Apropo our recent discussion of the irrelevance of HET.
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Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 09:10:02 -0400
From: "Mises Daily Article" <[log in to unmask]>
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Scientism Standing in the Way of Science: An Historical Precedent to
Austrian Economics
by Gene Callahan
[Posted on Thursday, June 09, 2005]
In this essay I want to draw attention to a period in the history of science
that, I believe, will be of interest to supporters of Austrian economics.
The episode in question is almost unknown to those only familiar with the
accounts of scientific history found in works intended for the general
public or in science textbooks, because it doesn't fit into the storyline
such narratives almost invariably are intended to convey.
Murray Rothbard called that common tale the "Whig history of science," but
it also might be termed the Voltarian or the Enlightenment history of
science. It was spun in the wake of the triumph of Newtonian mechanics
during the 18th century, by intellectuals eager to inspire reverence for the
new natural philosophy they admired and to discredit the Catholic Church
they despised. According to their account, after the decline of ancient
Greek civilization, science had sunk from view beneath the dogmatism and
superstition of the time they tendentiously called "The Middle Ages." (See
Grant, 1996, for a debunking of this view.)
Only with the work of Copernicus, in the 16th century, did the light of
reason again begin to shine through those clouds of ignorance. At the turn
of the 17th century the clouds were further parted by Galileo and Kepler,
and several decades later they were finally burned away completely by the
brilliance of Newton. Once science had been liberated from the shackles of
faith, its progress was steady and irresistible. The problem is that, in
order to tell the story they wished to promote, the tellers had to edit out
large portions of the actual history of science. One of the significant
omissions is the fact that what was called "the mechanical philosophy"
dominated science during most of the 17th century.
It is important for our purposes to understand that the mechanical
philosophy, whose adherents included Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, Hobbes, and
other major thinkers, was put forward as a progressive program, seeking to
banish "occult explanations" from acceptable scientific discourse. Although
it took on somewhat different forms in the writings of its various
proponents, it can be summarized, without too much distortion, as asserting
that only the extension, place, and motion of bits of matter are valid
components of a truly scientific explanation (Westfall, 1977, p. 31). The
mechanical philosophers held that "bodies comprise only particles of matter
in motion," where matter is forbidden from having any active principles
(Westfall, 1977, p. 33). Or, to directly quote Descartes, who was perhaps
the foremost promoter of the approach under discussion, "I considered in
general all the clear and distinct notions which our understanding can
contain with regard to material things. And I found no others except for the
notions we have of shapes, sizes and motions . . ." (quoted in Sargent,
1995, p. 32).
A notable aspect of the mechanical philosophy, especially for our purposes,
was its adherents obsession with creating models that could account for
observed phenomena employing only the size, shape, and motion of material
particles. Little was done in the way of ascertaining whether the models
were realistic; the important thing was to have a model. For instance,
magnetism was a thorny issue for these thinkers, since the most obvious
explanation of magnetic attraction involved the occult and unacceptable
notion of an attractive force. Descartes devised a suitably mechanical model
attempting to account for magnetic attraction, one in which the Earth and
other magnetic bodies emitted streams of little screw-shaped particles,
which, when they passed through the pores of any iron object, drew that
object towards the magnet. (See the image of Descartes' model below, which
is from the cover of Westfall, 1977.)
Along the same lines, "In De Corpore [Thomas] Hobbes had presented a
mechanical explanation of the production of cold and ice, both of which he
attributed to a 'constant wind' that pressed upon bodies." A liquid freezes
when that wind "raises the parts of it in such a way that the uppermost
parts become pressed together and thus 'coagulated'" (Sargent, 1995, pp.
202-03). And Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke explained the relationship they
had discovered, between the volume of a certain amount of air and the
pressure to which it was subjected, by "the supposition that air consists of
particles like little coiled springs, like wool, which 'consists of many
slender and flexible hairs; each of which may indeed, like a little spring,
be easily bent and rolled up, but will also, like a spring, be still
endeavouring to stretch itself out again'" (Pyle, 1995, p. 476). Such models
seem absurd to us today. But it is important to realize that, at the time
they were put forward, they were seen as the cutting edge of science,
replacing the primitive and unscientific explanations of natural phenomena
that had been offered by Aristotle and his disciples.
Even in physics, where the mechanical philosophy was most successful,
dogmatic adherence to its precepts crippled research into certain topics.
For example, as Westfall notes: "By the end of the 17th century, the
mechanical philosophy, which encouraged optics early in the century, and
which furnished the idiom in which all students of optics . . . discussed
the science, had become an obstacle to further progress. . . . [O]ptics
stagnated for a century" (1977, p. 64).
In other sciences the effect of its supremacy were even more deleterious.
Westfall describes "the story of chemistry in the second half of the [17th]
century [as] the story . . . of its subjection to the mechanical philosophy,
since the growing role of mechanisms in chemical literature appears less to
have sprung from the phenomena than to have been imposed on them by external
considerations" (1977, p. 69). Similar to the way in which model building in
modern economics has been used to justify every conceivable policy
prescription, Westfall notes: "The mechanical philosophy did not in itself
offer a chemical theory. On the contrary, it was potentially adaptable to
almost any theory" (1977, p. 71).
Rather than searching for the fundamental causal factors underlying the
multiplicity of chemical phenomena, the focus of the mechanical philosophers
was on devising some model, any model, that appeared to explain each
particular phenomenon with which they were presented using only mechanical
elements. Westfall comments, "Like his fellow mechanical chemists, [Lemery,
the leading French chemist of the 17th century,] seemed possessed by a mania
to explain every property and every phenomenon" (1977, p. 73). He contends,
"In no area of science was the tendency to imagine invisible mechanisms
carried to such extremes" as it was in chemistry (1977, p. 81). For example,
Lemery's theory of why acids dissolved metals suggested that the particles
making up acids had little, dagger-like points, points which skewered the
smooth particles composing metals and then carried them away from their
comrades. Metals could be precipitated back out of a solution by adding
another substance whose particles moved in such an agitated fashion that
they would break off the points of the particles of acid, thus setting the
particles of metal free.
The most prominent, and arguably the best, chemist of the 17th century was
Robert Boyle. Although he was not as dogmatic as many other proponents of
the mechanical philosophy, it was still the case that "the development of a
satisfactory chemical theory as such was not Boyle's goal. Chemistry
represented to him a means to demonstrate the validity of the mechanical
philosophy of nature" (Westfall, 1977, p. 77). Indeed, "his mechanical
philosophy appears to have operated to thwart the most promising aspect of
his chemistry" (Westfall, 1977, p. 79).
Westfall concludes his discussion of mechanical chemistry by saying: "Since
there were no criteria by which to judge the superiority of one imagined
mechanism over another, the mechanical philosophy itself dissolved into as
many versions as there were chemists. . . . It is difficult to see that the
mechanical philosophy contributed anything to the progress of chemistry as a
science" (p. 81).
The reign of the mechanical philosophy had a similar effect on the
advancement of biology. One of the most significant biological discoveries
of the era, that the heart is a pump serving to circulate blood throughout
the body, was made not by a mechanical philosopher but by an animist,
William Harvey. (Descartes, instead, explained the heart as a heat engine
that expanded the blood, forcing it out through the circulatory system.) The
mechanists, when confronted with the discovery of mammalian eggs by
investigators employing the microscope, and unable to accept the existence
of anything such as a "formative virtue" that could transform some simple
substance into a complex body, responded with the theory that a fully formed
animal was contained inside every egg. Of course, if the little critter in
the egg was a female, she would already have eggs in her, within which would
be her fully formed children, who would contain eggs containing their
children. . . . It even was suggested "that the entire human race was
present already in Eve" (Westfall, 1977, p. 100).
In arriving at such theories, the mechanical philosophers had not engaged in
any deep contemplation of biology, as a result of which they concluded that
their method offered the best approach for examining living creatures. They
had already decided that only mechanical explanations could qualify as
scientific, and so they tried to force fit biological processes into their
moulds. As Westfall puts it, "[Mechanistic biology] did not arise from the
demands of biological study; it was far more the puppet regime set up by the
mechanical philosophy's invasion" (1977, p. 104).
The mechanical philosophy lost its hold on the scientific imagination during
the 18thcentury, due both to the unsatisfactory nature of many of the
explanations it offered, and to the stellar success of Newton's distinctly
non-mechanical theory of gravity. It is worth noting that in many cases,
science advanced by going "backwards" to concepts that had been rejected by
the mechanical philosophers as "unscientific." As I just noted, Newton's
theory of gravity did not meet the mechanical criteria for a proper
scientific theory--per Newton, one body was somehow able to influence another
body without any physical contact between the two--and when it was published,
it was widely derided by Cartesians as a throwback to the positing of
"occult forces" characteristic of the superstitious views of Renaissance
naturalism. Similarly, Newton attributed his mathematical advances to
revisiting the works of the ancient Greek geometers, and dismissed the
recently developed Cartesian geometry as "the Analysis of the Bunglers in
Mathematicks" (Westfall, 1980, p. 379-80). Furthermore, some theories
developed during the reign of mechanical philosophy, that were long rejected
as hopelessly flawed, eventually underwent resuscitation. Again turning to
Newton for an example, his idea that all material bodies are composed of
only a very few elementary particles, and that what appear to be chemical
elements are really compounds of those building blocks, and, therefore,
could be transformed into each other, was seen as an unsightly blemish on
his great career for two centuries. However, as Pyle notes:
This criticism seems unfair and unwarranted. In the first place, the
Newtonian matter-theory is remarkably close to what we no believe to be the
truth. Chemical species do only arise at a 'molecular' level, i.e. as a
result of the aggregation of simpler (and chemical neutral) constituents.
The chemical atom of Dalton is a highly complex structure, made up of
neutrons, protons, electrons, etc., held together by powerful
interparticulate forces of various kinds. The transmutation of the so-called
'chemical elements' is physically possible although, as Newton foresaw,
highly difficult owing to the strength of those forces (1995, p. 433).
Austrian Economics is for everyone: $14
Although the mechanical philosophy is long dead and buried, our age is not
without its own dogma regarding properly scientific explanations. Today, the
prevailing belief is that any real science must be composed of mathematical
models, models which yield quantitative predictions about some class of
events based on particular, initial conditions, also specified numerically.
Once again, the currently popular methodology has been imposed on diverse
disciplines with little regard to whether it is suitable to their subject
matter, but simply because it is thought to be the only respectable way to
do science. The philosopher John Dupr� calls this "scientific imperialism,"
meaning "the tendency for a successful scientific idea to be applied far
beyond its original home, and generally with decreasing success the more its
application is expanded" (2001, p. 16). Once again, we see a frantic effort
to generate models fitting the accepted paradigm, with little regard for the
realism of the assumptions and mechanisms from which they are constructed.
At this point, the relevance of the history of the mechanical philosophy to
the circumstances with which Austrian economists currently struggle should
be apparent. It illustrates a number of points that can be used to defend
their embrace of an unfashionable view of economics:
a.. It is not the case that science always makes steady progress; it
sometimes enters cul-de-sacs that it must eventually back out of in order to
move forward again. That is especially the case when a methodology from one
science is imposed on another without concern for its aptness in the new
domain.
b.. It is not the case that scientific truth can be decided by a "market
test"; science is not toothpaste, and markets cater to the preferences of
participants, without regard to whether those preferences arise from
scrupulous examination or ill-considered prejudice.
c.. It is not the case that a real science must forget its founders;
often, the key needed to unlock some gate barring the way forward can be
found in the ideas of a long-dead thinker.
d.. And it is not the case that scientists should placidly drift with the
prevalent methodological tide like so many jellyfish bobbing in the waves;
the greatest scientists have often been the ones who had the courage to swim
against the current.
____________________
Gene Callahan is studying at the London School of Economics. He is the
author of Economics for Real People. Send him MAIL, and see his Mises.org
Daily Articles Archive. Post Comments on the blog.
References
Dupr�, John (2001) Human Nature and the Limits of Science, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Grant, Edward (1996) The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages,
Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Pyle, Andrew (1995) Atomism and its Critics: From Democritus to
Newton,Bristol: Thoemmes Press.
Sargent, Rose-Mary (1995) The Diffident Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the
Philosophy of Experiment, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press.
Westfall, Richard S. (1977) The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms
and Mechanics, Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University
Press.
Westfall, Richard S. (1980) Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton,
Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
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