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Professor Levitt has given me permission to forward one of his e-mails to
Michael Berube, part of a discussion they have been conducting.
As for the suggestion that Gross and Levitt might be conservative hacks,
that is too funny for words. See _The Higher Superstition_ to check their
bona fides.
Clare Spark
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Levitt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 2:23 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [NASSR-L] Air Pump
------------------------------------
>Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
Let me explain one more time. "Leviathan" is basically a very dishonest
book. It diddles history outrageously in order to make an ideological
point. Here's the real "history":
By the time of the vacuum disputes, Hobbes was an utter laughingstock among
serious mathematicians because of his crazy pretensions. He was, in short,
a very typical math crank. His crowning moment as a crank came when he came
across Wallis's great work on the analytic geometry of conic sections, only
to refuse to read it, let alone to understand it. Of course, he had to brag
publicly of his ignorance. This came in addition to his numerous crank
demonstrations of circle squaring and angle trisection, which were gleefully
dissected by Ward, Wallis, Huygens, et al. In particular, the fatuity of
his argument for the methodological superiority of his kind of a prioristic
"Euclidean" reasoning was duly and sardonically noted. If there was one guy
in Europe who couldn't follow such reasoning or construct an argument in
that vein, it was poor old Hobbes.
Hobbes's entry into the vaccum dispute was, in fact, a way to advance his
geometric claims by the back door, as his opponents well knew. Wallis, in
consequence, was provoked to take up his pen in defense of Boyle and
friends. Of course, Wallis, mathematical genius that he was, was an
irascible son of a bitch and deaf to warnings from his friends that little
satisfaction was to be expected from debating cranks. Thus the prolonged
and tedious "air pump' dispute upon which Shapin & Schaffer focus. In doing
so, however, S&S willfully and massively distort the record, barely skirting
Hobbes's mathematical misadventures and the disesteem into which they had
already brought him. Specifically, they ignore the resulting irony of the
arguments for deductive a priorism that Hobbes resurrected. If you will
note, in their translation of the "Dialogus Physicus", they simply omit,
with scant explanation, Hobbes's resurrected circle-squaring claims, which
would shed a rather different light on what was at issue.
S&S do all this in order to hawk a general thesis that the air-pump matter
represented a "defining moment" in western science wherein hard-nosed
empiricism and its social concommitants drove out science via a prioristic
metaphysics, with its model of the isolated sage contemplating in private.
But indeed, the matter is much more compllicated than that, histroically and
philosophically. The tension between rigorous empiricism and deductive,
Platonic a priorism, remained a major issue in 17th century science. For
instance, if we examine the nasty squabble between Newton and a host of
vociferous critics in the Royal Society over the famous prism experiments,
we find Newton arguing for hard-edged empiricism as against the Platonic
arguments of his foes,which tried to demonstrate from first principles that
white light cannot be composite. On the other hand, in the later disputes
over the reality of action at a distance, we find Newton arguing,
essentially, from mathematical elegance, against the critics who point out
that the actual mechanism of gravity is undetected and undetectable. The
point is that the issue is as subtle as it is persistent, and hardly a relic
of pre-scientific thought.
It is a major issue today, by the way, as the disputes over, e.g., string
theory continue to demonstrate. See, for example, L. Susskind's new book on
superstring landscape theory.
S&S simply sweep all of this under the rug in order to make what is
ultimately a very spurious case that in developing "empiricist" science
based on public withnessing, the seventeenth century ruthlessly suppressed
an alternative, a prioristic "Hobbesian" science. Since the argument is
only sustained by a violently Procrustean method for dealing with actual
evidence, the "Leviathan" book is not worth taking seriously. But since it
was directed to sociologists (and English profs!) who don't know squat about
the unsolvable problems of classical geometry, the algebraic classification
of conic sections, or Wallis's series for pi, it did, indeed, get itself
taken very seriously.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
NL
