4 ms·

In what may be a case of Baader-Meinhof, I just came across the term "Whiggish" for the first time, reading Steven Weinberg's _To Explain the World_ (pretty goo

In what may be a case of Baader-Meinhof, I just came across the term "Whiggish" for the first time, reading Steven Weinberg's _To Explain the World_ (pretty good so far). He also has a dig at Kuhn, recounting a time when they met briefly and Kuhn gave a defense of Aristotle that he found incoherent. I'm no expert in the field of scientific thought, but my sympathies fall with Morris and Weinberg and the like. I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you've had the privilege to learn from. There are legitimate social and ethical concerns for everyone to keep in mind with the advancement of scientific knowledge. But this shouldn't be conflated with the idea that we don't understand the natural world better than we used to. We do.

ShabbosGoy 8y ago
> I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you've had the privilege to learn from. Would physics as a discipline exist in its current form without thinkers like Aristotle? That’s the more important question for me.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  The course of science is shaped by the natural world at least as much by people. It needs people with the curiosity of Aristotle, but how it proceeds depends also on what nature reveals to them, and on what they can pry from nature by using what they have learned so far. My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    > My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings. The anthropic principle states as much. I like that you used “intelligent beings” instead of humans, because I could imagine a scenario where synthetic or artificially intelligent beings would arrive to the same conclusions, upon making the same observations of their natural world.
benbreen 8y ago
I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826 https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826 Ironically, given the fact that Morris and Weinberg both prize clarity of thought, I think they are talking at cross purposes when they critique historians of science and are not properly defining their terms. Take this quote from the OP for instance: "While studying at Princeton, Morris soon learned that Kuhn held in particular contempt any view of science as a triumphal procession toward a more accurate description of the universe and how it works, a view called 'Whiggishness,' from British politics. The ultimate mouthpiece of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggish position in The Ashtray is an unnamed Harvard graduate student who insists that a new paradigm is not necessarily better than the old one, 'just different.'" But Butterfield and other critics of the so-called "Whig" school of history are not contesting the proposition that we now understand the natural world better than a cave man (or a Hellenistic Greek) did. (They're also not relativists, incidentally). Instead, they're critiquing the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable. In other words, there is an underlying physical reality that sets constraints on what we can know and how we know it. But within those constraints there are innumerable potential branching paths. A Whiggish take on history of science might say, for instance, that it was inevitable that the first moon landing would be achieved by a nation with Enlightenment values. A non-Whig interpretation is not saying that the moon doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't care about the Apollo program. It's pointing out that the specific course taken by our timeline of history of science is not an inevitability. It could have been otherwise.
- tptacek 8y ago
  This comment is at least as useful as the article. Thanks!
- schoen 8y ago
  Your review is a very interesting take. It reminds me of someone's observation (I forgot whose) that mathematics is often presented as a set of successful proofs and derivations, without an explanation of the motivation behind them or how they were discovered. So proof tactics may seem somewhat magical, even though they might in fact be a result of a mathematician's tinkering and blundering around, including alternative approaches that didn't work. An interesting example that someone gave from elementary mathematics is the derivation of the quadratic formula. ax²+bx+c=0 (a≠0) 4a(ax²+bx+c)=4a(0)=0 4a²x²+4abx+4ac=0 4a²x²+4abx+4ac+b²=b² 4a²x²+4abx+b²=b²-4ac (2ax+b)(2ax+b)=b²-4ac 2ax+b=±√(b²-4ac) 2ax=-b±√(b²-4ac) x=(-b±√(b²-4ac))/2a Someone discussing this pointed out that this derivation is easy to follow, but extraordinarily mysterious in terms of how we knew to do various things at various steps, such as mysteriously multiplying both sides by 4a or mysteriously adding b² to each side at some point. How did we know to do that? Of course there are different explanations of the underlying motivations and the history of how people discovered this proof, but it's easy to be given the proof without any of that context, and that kind of thing is in fact the rule rather than the exception in many parts of math study. Again, I think this was someone else's observation but I don't remember where I came across it.

ShabbosGoy 8y ago

> I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you've had the privilege to learn from. Would physics as a discipline exist in its current form without thinkers like Aristotle? That’s the more important question for me.

mannykannot 8y ago
The course of science is shaped by the natural world at least as much by people. It needs people with the curiosity of Aristotle, but how it proceeds depends also on what nature reveals to them, and on what they can pry from nature by using what they have learned so far. My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings.
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago
  > My guess is that something like our physics has emerged (or will, relatively shortly) on every world populated with intelligent beings. The anthropic principle states as much. I like that you used “intelligent beings” instead of humans, because I could imagine a scenario where synthetic or artificially intelligent beings would arrive to the same conclusions, upon making the same observations of their natural world.

benbreen 8y ago

I reviewed Weinberg's book and took a somewhat different stance on the issue here: https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826 https://www.chronicle.com/article/VialError/234826 Ironically, given the fact that Morris and Weinberg both prize clarity of thought, I think they are talking at cross purposes when they critique historians of science and are not properly defining their terms. Take this quote from the OP for instance: "While studying at Princeton, Morris soon learned that Kuhn held in particular contempt any view of science as a triumphal procession toward a more accurate description of the universe and how it works, a view called 'Whiggishness,' from British politics. The ultimate mouthpiece of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggish position in The Ashtray is an unnamed Harvard graduate student who insists that a new paradigm is not necessarily better than the old one, 'just different.'" But Butterfield and other critics of the so-called "Whig" school of history are not contesting the proposition that we now understand the natural world better than a cave man (or a Hellenistic Greek) did. (They're also not relativists, incidentally). Instead, they're critiquing the idea that the specific path of progress is inevitable. In other words, there is an underlying physical reality that sets constraints on what we can know and how we know it. But within those constraints there are innumerable potential branching paths. A Whiggish take on history of science might say, for instance, that it was inevitable that the first moon landing would be achieved by a nation with Enlightenment values. A non-Whig interpretation is not saying that the moon doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't care about the Apollo program. It's pointing out that the specific course taken by our timeline of history of science is not an inevitability. It could have been otherwise.

tptacek 8y ago
This comment is at least as useful as the article. Thanks!
schoen 8y ago
Your review is a very interesting take. It reminds me of someone's observation (I forgot whose) that mathematics is often presented as a set of successful proofs and derivations, without an explanation of the motivation behind them or how they were discovered. So proof tactics may seem somewhat magical, even though they might in fact be a result of a mathematician's tinkering and blundering around, including alternative approaches that didn't work. An interesting example that someone gave from elementary mathematics is the derivation of the quadratic formula. ax²+bx+c=0 (a≠0) 4a(ax²+bx+c)=4a(0)=0 4a²x²+4abx+4ac=0 4a²x²+4abx+4ac+b²=b² 4a²x²+4abx+b²=b²-4ac (2ax+b)(2ax+b)=b²-4ac 2ax+b=±√(b²-4ac) 2ax=-b±√(b²-4ac) x=(-b±√(b²-4ac))/2a Someone discussing this pointed out that this derivation is easy to follow, but extraordinarily mysterious in terms of how we knew to do various things at various steps, such as mysteriously multiplying both sides by 4a or mysteriously adding b² to each side at some point. How did we know to do that? Of course there are different explanations of the underlying motivations and the history of how people discovered this proof, but it's easy to be given the proof without any of that context, and that kind of thing is in fact the rule rather than the exception in many parts of math study. Again, I think this was someone else's observation but I don't remember where I came across it.