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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Alfred Nordmann

Handbooks and companions are literary genres of their own and usually pretend to provide a review of theory or a survey of a field of inquiry. One should expect, therefore, that a community of scholars has taken an interest in the relation of philosophy of science to literature, or at least in the contributions by philosophers of science to an understanding of the relation of literature and science. Interestingly, this is not the case. The present chapter thus takes poetic license to imagine a field of inquiry that is not entirely unpopulated but wide open and that offers room for various kinds of inquiry. Rather than collect together isolated contributions to this field of inquiry, it picks some of them in a rather eclectic manner and only to hint at further work that could be done along these lines. And instead of giving a complete account of the sparse activities in the open field, it issues an invitation for others to enter, and it does this by highlighting some of the more general research projects that might be pursued there.

Philosophy of science

This is not the place to define “philosophy of science.” Not even philosophers of science try to do this, let alone the society for the History of the Philosophy of Science (HOPOS). This society considers all reflections on the principles and methods, teachings and practices of science as a kind of philosophy of science, especially if these reflections are performed by certified scientists or philosophers. Accordingly, one might talk about Aristotle’s or Descartes’s, Lavoisier’sor Newton’s philosophy of science; or what the Ptolemeans meant by “saving the phenomena” as a question about their largely implicit philosophy of science. On this approach, the relation of philosophy of science to literature becomes indistinguishable from “philosophy and literature” more generally, including the many ways in which conceptions of nature are engaged by literary practice. “Philosophy of science” is also the name for a branch of philosophy, however, and this branch of philosophy originated under rather specific conditions towards the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the claims of philosophy to offer a scientific or absolute grounding of the sciences came apart at the seams. First, scientists were put off by such claims, especially those associated with the powerful philosophy of Hegel. Second, within the most advanced philosophical and scientific traditions of the nineteenth century there came the realization that a science of metaphysics is not possible. After Immanuel Kant had proposed that Newton’s laws articulated the basic and necessary suppositions that make any knowledge of nature or scientific experience possible, and after the physiology of the senses looked at such necessary conditions from an empirical point of view, scientists and philosophers recognized that the formulation and adoption of any theory involved acts of judgment that could not be eliminated from accounts of science. This recognition came under the name of “conventionalism” or “under-determination of theories by evidence”: scientists must choose a geometry within which to represent the facts, they can choose a formulation of mechanics that does not include “force” or “energy,” and they routinely choose conventions that guide their work in the name of simplicity, descriptive faithfulness, or consistency. Third, these acts of judgment or elements of choice foreground that scientists are not solitary thinkers who produce evidence and then draw logical conclusions, but that there is a scientific community. Hence, the methods of science are no longer just methods of doing and thinking, they are methods for securing agreement, and thereby for an “intersubjective” kind of objectivity. And thus arose among philosopher-scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz, William Whewell, Heinrich Hertz, Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, Emile Meyerson, Karl Pearson, or Charles Sanders Peirce a philosophy of science that is distinct from theory of knowledge, philosophy of nature, ontology, or logic. It is concerned with a peculiar form of public reasoning and the rationality of scientific procedure. It is for this philosophy of science – the highly disciplined investigation mostly of the natural sciences – that we now ask about its relation to literature.

Resonance

The most straightforward question always appears to be the one concerning influence: Where did philosophy of science leave its imprint on the manner of writing? On the face of it, this question invites only anecdotal answers and no sustained program of research. One might look for the occasional novel that features a philosopher of science. In a similar spirit of eclecticism, one might wish to reconstruct from portraits of science and of scientists how images of science are shaped by philosophies of science. Do we see scientists in the image of an inductivist philosophy of science, as tireless collectors of evidence? Do we see them along the lines of Karl Popper’s falsificationism, as acerbic critical minds who question all human belief? Or do we see unglamorous “normal scientists” who seek to find just another small piece of the puzzle in the course of articulating a Kuhnian paradigm?

Beyond the question of influence as the reappearance of people and ideas in another setting, there is the question of how literary productions and images of objectivity rely on a methodology that is informed by philosophical views of scientific method. Thomas Bernhard’s novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew, for example, is all Thomas Bernhard and very little Ludwig Wittgenstein. To be sure, Bernhard evokes the eccentric life of Wittgenstein and the culture that produced not only Wittgenstein and the Vienna circle of philosophers of science but also himself, a writer presumably of equal stature (Bernhard 1989). In contrast, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does not explain the curious title of the book at all – it features neither Wittgenstein nor the mistress he never had – and yet there is an uncanny presence of Wittgenstein in the sequence of remarks that consider in their obliquely factual barrenness a world that signifies its own limits and its own end (Markson 1990). Only the latter novel thus invites the challenge to characterize the influence of a philosophy of science on its literary method.¹

Such questions about the indebtedness of literary method to philosophical accounts of scientific method have been brought to the work of Robert Musil and Bertolt Brecht.² Musil is a particularly obvious case in that he wrote a dissertation on Ernst Mach and thus was himself a certified philosopher of science at least for a period in his life (Musil 1982). Much of the Man without Qualities revolves around Mach’s proposal that science produces a representation of the facts by constructions of analogy. This “picturing without resemblance” amalgamates truth and untruth and produces accurate determinations of reality by means of the imagination (Schelling 1970; Moser 1984; Frank 1988). The famous opening lines of the book as well as the intellectual regime of Young Törless announce this probing of a kind of positivism (Arvon 1970; Luserke 1987; Musil 1982, 1995; Mehigan 1997; Smith 2000; also Barnouw 1978).

Brecht constantly took up and reworked philosophical ideas to bolster his theatrical method and he therefore took a considerable interest in the new, anti-Aristotelian logic that developed just prior to his own anti-Aristotelian poetics (Danneberg 1996; Danneberg and Müller 1990; Sautter 1995; Giles 1997). Years later, he turned to the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach for advice about Galileo Galilei, a play which probably informed a radical revisioning of science in Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method (Feyerabend 1988; but see Jungius 2000).³ Indeed, Feyerabend’s philosophy of science may be the one place where the direction of influence has been reversed and where a literary strategy informed notions of scientific rationality. Feyerabend’s “anarchist” or “Dadaist” theory of knowledge proposes anti-methodical methods such as the principle of counter-induction, and these methods may well have drawn inspiration from Brecht’s “Five Difficulties of Writing Down the Truth” which prepared the ground for the Galileo play (Brecht 1966; cf. Dusek 1998; Feyerabend 1967).

Difference

“All that philosophy can hope to accomplish is to make poetry and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites.” These words summarize Gaston Bachelard’s work on the scientific spirit and the poetic imagination (Bachelard 1987: 2; see also Gaudin 1971). They also offer a different perspective on the relation of philosophy of science and literature – different philosophies of science construe the difference between science and literature differently. And surprisingly, perhaps, few philosophies of science fortify the boundary between them as well as does Bachelard’s: beholden to first impressions, to principles of sympathy and analogy, the work of the imagination needs to be denied by a scientific spirit that inexorably drives a wedge between rationality and intuition (Tiles 1984; McAllester 1989; Chimisso 2001).

The boundary between poetic imagination and scientific rationalization proves far more porous than first meets the eye, especially in the accounts offered by the logical empiricists of the Vienna Circle. Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” is known for drawing a sharp divide between the language of science, with its clarity of meaning, and all other forms of expression that are lumped together as metaphysics, poetry, music, and art. It sounds like an ultimate denigration, then, when in this essay Carnap likens Heidegger’s metaphysics to poetry (Carnap 1959).⁴ Yet this is the same Rudolf Carnap who was read and to some extent appropriated by Brecht, and the same Rudolf Carnap who was influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and who admired Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics – two authors who adopted literary strategies to expose the meaninglessness of certain uses of language.

Wittgenstein’s, Nietzsche’s, and perhaps also Carnap’s critiques of language may well be compatible with a certain respect for the ineffable, and the association of metaphysics with poetry may therefore amount to a necessary division of labor (Friedman 2000; Gabriel 2003). According to logical empiricism and in contrast to Bachelard, science in the sphere of empirical meaningfulness and the so-called context of justification cannot say “no” to the imagination, quite simply because science and imagination don’t speak the same language. Moreover, the scientifically undisciplined and ungrammatical language of metaphysics, speculation, and imagination may well play a significant role in the context of discovery. This division of labor between “context of discovery” and “context of justification” is most pronounced in the works of Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper (Reichenbach 1938; Popper 1959). It does not coincide with Bachelard’s distinction between poetry and science but differentiates a hedonistic sphere in which everything is permitted from a highly disciplined sphere that is governed by criteria of meaningfulness and in which science becomes scientific. By speaking about science, then, these philosophers of science also invoke the unspeakable context in which scientific ideas originate.⁵

The examples of Bachelard and Carnap suggest that philosophy of science is engaged in “boundary work” not just in respect to science and non-science in general, but on behalf of science and literature in particular (Gieryn 1983).⁶ This becomes even more evident in recent decades, though the boundary work is still performed mostly implicitly. The notion of “style” is one arena where this work takes place, the notion of “objectivity” is another, and the topic of “fiction” is a third.

With Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science and its proliferation of paradigms, the question arose whether there is a close affinity between literary styles and scientific paradigms as schemes of thought and practice that organize phenomena and orient perception. Kuhn himself raised the question, and since then it more or less silently accompanied discussions of styles of scientific reasoning (Kuhn 1977; Hacking 1992; Crombie 1995; Kwa 2005). Similarly, a historical understanding of “objectivity” weakened its ties to representational truth. The trained eye of scientific genius, impersonal and mechanical procedures, and the achievement literally of phenomena, capabilities, and artifacts at various times represent the accomplishment of objectivity – and science shares this accomplishment with literature and the arts (Galison 1999; Daston and Galison 2007). Finally, recent discussions of scientific modeling foreground the role of fictions in science. Inspired in part by Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of ‘As If’, this discussion revolves around the idea that scientific models are not so much true isomorphic representations, but serve rather as substitutes of reality that are fictitiously taken for the real thing in order to allow for some useful conceptual and exploratory work (Vaihinger 1924; Fine 1993; French 2003; Nordmann 2006; Suárez 2008). Just as a literary character like Hamlet serves inquiries into questions of knowledge and action, so a fictional molecule like “siligen” might enable the construction of a predictively successful multi-scale model (Winsberg 2006).

Valorization

None of this boundary work on the difference between science and literature establishes any categorical distinction between the two, and if philosophers of science have been diffident about openly engaging in this boundary work, this is probably because they do not wish to be caught assuming a categorical distinction that essentializes science and literature and that merely needs to be articulated. By attempting to distinguish, instead, between science and pseudo-science, meaningful and meaningless language, public and private ways of knowing, the philosophy of science does not delimit the scientific in contrast to the literary. It valorizes a certain mode of speaking and writing or of representing the world, and leaves it up to literature and the arts as to what extent they appropriate these modes for their own purposes. Philosophy of science has thus propagated at various times models of proper prose, and with these norms of representation it intervenes in the domain of the literary.

Such interventions and the responsiveness to them in the literary world cannot be detailed here. One or two suggestions or reminders must suffice. “What can be said at all, can be said clearly” is a stylistic injunction by Wittgenstein that has guided the philosophy of science in two ways: it set an ambitious goal, namely to clearly specify criteria of clarity, and it shaped philosophy of science as an academic field by producing patterns of exclusion and inclusion (Wittgenstein 1922: Preface).⁷ Initially, this ambitious goal was to be met by constructing or reconstructing a language of science in which all sentences are either logical or empirical and in which it is possible to specify for every empirical sentence the exact conditions under which it is true or false. A related approach consisted in building up the language of scientific theory from a language of sense data which objectifies perceptions and subjects them to collective scrutiny: “Otto’s protocol at 3:17 o’clock [Otto’s speech-thinking at 3:16 o’clock was: (at 3:15 o’clock there was a table in the room perceived by Otto)]” (Neurath 1983). When Otto Neurath called in 1932 for the formulation of such protocol statements, the stylistic injunction by philosophers of science proved linguistically innovative – it is a far cry from reconstructing merely the bland impersonal language of the average scientific research publication.

Starting with Heinrich Hertz’s rigorous elimination from language of the metaphysically obscure conceptions of “force” and “cause and effect” (Hertz 1895) and with Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Sensations (1916), philosophers of science sought to explicate what remains implicit in conventional discourse and to impersonalize as much as possible perception and processes of reasoning. Although this radical program of a metaphysical cleansing of language came to an end along with the rise of a more historicist philosophy of science in the 1960s, it reverberates in the still-prevailing idea that a shared paradigm affords literalness and that scientists always need to interpret data but never need to interpret words (Nordmann 2008). It would be to short-change philosophy of science if one took this idea as a sign of naïveté. It is at this point where even the most descriptive and historicist philosopher advocates a linguistic norm, namely that a genuine community of speakers can be created as one joins a language game that constitutes shared meanings through shared practices. This is a norm that is sometimes taken up and sometimes undermined by literary strategies.

A genre of its own

Though few philosophers of science – Bachelard being the most notable exception – propose theories about the relation of literature and science or theories about literary aspects of science, they are not neutral toward questions of language. In the name of science, they intervene in the literary sphere with a critique of language and with more or less explicit norms of representation.

Writers who undertake a critique of language are bound to be highly self-conscious about their own use of language. When Wittgenstein found that only the language of science and other descriptive sentences are meaningful, he drew the conclusion that this excludes his own philosophical writing: “My sentences elucidate through this: who understands me recognizes them in the end as nonsensical” (Wittgenstein 1922: 6.54). Wittgenstein remains an exception, of course, and while many philosophers of science follow the genre conventions enforced by Philosophy of Science and other journals, they don’t appear to be terribly self-conscious about their own use of language. And yet, it may well be worthwhile to look at this mainstreamed and canonical philosophy of science as a genre of its own which emerged from the struggle to reflect science in a scientific idiom.

There are three literary forms, in particular, which may have shaped this genre: the formal system, the dialogue, and the aphorism. The formal system is an inheritance of rationalism and aims to display an architectonic of concepts or hierarchy of principles – in rational reconstructions of bodies of theory or of the choices made by scientists. In contrast, the genealogy of the aphorism refers in a twofold manner to empiricism. First, it can be traced from Francis Bacon via the eighteenth-century physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, romanticist Naturphilosophie, the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche at least to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Second, the poignant brevity of the aphorism corresponds to the poignant saliency of the scientific fact. The dramatic appearance of a fact on the stage of an experiment is supposed to have the rhetorical force of dispelling the doubt of skeptics. The aphorism works in a similar way in that it presents a thought solely for its power to unsettle belief or to suggest a possibility of reasoning (Baird and Nordmann 1994; Daston 2001). The aphoristic mode survives only as a rhetorical gesture in mainstream philosophy of science and often enough in close association with the dialogue and the trading back and forth of striking examples and counterexamples. The implicit and explicit dialogue becomes the preferred mode of writing for the later Wittgenstein (but see Wittgenstein 1922: 6.53); it is taken up, for example, by Imre Lakatos (1976) and Paul Feyerabend (1991). Since these dialogues are not designed to elicit truth but, rather, to explore an impasse between equally plausible, perhaps undecidable positions, it may be difficult to construct a simple genealogy all the way back to Galileo, or even to Socrates.

What the formal system, the dialogue, and the aphorism have in common is that they are self-limiting: they constrain linguistic expressions in such a way that they cannot silently advance a substantive metaphysical view. They permit unselfconscious formulations that are put forward as objectified linguistic artifacts that stand ready to be countered and qualified, and which therefore do not require a reflective stance or a meta-language in which the philosophy of science might critique itself.⁸ This, then, might be a very tentative characterization of philosophy of science as a literary genre of its own: the scientific possibility of writing unselfconsciously and yet not dogmatically is taken up at least by that philosophy of science which aims to reflect science without disrupting it or making it self-conscious. A literary analysis of styles of writing by such philosophers of science will therefore have to contend with this semblance of transparency as their inconspicuous beginning (Gabriel 2001; Schildknecht 2002).

Imagining philosophies of science

After asking whether philosophy of science might represent a literary genre in its own right, we can finally turn the tables and ask whether writers who imagine a literary methodology for producing knowledge or who imagine fictitious sciences and scientists are thereby also imagining alternative philosophies of science. The challenge to reflect the relation of philosophy of science and literature is thereby returned to those who draw on the literary imagination to question the hegemony of the sciences. As one might imagine, the philosophy of science itself has been rather oblivious to the construction of alternative sciences and alternate philosophies of science. Thus, philosophers of science did not respond to the brilliant and elaborate presentation by Alfred Jarry and his followers of ‘pataphysics as the science that searches the laws that govern the exceptions (Shattuck and Taylor 1960; Bök 2002; Ferentschik 2006). The most notable exception to this is the persistent challenge to the laboratory sciences and their mode of causal analysis by an alternative conception of science that remains associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. To be sure, his morphological method of revealing organizing principles by arranging series of phenomena failed to displace Newtonian physics, especially his Optics. Most philosophers of science consider this failure of Goethe’s theory of colors reason enough not to take it seriously. However, to the extent that German scientists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remained deeply attached to Goethe as a literary figure and cultural icon, his views on science lived on and surfaced especially in the so-called life sciences. They have experienced a renaissance of sorts in the recent morphological turn of evolutionary theorists (Richards 2002).

Goethe, of course, was dead serious about his claim to be a natural scientist as well as a literary giant. At the intersection of philosophy of science and literature, what should be taken seriously instead is the dead-pan seriousness of the ‘pataphysicians and of other quasi-scientific methods claiming alternative forms of objective knowledge.⁹ This can bring to light the madness in the method of science and perhaps the madness in the particular way in which philosophers of science are taking science seriously. It can also bring to light, however, the peculiarly illuminating delight of scientific rigor as it extends out from the sciences via philosophy of science to philosophy and a certain disciplined manner of writing and thinking.

Notes

1 While it is a bit of a stretch to consider Ludwig Wittgenstein a philosopher of science, his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was enormously influential on philosophy of science, and Wittgenstein engaged in the 1920s in a series of conversations with members of the Vienna Circle (Waismann 1979). As such, literary treatments of Ludwig Wittgenstein might serve as a good point of comparison – the biographical novel by Bruce Duffy (1987), the crime novels by Philip Kerr (1993) and Heinrich Steinfest (2004), the biographical and philosophical works by Iris Murdoch (1954) and W.G. Sebald (2001), and various other literary works. Beyond that, of course, there are the films by Peter Forgács (1992) and Derek Jarman (Eagleton and Jarman 1993), and the essays, exhibitions, and installations by conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth (1989).

2 Many other authors deserve to be considered in this light, for example, Hermann Broch, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Max Frisch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, William Vollmann, or Michel Houllebecq. If it appears that German-speaking authors are featured very prominently in this text, this is largely due to the fact that the most influential group of philosophers of science were deeply entrenched in Viennese and German culture until their emigration to the United States (compare Reisch 2005).

3 In his autobiography, Feyerabend reflects his ambiguous relation to Brecht (Feyerabend 1995: 18, 73, and 180).

4 Like Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger can hardly be considered a philosopher of science in the narrow sense of the term, though he offers a rather fully developed theory of modern science. Ironically, perhaps, it also considers modern science in contrast to poetry – like poetry, science is a bringing forth and revealing of truth, but unlike poetry it considers nature a calculable system of forces that are standing in reserve to be commandeered in experimentation and technological application (Heidegger 1977).

5 A less generous and less differentiated charge against “nonsense” was raised in the context of the so-called “Science Wars.” These began with a literary intervention by a physicist, namely a clever parody of a particular style of writing about physics. This approach to physics was to be exposed as obscurantist, metaphysical, and nonsensical. Here, no accommodations were made for the rightful place of this kind of writing, even though the hoax worked only because the initial parody was intelligible on its own terms (Sokal 1996; Sokal and Bricmont 1999).

6 A term with considerable currency in contemporary science studies and cultural studies, “boundary work” was coined to describe one of the central concerns of the philosophy of science, namely to offer a demarcation criterion to distinguish science from pseudo-science. Karl Popper famously suggested that the falsifiability of genuinely scientific hypotheses affords such a criterion (Popper 1959).

7 Paradoxically, perhaps, these patterns led to the virtual exclusion of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of science. The flagship journal Philosophy of Science demonstrates the desired clarity of prose in the most exemplary and exclusive fashion (even today, for example, its readers might get the impression that scientists produce text only and hardly rely on visualizations). In more than sixty years, only one contribution (on the philosophy of mathematics) featured Wittgenstein in the title and as an authoritative reference. Despite his vigorous celebration of scientific rationality, Gaston Bachelard has also been excluded from a philosophy of science that rallies around clarity as a stylistic norm.

8 Within the philosophy of science, reflection on its own language came to the fore, especially with the question whether it speaks in a meta-language about the language of science or whether as a science of science it must reject the very idea of a meta-language. This debate has never been settled nor does it continue today – it withered away with the aspirations of logical empiricism.

9 Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet comes to mind, the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Alain Robbes-Grillet, Alexander Kluge, or William Vollmann – to name but a few.

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