the chicken and egg, revisited

8/7/2019 The Chicken and Egg, Revisited

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The Chicken and Egg, Revisited:On the relation of theory and experiment in rational mechanics

Charles J. Sentell

University of Cambridge

Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine

7 February 2005

The depersonalizing of the things of everyday practice becomes the chief agency of their repersonalizing in new and

more fruitful modes of practice. The paradox of theory and practice is that theory is with respect to all modes of

practice the most practical of all things, and the more impartial and impersonal it is, the more truly practical it is.

- John Dewey

In his preface to The Essential Tension, Thomas Kuhn recalls his own moment of

enlightenment. While preparing a course on the development of seventeenth-century

rational mechanics, Kuhn began to engage Aristotelian texts in the sincere attempt to think

like [an Aristotelian] (Kuhn 1977:xii). If he could do this, Kuhn claimed, he would be

better able to understand and communicate to his students the exact achievements of Galileo

and other seventeenth-century natural philosophers. And on one very warm day in 1947,

a new way to read a set of texts dawned on Kuhn. He ceased to understand Aristotles

physics as simply wrong and began, rather, to see in it a coherent, sensible view of the world.

This revolution in Kuhns own thought eventually led to his conception of science as a body

of knowledge that progresses through periods of paradigmatic normalcy, which gradually

acquires internal instability, and ends with the revolutionary disestablishment of one

scientific worldview for another (Kuhn 1962).

This view of science arguably constitutes the central metaphor governing much of

the recent work in the history and philosophy of science (Galison 1988:204). According to

Peter Galison, Kuhns view of science is best understood as inverting the relationship of

theory and experiment that originated with the Vienna Circle. While the logical positivists

(e.g. Carnap, Hempel, Schlick) gave priority to observation and experiment over that of

theory, Kuhn and other anti-positivists (e.g. Lakatos, Hesse, Feyerabend) reverse this

hierarchy and make theory the necessary framework through which observation and

experiment must occur. These frameworks, or paradigms, are discrete systems of knowledge

that contain the very principles whose existence makes possible the experience of phenomena

asscientific. This inversion of the relationship between theory and experiment has a general

Kantian orientation, and I suggest that this is neither inconsequential nor coincidental. In fact,

it stretches back well beyond Kuhn and the anti-positivists, and is perhaps best understood as

a particular genealogy within the post-Kantian tradition.


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In this essay, I examine this position concerning the relationship of theory and

experiment in terms of its philosophical and historiographical implications. I first present

two central, rather intractable, philosophical problems that arise when theory is considered to

be the necessary precondition of scientific experience. I suggest that these problems derive

their intractability from the way they are posed, namely, as problems of interaction. The

thrust of my argument, however, turns on the relationship between these philosophical

problems and the historiographical contexts from which they originate. Thus, in the second

section of the essay I examine the work of the French neo-Kantian Gaston Bachelard and his

student Alexandre Koyr. It is with Bachelard and Koyr (rather than Kuhn) that the idea of

epistemic ruptures within the history of science finds two of its earliest articulations.

Through an analysis of their notions of radical discontinuity, I show that the distinction

between theory and experiment belies a deeper distinction between science and common

sense. These two distinctions are inextricably linked, and I argue that the historiographical

distinction between science and common sense actually gives rise to the philosophical one

between theory and experiment. I conclude by suggesting that changing the way we

understand the nature of these distinctions resolves many of their problematic characteristics.

Throughout the essay, I use the example of Galileo for both philosophical and

historiographical purposes. Philosophically, Galileos statement of the isochrony of the

pendulum is used to illustrate the two problems I present as central to post-Kantian accounts

of the relation between theory and experiment. Historiographically, Galileo serves as the

exemplar of the first scientific revolution, a revolution that saw Aristotelian common sense

physics overturned in favor of the new quantitative science.

I.

Typical of post-Kantian philosophies of science is the view that, for any given science, there

is a discrete set of constitutive, a priori principles that make possible that sciences

experiments, objects, and hypotheses. This position has been termed a Kantianism in the

second approximation because Kant's notion of the constitutive a priori concerns the larger

concept of experience, while this position refers to a specific sub-set of experience, namely,

that of the modern mathematical-physical sciences (Tiles 1984:17; Cf. Kant 1787). This

position, in other words, holds that the construction of experiments, along with their

concomitant measurements, standardizations and instrumentations, are dependent upon prior

theoretical commitments; theory gives meaning to scientific experience precisely because it

makes it possible (Cf. Hanson 1958; Friedman 1999).


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In this section I present two basic problems that arise when the relation of theory and

experiment is considered from this perspective. The first problem concerns the implications

stemming from the origins of the basic laws of the exact sciences, which I term the problem

of analyticity. The second problem concerns the role of instrumentation in the course of

theory development, which I term the problem of reification.

The Problem of Analyticity

That the basic laws of mathematical science are analytic in nature is a well-known and much

discussed fact. Indeed, this problem finds its first full articulation in The Critique of Pure

Reason where Kant, after having wrestled with the implications of Newtons Principia, takes

as his basic problem the explanation of how synthetic a priori truths are at all possible. Kant

admits that the existence of analytic empirical truths cannot be disputed, so he then sets about

to explain how they are possible. Ever since, the problem of accounting for the exact way in

which analytic propositions map onto the empirical world has been a central philosophical

issue.

The point I am raising, however, concerns the relationship between the analytic laws

of science and their formulation in and through experimental practice. I want to ask how

these formulations find their precise analytical expression, and what this analyticity implies.

As an illustration, I turn to one the most basic, yet counterintuitively complex, instruments

and examples in the history of rational mechanics: the pendulum and Galileos discovery of

isochrony.

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo observes that the

period of the pendulum is dependent only upon the length of the cord, and that the weight of

the bob, the speed of oscillation, and the degree of displacement from the perpendicular are

all independent of the isochronous swinging of the pendulum (Galileo 1632:450). This is a

rather striking suggestion, but has direct implications for Galileos work on the law of fall.

His interlocutors consider examples with different bobs, one made of lead and the other cork,

and are surprised to find that no matter what the substance is comprising the bob, nor how far

it is removed from the perpendicular, each vibration takes precisely the same amount of time.

Galileo had thus marshaled his evidence, provided experimental examples, and convinced his

interlocutors of the isochrony of the pendulum. Well, not quite.

It is not until 1638, in his Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences, that Galileo is

able to give precise mathematical formulation to one of the crucial laws in route to proving

the principle of isochrony. During the First Day of the dialogue, Salviati (Galileo) arrives


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at a demonstration of the law of length, which states that the period of oscillation depends

upon the square root of the length of the pendulum (Galileo 1638:95). Crucial though this

step may be, it is a long way from proving isochrony. As Piero Ariotti and others have

shown, Galileo never actually succeeds in providing an adequate proof for his claim of

isochrony (Ariotti 1968:426; cf. Naylor 1989). This must first wait for Christiaan Huygens

and his work on cycloidal pendulums, and finally for its precise nomological articulation with

Newton (Ariotti 1972:373). Moreover, by the time Newton articulated this law in the

Principia, it had been fairly well concluded that true isochrony is in fact unachievable in a

standard physical pendulum; it could only be achieved in an ideal situation (Ariotti

1972:409).

How does Galileo see the law of isochrony? How does he provide the correct, non-

quantitative expression of a law, which lay at the center of mechanical physics, long before

he has the means to prove it experimentally or articulate it mathematically? That he is unable

to prove the principle indicates that the formulation or articulation of this basic law of

rational mechanics did not indeed, couldnot derive from experimental observation. No

matter how many times Galileo performed his various experiments involving the pendulum,

no amount of observation or experiment could lead him to the precise mathematical

formulation of the principle of isochrony. The law is analytic and precedes the empirical

confirmation of its contents.

But what, exactly, are the implications of this point? I think there are two possible

implications, which can be roughly termed Platonic and Kantian, and that it is important

to differentiate between them. On the one hand, it could imply that mathematical

formulations of physical phenomena get to the heart of the matter, so to speak, and describe

the way the world really is. This entails that the worldis mathematical and the laws of

mechanics are simply the articulations of this underlying mathematical form. This is the

Platonic point. And not being able to experience the world directly as number, the difficulty

becomes understanding the specific mechanism by which the world is mathematicized. That

the world is mathematical, in other words, begs the question of how mathematical precision

is captured, even if only approximately, by sense experience. On the other hand, the problem

of analyticity could imply that, within a mathematical framework, the analytic laws are the

possibility-creating conditions that make the space within which subsequent observation and

experimentation occurs. In this way, analytic laws provide the transcendental content which

makes empirical application possible. This is the Kantian point. On this side of the


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implication, the problem of analyticity requires we understand the foundational concepts of

mathematical science as being constructed for mathematical applicability, which transforms

the question into one about how these concepts encapsulate the universe so precisely.

So whereas the Platonic point begs the question of precision in experience, the

Kantian point begs the question of quantitative points of contact with nature (Kuhn

1977:98). Understanding this difference captures the conceptual breadth of the problem of

analyticity.

The Problem of Reification

I mentioned earlier that Galileos efforts to demonstrate the isochrony of the pendulum were

bound up with his larger project on the law of fall. If all pendulums, no matter the mass of

the bob, beat at exactly the same rate, this would support the claim that all objects fall at the

same rate (taking into account air resistance, etc.) The pendulum, then, instantiates a

particular aspect of the phenomena under investigation and functions to narrow the field of

relevant experience so that the phenomena in question may be more effectively studied. The

experimental setup, in other words, brings into focus the phenomena under investigation by

eliminating irrelevant or obfuscating phenomena. This allows the pertinent phenomena to be

drawn to the forefront and examined in isolable detail. The upshot, however, is that the

material apparatus employed to demonstrate a principle or law quickly becomes entangled

with the very theoretical expression at issue. This is what I term the problem of reification

and, again, returning to Galileos work on the pendulum is instructive.

Earlier I said that Galileo was only ever able to provide approximate examples of the

principle of isochrony. This should not, however, detract from what Galileo did accomplish

by way of making the pendulum a demonstrative device. In order to see the isochrony of

the pendulum, an entire set of theoretical claims had to be articulated in support of the very

limited principle in question. For example, in Two New Sciences, Galileo is finally able to

state three of the basic principles underlying his claim of isochrony, namely, the law of

length, the law of chords, and the brachistochrone curve theorems (Galileo 1638:96, 188, 239

respectively). These theoretical claims settled central questions concerning the precise

relationship between the length of the pendulum and its period, and the shortest movement

along an arc. These were then incorporated into the tacit operations of the pendulum so that

when Galileo uses it to demonstrate isochrony, his interlocutors have already made crucial

conceptual steps toward comprehending the point of which Galileo is trying to convince

them.


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Thus, the self-evidence of isochrony is not evident without a prior theoretical

framework to indicate what counts as evidence and what that evidence means. By attempting

to prove isochrony with experiments using the pendulum itself, Galileo employed the

instrument that embodied the theory he was trying to prove. To succeed, he had to

presuppose an entire set of theories about the pendulum, which, including the ones already

mentioned, also include a theory of mass, a theory of the fulcrum and bob, a theory of

motion, and a theory of air resistance. So before the pendulum could effectively demonstrate

isochrony, Galileo had to incorporate into the idea of the pendulum the necessary theoretical

notions that allowed it to function as needed.

In this way, instruments are just as theory-laden as observations. What is more, they

are theory-laden in precisely the same sense. Just as the argument goes for observation, so

too must the functions of instrumentation be previously defined before the product resulting

from instrumental application can be made sensible. This is the crux of the problem of

reification: if experiments, along with their instruments, measurements and matters of fact,

are reifications of theory, how is it that this apparatus is ever able to provide material that

falls outside its previously embedded theoretical framework? Put another way, if

experiments are merely the hypostatization of theories, how does that account for the ways in

which the material conditions of experimentation lead to new theoretical insights? If matters

of fact are experimentally produced, what about anomalous matters of fact? Or, to put it

conversely, if instruments are not the reifications of theory, how is it possible to use those

instruments at all?

So whereas the problem of analyticity concerns the conceptual means by which a law

finds its precise articulation, the problem of reification concerns the material demonstration

that necessarily accompanies the experimental proof. The crux of these problems consists of

a particular characterization of the relationship between theory and observational or

experimental practice. By claiming the theoretical frameworks are the necessary

preconditions for scientific experience, thinkers in this tradition are asking a type of chicken

and egg question. Which comes first, theory or experiment? By prioritizing theory over

experiment, these questions become ones of interaction or mediation; they are questions

whose main focus is accounting for how two separate realms of activity and knowledge can

feasibly interact. By isolating theory and experiment in this way, such problems become

inevitable. This view of the relation of theory and experiment, however, is actually deeply

embedded within a particular understanding of the nature of the history of science. By


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examining the historiographical roots of this view, it becomes clear that there is another key

distinction at play, namely, that of science and common sense.

II.

While both Gaston Bachelard and Alexandre Koyr follow the general theory first

approach to scientific understanding outlined above, my analysis will now focus upon how

they construe the nature of scientific history so as to create a space within which these

problems find philosophical traction. Through my analysis, I will emphasize how each

addresses two key themes: (1) that the nature of scientific history is essentially discontinuous,

and that (2) science is a distinct mode of knowledge, characterized by its mathematization of

natural phenomena, and its sharp separation from common sense. By focusing on these

concepts, I will to show how the theory-experiment distinction is inextricably linked to the

science-common sense distinction.

In The New Scientific Spirit, Bachelard addresses the aforementioned problems in a

way that clearly exhibits his neo-Kantian commitments. In characterizing scientific

observation, Bachelard claims it is something which always necessitates a previously given

theory. Observation, he claims, is governed by a code of precautions that must be

observed; observers are admonished to think before they look, to scrutinize carefully what

they first see, and invariably to doubt the results of the initial observation. He goes on to

say:

Scientific observation is always polemical; it either confirms or denies a prior thesis, a

pre-existing model, an observational protocol. It shows as it demonstrates; it establishes

a hierarchy of appearances; it transcends the immediate; it reconstructs first its own

models and then reality. And once the step is taken from observation to experimentation,

the polemical character of knowledge stands out even more sharply. Now phenomena

must be selected, filtered, purified, shaped by instruments; indeed, it may well be the

instruments that produce the phenomena in the first place. And instruments are nothing

but theories materialized. The phenomena they produce bear the stamp of theory

throughout (Bachelard 1934:12-13).

This passage also contains one of Bachelards most original positions, namely, that the

machinery of transcendentalism is not solely conceptual, but that it is also instantiated in the

material apparatus of experimentation. In developing this view, Bachelard introduces the

notion of phenomeno-techniques, which describes the way scientific theories actually

produce the space of possibilities through which phenomena is seen scientifically. Theories


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Metaphysics and Measurement, Koyr claims that it is the distinct mathematization

(geometrization) of nature that defines the new science (Koyr 1968:20). What Galileo and

the founders of modern science had to do, according to Koyr, was destroy one world and

replace it by another. They had to reshape the framework of our intellect itself, to restate and

to reform its concepts, to evolve a new approach to Being, a new concept of knowledge, a

new concept of science and even to replace a pretty natural approach, that of common

sense, by another which is not natural at all (Koyr 1968:21). For Koyr, modern science is

a unique form of knowledge that came into existence only after a decisive break with

Aristotelian common sense physics, and is defined by its mathematization of natural

phenomena.

Koyr uses a similar example to illustrate the problem of analyticity, namely,

Galileos work on the law of fall. This problem, Koyr claims, implies that he [Galileo] was

obliged to drop sense-perception as the source of knowledge and to proclaim that intellectual,

and even a priori knowledge, is our sole and only means of apprehending the essence of the

Real (Koyr 1968:38). Thus Koyr characterizes the advent of the scientific as a move from

common sense to science, from quality to quantity, from imprecision to precision. And

rather than address the question begged by the Platonic implication of the problem of

analyticity, Koyr merely notes that:

Experiment is the methodical interrogation of nature, an interrogation which

presupposes and implies a language in which to formulate the questions, and a dictionary

which enables us to read and to interpret the answersYet obviously the choice of the

language, the decision to employ it, could not be determined by the experience which its

use was to make possible. It had to come from other sources (Koyr 1968:18-19).

Here, Koyrs commitment to the general post-Kantian position whereby theory precedes

experimentation is clear. Yet the operative distinction that makes possible understanding

theory and experiment in this way is precisely the distinction between science and common

sense.

By categorically separating science from common sense, Bachelard and Koyr create

the possibility for theory to be identified as entirely distinct from experimental praxis. The

problems of analyticity and reification, the problems whose main focus was that of

accounting for how theory and experiment interact, are pushed back to the level of the

relation between science and common sense. In characterizing the advent of modern science

as a decisive break with intuitive common sense, and claiming that science progresses


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through revolutionary transformations of theoreticalunderstandings, these thinkers prioritize

and dichotomize theory as that which distinguishes scientific knowledge from everyday

conceptions. This historiographical description of science, in other words, leads to the

philosophical problematization of the relation between abstract theory and the material forms

through which that theory is made manifest.

Thus, both Bachelard and Koyr are philosophers of transition; they provide

narratives about how the move is made from pre- or non-scientific to the scientific. To this

extent, they are not so interested in the exact content of a particular science, but rather focus

on providing philosophical and historical accounts of the structural dynamics that create the

possibility for that science in the first place. They hold that what happened in Europe around

the seventeenth-century was a profound displacement of common sense in favor of a more

rarefied, mathematicized, theoretical system of knowledge that continues to grow today

under the aegis of science.

III.

I began by posing two problems that arise in the context of considering the relation between

theory and experiment. I claimed that these problems turned on questions of how two

distinct realms, namely that of theory and experimental practice, could interact. I then turned

to Bachelard and Koyr and showed that what underlay these original problems was a deeper

issue concerning the nature of scientific rationality, i.e. whether it was categorically distinct

from common sense. I want now to suggest that these questions too turn on issues of

transition. Bachelard and Koyr both argue that the first radical rupture in the history of

science actually createdscience through a conceptual divorce from intuitive common sense.

And as discontinuous revolutions continue to reshape the landscape of the sciences,

articulating new and oftentimes radically different visions of the world, the pressing question

becomes one of preserving rationality through these changes.

As common sense is notoriously difficult to define, I think it is helpful at this point

to distinguish between two senses of the term. Peter Dear claims that Aristotelian physics,

and its subsequent Scholastic developments, closely link natural philosophical knowledge

with everyday, commonsensical knowledge. Key to this link is the Aristotelian conception of

natural (rather than violent) movements, which are in sync with a particular objects

essence and therefore happen commonly (Dear 2001:72). Natural philosophy, for

Aristotelian Scholastics, was the enterprise of exploring the causes of the phenomena of the

everyday world, and in that sense was part and parcel of common sense.


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With Galileo and the first scientific revolution, however, comes the announcement

that the premises of knowledge making and logic are simple and mathematical. In this sense,

Bachelard and Koyr are correct to claim that modern physical science constitutes an

important break with common sense. The Galilean revolution is the substitution of common

sense with a type of knowledge not derivable solely from experience; its mathematical and

geometrical languages were then alien to the commonsensical view of the world. A chasm

thus forms between experience and experiment, between generals and singulars, between

common sense and an organized, circumstantiated, special system of knowledge that one

cannot experience outside the artificial setting of the experimental framework.

In the Two New Sciences, Sagredo claims that Salviati (Galileo) gives him frequent

occasion to admire the wealth and profusion of nature when, from such common and even

trivial phenomena, you derive facts which are not only striking and new but which are often

far removed from what we would have imagined (Galileo 1638:95). In this passage, the

rudimentary elements of the two senses I wish to distinguish are present. In one sense,

science is a special case, as sub-set as it were, of common sense; it grows out of, and takes its

phenomena and examples from, the wider scope of commonsensical knowledge and

experience. In another sense, science represents a dramatic break from common sense,

whereby a completely new form of knowledge is erected outside of common sense

conceptions. Dear himself notes this tension: Galileo wished to persuade his readers that the

results amounted to common experience. His problem, however, was that the particular

experience that he wished his readers to accept was not in fact one that is well known and

familiar (Dear 2001:133). Thus, even for Galileo the line between common knowledge and

the more specialized sphere of his new science was difficult to mediate.

The distinction I wish to make here concerns the way in which we understand the

distinctions of science and common sense, on the one hand, and theory and experiment, on

the other. I am suggesting that the distinction between science and common sense is

acceptable as long as it is understood heuristically, rather than formally or ontologically. A

formal or ontological sense of the distinction entails a categorical difference in rationality; it

holds that science alone embodies rationality, and that common sense is either a-rational or

irrational or just not of the type of rationality that comprises science. The historiographical

point of distinguishing between science and common sense is useful for a number of reasons,

not the least of which is that it facilitates our talking about the strange and sometimes

counterintuitive knowledge of the sciences. But when it is taken in its stronger, more formal


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sense, the distinction obscures crucial similarities and dependences and actually creates

philosophical problems, such as those of analyticity and reification.

In a very real sense, the advent of modern physical science was the advent of a new

language, a new knowledge that profoundly reshaped our understanding of the world. But to

claim that it is categorically distinct from common sense, then or now, is to make an

ontological separation between two spheres of knowledge and thereby beg the question of

rational continuity through scientific change (and, for that matter, the rationality of non-

scientific knowledge as well). Understood heuristically, common sense becomes the

necessary precursor to any scientific knowledge whatsoever. From a logical point of view,

scientific knowledge simply could not have sprung fully formed from the head of Galileo. Its

contents had to come from other sources, namely, the world of common experience. All

revolutions are revolutions againstsomething; they incorporate and transform the views

against which they are reacting, whether they be commonsensical or properly scientific.

Analogously, the distinction between theory and experiment must be understood as

two aspects of the same activity as well. Rather than being different species of knowledge

occurring in two distinct realms of activity, I am suggesting that scientific theory is an

irreducible mode of scientific practice. They are mutually dependent activities occurring in

the same space of possibilities. Bachelards concept of phenomeno-techniques comes very

close to this idea, though the exact mechanism by which theory and experiment interact is

never fully developed in his work. By now it should be clear that why such a mechanism

would need explicating in the first place is a function of the dualism Bachelard employed at

the historical level. If the histories of sciences are discontinuous, and indeed if the sciences

themselves are discontinuous with other forms of common knowledge, then naturally one

would need to provide a detailed account of how these diametrically opposed realms could

interact.

Thus, the sciences do not represent a new form of rationality, but a new form of

reification or objectivity; they provide a space within which problems, objects, and matters of

fact find fruitful routes of exploration and elaboration. Oftentimes this space is artificially

constructed, abstracted from the world so as to isolate and highlight a particular aspect of that

world. But this should not be taken as a radically separate form of knowing; rather it is a way

of counteracting and concretizing the move of abstraction.

Understood in this way, the distinctions between theory and practice, on the one

hand, and science and common sense, on the other, are rendered helpful rather than


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problematic. By advocating dissolution of the strict dualisms obtaining between these

concepts, I am not advocating their abolition from our vocabulary as well. I hope to have

made clear that such distinctions are potentially very useful, and that only by erecting them

into diametrically opposed distinctions do we run into the historiographical and philosophical

problems that have proven so particularly intractable to the post-Kantian tradition.


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the chicken and egg, revisited

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