum notes, our preoccupation with the privileged epistemology of science might have left us with too “exclusive” a focus.
“POPULAR SCIENCE” IN THE LONGUE DURÉE
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Of course, one of the key ways in which the project of historicizing “popular science” impinges on the practice of historians is in focusing attention on the changes in such notions and their use over time. In particular, as several of the contributors point out, important temporal changes have taken place in the politics of knowledge that have been associated with “popular science.” The long‐standing dominance of the “diffusionist” model of science popularization, which protects scientific expertise by asserting that nonspecialists apprehend scientific knowledge through a process of dilution and distortion, has perhaps tended to obscure the changing and multiform character of “popular science” in this regard. Yet the extent to which discourses and practices of “popular science” have been intended to exclude individuals from knowledge making has always been contested. In Britain, as in several other countries, one of the driving forces behind the development of a discourse of “popular science” was the commercial imperative of publishers, editors, and authors who wished to maximize the market for their products. For such individuals, the exclusionary usage associated with the “diffusionist” notion would clearly have been counterproductive. Similarly, as Anne Secord has argued, “popular botany” in early nineteenth‐century Britain was considered by many expert naturalists to be “the means by which private individuals could best be encouraged to extend their aesthetic appreciation and love of plants to an active and participatory pursuit of science.” Rather than being exclusionary, Secord shows, the notion of “popularization” involved individuals in botanical practice, while at the same time organizing and constraining their participation.7 In a preprofessional context, as Pandora's essay emphasizes for the antebellum United States, a discourse of “popular science” could readily serve to organize a scientific division of labor.

In Britain and the United States, it is clear that the development of more exclusionary uses of the lexicon of “popular science” was related to some extent to the professionalization of science in the later nineteenth century. For instance, while Susan Sheets‐Pyenson discovered a “low science” ideology in the popular science magazines of early nineteenth‐century Britain, she found this transformed by the 1860s; as Ruth Barton puts it, the new popular science magazines “sought not participation from amateurs, but support for professionals.” Bensaude‐Vincent has suggested that it was in the years after World War I, with the emergence of the new physics and related epistemological changes, that an unbridgeable gap began to be posited between scientists and the public. This was given expression, she claims, in the shift from an inclusive vocabulary of “popular science,” first to “science popularization” and then to “science communication.”8 As we have seen, however, Bensaude‐Vincent considers even this to be a temporary development, which is beginning to be displaced by the recent development of an alternative conceptualization. Moreover, as Daum observes, the rich history of the vicissitudes of “popular science” in the twentieth century has barely begun to be told.

Of course, the observation that the discourses and practices of “popular science” have a short history not only helps us to appreciate their historicity but also raises questions about the alternative configurations of knowledge they replaced or supplemented. It would, for instance, have made no sense to speak of “popular science” in Britain before 1800, and several eighteenth‐century historians have consequently paid considerable attention over recent decades to related but distinct discourses and practices of “public” and “polite” science.9 Moreover, the transitions between such different configurations of knowledge are clearly of fundamental historical interest. Is it, then, still appropriate to construct a longue durée history that encompasses these related phenomena within a single conceptual framework? Several of the contributors here address this question directly. For Daum, the multiform “popular science” of the modern era should be examined as one expression of a longue durée history of “public knowledge.” According to Bensaude‐Vincent, “popular science” has been one moment in a longue durée history of “science and common knowledge,” since, she argues, the distinction between “epistemê and doxa” was a “foundational gesture” of Western science. Finally, while O'Connor endorses Secord's longue durée framework of “knowledge in transit,” he nevertheless seeks to rescue “popular science” as an “umbrella‐category” that can properly be applied by historians to a wide range of phenomena over the longue durée.

While each of these approaches has much to recommend it, my own preferred approach continues to be that outlined by Secord. This places “popular science” and its cognates within the widest possible comparative frame, dismantling artificial distinctions between this historically specific set of discourses and practices and others, such as lab talk, note taking, monographic publication, pedagogy, correspondence, travels, translation, and, indeed, the “public science” of eighteenth‐century Britain. Moreover, as we have seen, its fundamental thrust is to break down the distinction between the making and the communication of knowledge that has so bedeviled the historiography of popular science. In Secord's historiography, the fact that “popular science” has been used by actors and historians alike to refer variously to science for the people, the science of the people, and science by the people ceases to be a problem. All of these are considered legitimate objects of historical inquiry, contributing to a common project of understanding how knowledge comes to be constituted and reconstituted within culture. It is this that makes the history of “popular science” a central aspect of the history of modern science, without which, as Pandora argues in regard to the United States, our understanding is impoverished.
CONCLUSION
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Whither, then, the history of “popular science”? The contributors to this Focus section are agreed that, just like “public science,” the discourses and practices of “popular science” and its cognates are historical phenomena worthy of serious attention. In this restricted sense, it is time, as Christopher Hamlin puts it, “to rehabilitate popularization, the category that dares not speak its name.”10 It is highly instructive, these essays suggest, to consider how such formulations arose in the modern era and how they have since changed. Moreover, it is especially productive to examine how differently they have been formulated in different places and languages and how these multiple histories have been interconnected. Much is also to be gained, the contributors argue, from an interdisciplinary focus on how “popular science” has been intertwined historically with the histories of other formulations of “popular” or “public” culture. Taken all in all, this amounts to a large‐scale research program, which promises to bring together in a productive manner research on a variety of fronts, addressing various problematics and using a range of methodologies.

At the same time, the contributors' historicization of “popular science” makes fully visible the extent to which an essentialist definition of the term fails to meet the needs of the historian. As O'Connor ably argues, this does not necessarily sound the death knell of “popular science” as a historian's pragmatic shorthand. Even in this highly restricted form, however, O'Connor suggests that historians should subject the term to constant scrutiny, in order to avoid importing unwanted assumptions into their historiography. More radical would be Secord's and my suggested abandonment of “popular science” as a “neutral descriptive term.” As we have seen, this need not leave us bereft of longue durée perspectives, and Secord's own “knowledge in transit” approach is here supplemented by Daum and Bensaude‐Vincent's emphasis on the longue durée history of “public knowledge” and of “science and its ‘others.’” Moreover, while the contributors here disagree about the best strategy to achieve the end, they are agreed that the essentialist use of the term “popular science” to distinguish the communicating of knowledge from its making has no place in the historian's analytical armory. The discourses and practices commonly designated by such terms as “popular science” in the modern era are, these essays suggest, fundamental aspects of the history of science, not merely adjunct topics to be studied by specialists within a separate subfield.

This Focus section was organized by Jonathan Topham. I am grateful to Bernard Lightman for making the section possible and for his constant encouragement, support, and expert guidance. I would also like to thank Lightman, Ralph O'Connor, and Roberta Topham for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction and the contributors for engaging in a most thoughtful and enlightening dialogue on this topic.

1 Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science, 1994, 32:237–267, on p. 253.

2 James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis, 2004, 95:654–672, on pp. 661, 670. See also Jonathan R. Topham, “Beyond the ‘Common Context’: The Production and Reading of the Bridgewater Treatises,” ibid., 1998, 89:233–262; Topham, “Scientific Publishing and the Reading of Science in Nineteenth‐Century Britain: A Historiographical Survey and Guide to Sources,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2000, 31A:559–612; and Topham, “Rethinking the History of Science Popularization/Popular Science,” in Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800–2000, ed. Faidra Papanelopoulou, Agustí Nieto‐Galan, and Enrique Perdiguero (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).

3 James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 2, 4, 514.

4 Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” Social Studies of Science, 1992, 22:597–618; Daston, “Scientific Objectivity with and without Words,” in Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, ed. Peter Becker and William Clark (Ann Arbor: Univ. Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 259–284; and Simon Schaffer, “Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 82–98.

5 Bernadette Bensaude‐Vincent and Anne Rasmussen, “Introduction,” in La science populaire dans la presse et l'édition XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Bensaude‐Vincent and Rasmussen (Paris: CNRS, 1997), pp. 13–30, on p. 14; and Andreas W. Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1849–1914 (1998; Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), pp. 33–42. See also Daum's contribution to this Focus section.

6 Agustí Nieto‐Galan and Faidra Papanelopoulou, “Science, Technology, and the Public in the European Periphery: A Report of the Fifth STEP Meeting (1–3 June 2006, Mahon [Minorca]),” Journal of Science Communication, 2006, 5(4):1–5, on pp. 1, 3; and Eugenia Roldán Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence: Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 3. It was an invitation from the STEP group to deliver a keynote address at their 2006 meeting that led me to explore further the historicizing of “popular science” and to propose this Focus section to the editor of Isis; see Topham, “Rethinking the History of Science Popularization/Popular Science” (cit n. 2), which gives a more detailed version of some of the arguments made here. Publications of the STEP group concerning popularization include Papanelopoulou et al., eds., Popularizing Science and Technology in the European Periphery (cit. n. 2); and Josep Simon and Néstor Herran, eds., Beyond Borders: Fresh Perspectives in History of Science (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), esp. Pt. 3.

7 Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 1990, 20:519–539; Jonathan R. Topham, “The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, and Cheap Miscellanies in Early Nineteenth‐Century Britain,” in Geoffrey Cantor et al., Reading the Magazine of Nature: Science in the Nineteenth‐Century Periodical (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 37–66; Topham, “Publishing ‘Popular Science’ in Early Nineteenth‐Century Britain,” in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth‐Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 135–168; and Anne Secord, “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth‐Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis, 2002, 93:28–57, on p. 28.

8 Susan Sheets‐Pyenson, “Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875,” Annals of Science, 1985, 42:549–572; Ruth Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science and the Purposes of Popularization in Some English Popular Science Journals of the 1860s,” ibid., 1998, 55:1–33, on p. 3; and Bernadette Bensaude‐Vincent, “A Genealogy of the Increasing Gap between Science and the Public,” Public Understanding of Science, 2001, 10:99–113, on p. 106.

9 See, e.g., Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992); and Alice N. Walters, “Conversation Pieces: Science and Politeness in Eighteenth‐Century England,” Hist. Sci., 1997, 35:121–154.

10 Christopher Hamlin, “Games Editors Played or Knowledge Readers Made?” Isis, 2005, 96:633–642, on p. 642.

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