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Understanding science through its history: a response to Newman
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Discussion
Understanding science through its history: a response to Newman Alan Chalmers Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Available online 26 January 2011
a b s t r a c t The paper is a response to William Newman’s rebuttal of a critique of his account of the origins of modern chemistry by Alan Chalmers. A way in which the nature of science can be illuminated by history of science is identified and an account of how this can be achieved in the context of a study of the work of Boyle defended in the face of Newman’s criticism. Texts from the writings of Boyle that are cited by Newman as posing problems for Chalmers’ thesis are interpreted as in fact supporting it. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
1. Understanding science through its history I appreciate the forthright way in which William Newman (2010) takes issue with my critique of his characterisation of Boyle’s chemistry. It helps me to clarify my position and identify ways in which I believe he has misconstrued my point. Newman broadens the scope of the discussion by putting it in the more general context of my recently published book, The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone (Chalmers, 2009). In this opening section I attempt to characterise the kind of history of science involved in my history of atomism generally and my focus on the work of Boyle in particular. This kind of history of science is not the only legitimate kind, but it is an important and informative kind that does not involve a misguided integration of history and philosophy of science. My overall aim is to understand and characterise the distinctive features of scientific knowledge. My study of the history of atomism is carried out with that end in view. The knowledge of atoms involved in contemporary science is highly abstract and general, refers to aspects of the material world that lies far beyond what can be observed directly, and which is nevertheless confirmed by experiment. The micro-world known to physics is very unlike the observable world in fundamental respects. I aim to throw light on the nature of science by seeking to understand how such knowledge came to be possible as a matter of historical fact. I therefore bring to history a specific point of view and set of questions, but not in a way that dictates what the answers to those questions
E-mail address: [email protected] 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.11.006
might be. If my interrogation of the history of science is adequately described as a ‘one-track modus operandi’ (Newman, 2010, p. 204) then so be it. But the fact that, in his critique, Newman finds it necessary to make detailed reference to Boyle’s texts is enough to establish that, at least in part, our dispute is a substantive historical one. I identify practices in the work of seventeenth-century figures that are recognisable as experimental science, insofar as specific claims about the material world were established as a result of stringent experimental testing. Boyle’s pneumatics and Newton’s mechanics are examples. Not only did Boyle and Newton vindicate their claims by subjecting them to a battery of independent experimental tests but they also made explicit this feature of the practice they were engaged in. One can extract from Boyle’s writings a sophisticated philosophy of experiment, as has been done by Rose-Mary Sargent (1995). When Newton insisted that his mechanics was ‘derived from the phenomena’ in a way in which Descartes’ was not he, in effect, employed what I have invoked as a distinction between confirmation by, and mere accommodation to, the results of experiment. Early examples of experimental science were practised in the seventeenth century as a matter of historical fact. What is more, they owed little to conjectures about the ultimate make-up of the material world of the kind articulated in Boyle’s mechanical philosophy. I am able to pick out examples of experimental science from the work of the likes of Boyle and Newton but there was much more to their work than that, of course. Both those figures were also
A. Chalmers / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
involved in philosophy, theology, alchemy and other practices. Identifying the details of those practices and the relations between them is a legitimate task for historians. Newman provides his own list of questions about seventeenth-century science and philosophy that can legitimately be put to a historian but which I do not directly address. I do not focus on such questions, not because I do not regard them as important, as Newman (2010, p. 204) asserts, but because they are other than the questions I have chosen to put to history. As far as my project is concerned, I engage with versions of atomism and the mechanical philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century in order to investigate the clam that their was a fruitful relationship between them and experimental science. I argue that there was not. A priori reasoning, arguments from some historically contingent notion of intelligibility and the projection of knowledge of the observable onto the micro-realm are not up to the task of establishing knowledge of atoms. The experimental method championed by Boyle was to prove capable of doing so but in a way that could not possibly have been anticipated by him. My historical analysis is intended to help substantiate and illuminate these important facts about science. 2. In what sense was Boyle’s mechanical philosophy ‘mechanical’ Newman argues that I make my case for the gulf between Boyle’s experimental investigations and his mechanical philosophy by interpreting that philosophy in an inappropriately strong sense. In his most recent reply he reinforces his point by invoking Boyle’s response to Henry More’s criticism of his pneumatics. Boyle deflected More’s criticism by insisting that the weight and spring of air invoked in his pneumatics were established as matters of fact even though they were not explained by appeal to underlying corpuscular mechanisms. Boyle’s discussion makes it clear that he regarded weight and spring as ‘mechanical’ nevertheless and, as Newman notes, explicitly refers to spring and weight as ‘mechanical affections’. In my characterisation of what I call ‘the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense’ the ‘mechanical affections’ are the shapes, sizes and degree of motion of portions of impenetrable portions of matter, and those only. Weight and spring are not included. Newman concludes that my distinction between Boyle’s mechanical philosophy, involving only the shapes, sizes and motions of particles of matter, and his experimental sciences, involving subordinate causes such as spring and weight, is an unduly sharp distinction that does not conform to Boyle’s usage. I acknowledge, and have myself stressed in previous publications, that ‘mechanical’ can be reasonably interpreted in ways other than the strict sense. In the response to More invoked by Newman, Boyle spells out one such way. According to it, mechanical explanations are those that invoke the laws of mechanics of the kind to be found in the work of Archimedes and Stevin, They appeal to such things as weight without attempting to explain them. Not only is such an interpretation of ‘mechanical’ perfectly reasonable but it also conforms to ‘the usual sense of that expression’ as Boyle observes in one of the passages cited by Newman (2010, p. 211). I refer to this notion as ‘mechanical in the common sense’. It was a notion that Boyle exploited to good effect in his pneumatics and, as Peter Anstey (2002, pp. 170–72) pointed out in his critique of Chalmers (1993), it was fruitfully extended further by Boyle in his treatment of respiration. Given this, why do I not interpret the mechanical philosophy championed by Boyle and claimed by him to be a useful guide to and supported by experiment, as the mechanical philosophy in the common sense involved in his response to More?
1
Boyle (2000, Vol. 6, p. 267).
151
Boyle presented and defended his mechanical philosophy as superior to Aristotelianism because it removes all traces of Aristotelian forms. He questioned the ontological status of forms and qualities which were other than the shape, size and some degree of motion that are necessarily possessed by a portion of matter by virtue of being such. He regarded the status of Aristotelian forms and qualities as unintelligible from an ontological point of view. He contrasted them with the mechanical affections or primary modes of matter, the shapes, sizes and motions of portions of matter that he argued to be perfectly intelligible and simple insofar as they did not require explanation at a deeper level. The mechanical affections are those from which ‘all the qualities are derived’.1 As Boyle himself stressed on a number of occasions, properties such as spring and weight do not qualify as mechanical modes or primitive affections in this strict sense. To treat them as such would raise the question of their ontological status and would undermine Boyle’s case against Aristotelian forms and qualities. The common and strict senses of ‘mechanical’ to be found in Boyle’s work are distinct and the former is not capable of sustaining philosophical arguments that were central to Boyle’s case against Aristotelianism. So my interpretation of Boyle’s matter theory as ‘the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense’ is not ‘unnecessary and gratuitously narrow’ as Newman (p. 208) bluntly puts it. Furthermore, insofar as Newman (2006, p. 225) identifies the key aspect of Boyle’s philosophy to be his ‘ceaseless war on hylomorphism and his reduction of the sensible world to mechanical causes’ the common sense interpretation of the mechanical philosophy at work in Boyle’s response to More will not be sufficient to serve his purposes either. Mechanism in the common sense could be, and was, exploited by Aristotelians, Paracelsians and by craftsmen with no philosophical commitments at all. Boyle (2000, Vol. 8, p. 326) himself explicitly makes the point that the ‘vulgar philosophers’ accept mechanical explanations when they can be had but complains that they confine their use to a restricted range of phenomena such as ‘mechanical engines’, thereby rendering them unfit to be regarded as ‘physical principles’. Boyle proceeds to explain how he aims to support the ‘corpuscularian doctrine of qualities’ by devising corpuscular mechanisms capable of accounting for a wide range of phenomena. He acknowledges that the contrived mechanisms are unlikely to be the true ones, so the arguments involving them do not provide ‘direct proofs’ of the mechanical origin of qualities. Nevertheless they do, according to Boyle (ibid. p. 325), serve as ‘confirmation’ of it. He explicitly distinguishes his mechanical accommodations from ‘matters of fact’ established by experiment. I have identified texts that I use as evidence that Boyle was aware of the gulf between the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense and the kind of knowledge that can be sought and vindicated via experiment. Newman offers an alternative interpretation of those texts. He argues that the gulf identified by Boyle is intended to distinguish between knowledge accessible to experiment and the matter theories of Epicurus and Descartes rather than his own version of the mechanical philosophy. Boyle’s mechanical philosophy in the strict sense did differ from Epicureanism and Cartesianism in important respects, to be sure. The main difference lies in the stress Boyle put on the role of God in devising and sustaining the world-order. The world did not come about as a result of chance collisions of atoms, as Epicurus maintained, nor as the result of the law-governed motions and collisions of corpuscles of matter as Descartes maintained. Rather, God fashioned our world by imbuing corpuscles with motion and arranging them in ways that result in the manifold phenomena distinctive of it. Nevertheless, the important differences notwithstanding, the mechanical
152
A. Chalmers / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
philosophies of Epicurus, Descartes and Boyle were alike insofar as they maintained that, as far as the ultimate ontology of the material world is concerned, it is comprised of particles of matter with shape, size and a degree of motion, and these alone. Boyle’s claim that those Epicureans and Cartesians who attempt to explain a phenomenon by deducing it from the mechanical affections of atoms ‘undertake a harder task than they imagine’ applies equally to his own mechanical philosophy in the strict sense if that philosophy is interpreted as a guide to experiment. The intermediate principles and subordinate causes, such as gravity, fermentation, springiness and magnetism, cited by Boyle as alternatives to atomic principles and causes, refer to principles and causes accessible to experiment and not to corpuscular arrangements, whether the properties of the corpuscles be restricted to the strict mechanical ones or not. In Chalmers (1993) I portrayed Boyle’s insistence on ultimate mechanical explanations in his philosophy and his defence of the use of subordinate causes in his experimental work as an inconsistency. In Chalmers (2009) and Chalmers (2010) I try to do better than that. I suggest that Boyle did not envisage supporting the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense by confirming it experimentally in a way that, for instance, he was able to do in pneumatics. Rather, he aimed to support it by devising mechanisms in the strict sense that were able to accommodate the phenomena. Newman (p. 208) doubts whether these accommodations constituted empirical support for the mechanical philosophy. Rather, ‘they were meant primarily to act as illustrations of how things might work mechanically in the invisibly small world in order to show that there was not an overriding necessity to invoke substantial forms or other explanatory agents’. I fully agree, notwithstanding the fact that, as indicated above, on at least one occasion Boyle referred to his accommodations as ‘confirmation’ of the mechanical philosophy. It is no part of my position that Boyle did not make a case for the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. Nor do I deny that in doing so he made telling points against at least the more extreme forms of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whatever the merits of the case Boyle was able to mount for the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense, there remains the issue of the connection between that philosophy and Boyle’s experimental investigations. Newman can insist that there was a productive link between the two only by interpreting ‘mechanical’ in a weaker sense than the strict one. But, as I have stressed above, this is not compatible with the details of and the case made for the mechanical philosophy by Boyle and undermines Newman’s own construal of Boyle’s philosophy as an alternative to Aristotelian hylomorphism. 3. The mechanical philosophy and chemistry As I stress in Chalmers (2010, p. 2), there is no doubt that Boyle aimed to develop productive links between chemistry and the mechanical philosophy. In the light of the discussion of the previous section, it is clear that an analysis of what is involved here must carefully discriminate between the various senses of ‘mechanical’ evident in Boyle’s writing. Did Boyle seek to forge links between chemistry and mechanism in a strict or common sense? I have argued that the former is the case, and that Boyle’s efforts were not productive as far as experimental chemistry was concerned. In Boyle’s own attempts to interpret chemistry in mechanical terms, it is the strict sense of ‘mechanical’ that is involved. His rejection of the ‘principles’ of the chemists on the grounds that they were insufficiently ‘fontal’ and of anything akin to what
2
I endorse and commend the account of Boyle’s philosophy in Anstey (2000).
became referred to as chemical affinity make perfect sense in the context of the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. But there is no reason why those notions could not be treated on a par with Boyle’s explicit stand on the weight and spring of air if what is involved is the mechanical philosophy in the common sense. As I document both in Chalmers (2009) and Chalmers (2010), Boyle reconciled chemistry with the mechanical philosophy by attributing chemical combination to the interlocking of corpuscles of various shapes and sizes, that is, by invoking mechanisms in the strict sense. All of these points can be substantiated by reference to an extended essay by Boyle (2000, Vol. 8, p. 315ff.) on ‘The Mechanical Origine or Production Of divers particular QUALITIES’. It is true that Boyle interpreted experimentally established ‘reductions to the pristine state’ and ‘redintegrations’ as evidence for persisting corpuscles or for the separation and coming together of corpuscles, as Newman has documented in detail. But these were post hoc accommodations of experimental findings to the corpuscular view. The fact that speculations about combining portions of matter were incapable of usefully informing experimental chemistry is implicit in Boyle’s own critique of atomism that both Newman and I have drawn attention to. In his pneumatics Boyle could draw on a reasonably clear notion of weight that already had a productive history. Notions capable of informing experimental chemistry were not so readily available. The notions of acids, alkalis and middle salts that were incorporated into eighteenth-century affinity tables, for example, drew on a body of experimental knowledge only partially available to Boyle, and the fashioning of which, incidentally, involved extensive use of indicator tests pioneered by Boyle. It is no part of my agenda to blame Boyle for failing to father modern chemistry, but it is part of my agenda to establish that the emergence of that chemistry owed little to the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. I am not sure that it owed much to the mechanical philosophy in the common sense either, unless ‘mechanical intervention’ and ‘experimental intervention’ are treated as synonymous. 4. Approbation and denunciation or disinterested analysis of arguments? According to Newman (p. 204) I see things ‘in binary terms of approbation or denunciation’ so that ‘there is little room for disinterested analysis of arguments’. Insofar as my case involves a focus on the relationship between Boyle’s experimentation and his mechanical philosophy it does portray things in binary terms. Boyle experimented to great effect and offered an early, well-argued and influential characterisation of experimental knowledge. He was also an astute philosopher and presented one of the clearest formulations of the mechanical philosophy that fed productively into the philosophy of John Locke and beyond.2 There were no productive links between the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense and experimentation. The brand of atomism involved in Boyle’s mechanical philosophy was transformed by Newton’s introduction of attractive and repulsive forces but petered out in the eighteenth century. Atoms re-entered physical science in the nineteenth century by a route that owed little to ultimate matter theories. These are all historical claims that I attempt to substantiate by a ‘disinterested analysis of arguments’. My interest in doing so is to throw light on the nature of scientific knowledge. To imply that my thesis is a ‘positivist manifesto’, as Newman (p. 204) does, is to fail to discriminate between philosophy, of the kind involved in seventeenth-century accounts of the ultimate structure of matter, and theory, of the kind involved, for instance, in Newton’s mechanics or, on a lowlier scale, in Boyle’s pneumat-
A. Chalmers / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
ics. My recent book on atomism concludes with an account of how highly theoretical knowledge of unobservable atoms was confirmed by experiment. This is not a positivist thesis. There is an aspect of my case that implies something like ‘denunciation’. If, by way of ‘disinterested analysis of arguments’, I find scholars arguing for some weak sense of mechanism and then proceeding as if they had established mechanism in a much stronger sense, then I believe I do something useful and important from a historical and philosophical point of view when I identify this lack of discrimination, even when the scholars involved are as illustrious as Robert Boyle and William Newman. References Anstey, P. (2000). The philosophy of Robert Boyle. London: Routledge.
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Anstey, P. (2002). Robert Boyle and the heuristic power of mechanism. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 33, 161–174. Boyle, R. (2000). In M. Hunter & E. B. Davis (Eds.). The works of Robert Boyle (Vols. 14). London: Pickering and Chatto. Chalmers, A. (1993). The lack of excellency of Boyle’s mechanical philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 24, 541–564. Chalmers, A. (2009). The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone: How science succeeded and philosophy failed to gain knowledge of atoms. Dordrecht: Springer. Chalmers, A. (2010). Boyle and the origins of modern science. Newman tried in the fire. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 1–10. Newman, W. (2006). From atoms to alchemy: Chymistry and the experimental origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newman, W. (2010). How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: A reply to Chalmers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 203–213. Sargent, R.-M. (1995). The diffident naturalist: Robert Boyle and the philosophy of experiment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Discussion
Understanding science through its history: a response to Newman Alan Chalmers Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Available online 26 January 2011
a b s t r a c t The paper is a response to William Newman’s rebuttal of a critique of his account of the origins of modern chemistry by Alan Chalmers. A way in which the nature of science can be illuminated by history of science is identified and an account of how this can be achieved in the context of a study of the work of Boyle defended in the face of Newman’s criticism. Texts from the writings of Boyle that are cited by Newman as posing problems for Chalmers’ thesis are interpreted as in fact supporting it. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
1. Understanding science through its history I appreciate the forthright way in which William Newman (2010) takes issue with my critique of his characterisation of Boyle’s chemistry. It helps me to clarify my position and identify ways in which I believe he has misconstrued my point. Newman broadens the scope of the discussion by putting it in the more general context of my recently published book, The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone (Chalmers, 2009). In this opening section I attempt to characterise the kind of history of science involved in my history of atomism generally and my focus on the work of Boyle in particular. This kind of history of science is not the only legitimate kind, but it is an important and informative kind that does not involve a misguided integration of history and philosophy of science. My overall aim is to understand and characterise the distinctive features of scientific knowledge. My study of the history of atomism is carried out with that end in view. The knowledge of atoms involved in contemporary science is highly abstract and general, refers to aspects of the material world that lies far beyond what can be observed directly, and which is nevertheless confirmed by experiment. The micro-world known to physics is very unlike the observable world in fundamental respects. I aim to throw light on the nature of science by seeking to understand how such knowledge came to be possible as a matter of historical fact. I therefore bring to history a specific point of view and set of questions, but not in a way that dictates what the answers to those questions
E-mail address: [email protected] 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2010.11.006
might be. If my interrogation of the history of science is adequately described as a ‘one-track modus operandi’ (Newman, 2010, p. 204) then so be it. But the fact that, in his critique, Newman finds it necessary to make detailed reference to Boyle’s texts is enough to establish that, at least in part, our dispute is a substantive historical one. I identify practices in the work of seventeenth-century figures that are recognisable as experimental science, insofar as specific claims about the material world were established as a result of stringent experimental testing. Boyle’s pneumatics and Newton’s mechanics are examples. Not only did Boyle and Newton vindicate their claims by subjecting them to a battery of independent experimental tests but they also made explicit this feature of the practice they were engaged in. One can extract from Boyle’s writings a sophisticated philosophy of experiment, as has been done by Rose-Mary Sargent (1995). When Newton insisted that his mechanics was ‘derived from the phenomena’ in a way in which Descartes’ was not he, in effect, employed what I have invoked as a distinction between confirmation by, and mere accommodation to, the results of experiment. Early examples of experimental science were practised in the seventeenth century as a matter of historical fact. What is more, they owed little to conjectures about the ultimate make-up of the material world of the kind articulated in Boyle’s mechanical philosophy. I am able to pick out examples of experimental science from the work of the likes of Boyle and Newton but there was much more to their work than that, of course. Both those figures were also
A. Chalmers / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
involved in philosophy, theology, alchemy and other practices. Identifying the details of those practices and the relations between them is a legitimate task for historians. Newman provides his own list of questions about seventeenth-century science and philosophy that can legitimately be put to a historian but which I do not directly address. I do not focus on such questions, not because I do not regard them as important, as Newman (2010, p. 204) asserts, but because they are other than the questions I have chosen to put to history. As far as my project is concerned, I engage with versions of atomism and the mechanical philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century in order to investigate the clam that their was a fruitful relationship between them and experimental science. I argue that there was not. A priori reasoning, arguments from some historically contingent notion of intelligibility and the projection of knowledge of the observable onto the micro-realm are not up to the task of establishing knowledge of atoms. The experimental method championed by Boyle was to prove capable of doing so but in a way that could not possibly have been anticipated by him. My historical analysis is intended to help substantiate and illuminate these important facts about science. 2. In what sense was Boyle’s mechanical philosophy ‘mechanical’ Newman argues that I make my case for the gulf between Boyle’s experimental investigations and his mechanical philosophy by interpreting that philosophy in an inappropriately strong sense. In his most recent reply he reinforces his point by invoking Boyle’s response to Henry More’s criticism of his pneumatics. Boyle deflected More’s criticism by insisting that the weight and spring of air invoked in his pneumatics were established as matters of fact even though they were not explained by appeal to underlying corpuscular mechanisms. Boyle’s discussion makes it clear that he regarded weight and spring as ‘mechanical’ nevertheless and, as Newman notes, explicitly refers to spring and weight as ‘mechanical affections’. In my characterisation of what I call ‘the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense’ the ‘mechanical affections’ are the shapes, sizes and degree of motion of portions of impenetrable portions of matter, and those only. Weight and spring are not included. Newman concludes that my distinction between Boyle’s mechanical philosophy, involving only the shapes, sizes and motions of particles of matter, and his experimental sciences, involving subordinate causes such as spring and weight, is an unduly sharp distinction that does not conform to Boyle’s usage. I acknowledge, and have myself stressed in previous publications, that ‘mechanical’ can be reasonably interpreted in ways other than the strict sense. In the response to More invoked by Newman, Boyle spells out one such way. According to it, mechanical explanations are those that invoke the laws of mechanics of the kind to be found in the work of Archimedes and Stevin, They appeal to such things as weight without attempting to explain them. Not only is such an interpretation of ‘mechanical’ perfectly reasonable but it also conforms to ‘the usual sense of that expression’ as Boyle observes in one of the passages cited by Newman (2010, p. 211). I refer to this notion as ‘mechanical in the common sense’. It was a notion that Boyle exploited to good effect in his pneumatics and, as Peter Anstey (2002, pp. 170–72) pointed out in his critique of Chalmers (1993), it was fruitfully extended further by Boyle in his treatment of respiration. Given this, why do I not interpret the mechanical philosophy championed by Boyle and claimed by him to be a useful guide to and supported by experiment, as the mechanical philosophy in the common sense involved in his response to More?
1
Boyle (2000, Vol. 6, p. 267).
151
Boyle presented and defended his mechanical philosophy as superior to Aristotelianism because it removes all traces of Aristotelian forms. He questioned the ontological status of forms and qualities which were other than the shape, size and some degree of motion that are necessarily possessed by a portion of matter by virtue of being such. He regarded the status of Aristotelian forms and qualities as unintelligible from an ontological point of view. He contrasted them with the mechanical affections or primary modes of matter, the shapes, sizes and motions of portions of matter that he argued to be perfectly intelligible and simple insofar as they did not require explanation at a deeper level. The mechanical affections are those from which ‘all the qualities are derived’.1 As Boyle himself stressed on a number of occasions, properties such as spring and weight do not qualify as mechanical modes or primitive affections in this strict sense. To treat them as such would raise the question of their ontological status and would undermine Boyle’s case against Aristotelian forms and qualities. The common and strict senses of ‘mechanical’ to be found in Boyle’s work are distinct and the former is not capable of sustaining philosophical arguments that were central to Boyle’s case against Aristotelianism. So my interpretation of Boyle’s matter theory as ‘the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense’ is not ‘unnecessary and gratuitously narrow’ as Newman (p. 208) bluntly puts it. Furthermore, insofar as Newman (2006, p. 225) identifies the key aspect of Boyle’s philosophy to be his ‘ceaseless war on hylomorphism and his reduction of the sensible world to mechanical causes’ the common sense interpretation of the mechanical philosophy at work in Boyle’s response to More will not be sufficient to serve his purposes either. Mechanism in the common sense could be, and was, exploited by Aristotelians, Paracelsians and by craftsmen with no philosophical commitments at all. Boyle (2000, Vol. 8, p. 326) himself explicitly makes the point that the ‘vulgar philosophers’ accept mechanical explanations when they can be had but complains that they confine their use to a restricted range of phenomena such as ‘mechanical engines’, thereby rendering them unfit to be regarded as ‘physical principles’. Boyle proceeds to explain how he aims to support the ‘corpuscularian doctrine of qualities’ by devising corpuscular mechanisms capable of accounting for a wide range of phenomena. He acknowledges that the contrived mechanisms are unlikely to be the true ones, so the arguments involving them do not provide ‘direct proofs’ of the mechanical origin of qualities. Nevertheless they do, according to Boyle (ibid. p. 325), serve as ‘confirmation’ of it. He explicitly distinguishes his mechanical accommodations from ‘matters of fact’ established by experiment. I have identified texts that I use as evidence that Boyle was aware of the gulf between the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense and the kind of knowledge that can be sought and vindicated via experiment. Newman offers an alternative interpretation of those texts. He argues that the gulf identified by Boyle is intended to distinguish between knowledge accessible to experiment and the matter theories of Epicurus and Descartes rather than his own version of the mechanical philosophy. Boyle’s mechanical philosophy in the strict sense did differ from Epicureanism and Cartesianism in important respects, to be sure. The main difference lies in the stress Boyle put on the role of God in devising and sustaining the world-order. The world did not come about as a result of chance collisions of atoms, as Epicurus maintained, nor as the result of the law-governed motions and collisions of corpuscles of matter as Descartes maintained. Rather, God fashioned our world by imbuing corpuscles with motion and arranging them in ways that result in the manifold phenomena distinctive of it. Nevertheless, the important differences notwithstanding, the mechanical
152
A. Chalmers / Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42 (2011) 150–153
philosophies of Epicurus, Descartes and Boyle were alike insofar as they maintained that, as far as the ultimate ontology of the material world is concerned, it is comprised of particles of matter with shape, size and a degree of motion, and these alone. Boyle’s claim that those Epicureans and Cartesians who attempt to explain a phenomenon by deducing it from the mechanical affections of atoms ‘undertake a harder task than they imagine’ applies equally to his own mechanical philosophy in the strict sense if that philosophy is interpreted as a guide to experiment. The intermediate principles and subordinate causes, such as gravity, fermentation, springiness and magnetism, cited by Boyle as alternatives to atomic principles and causes, refer to principles and causes accessible to experiment and not to corpuscular arrangements, whether the properties of the corpuscles be restricted to the strict mechanical ones or not. In Chalmers (1993) I portrayed Boyle’s insistence on ultimate mechanical explanations in his philosophy and his defence of the use of subordinate causes in his experimental work as an inconsistency. In Chalmers (2009) and Chalmers (2010) I try to do better than that. I suggest that Boyle did not envisage supporting the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense by confirming it experimentally in a way that, for instance, he was able to do in pneumatics. Rather, he aimed to support it by devising mechanisms in the strict sense that were able to accommodate the phenomena. Newman (p. 208) doubts whether these accommodations constituted empirical support for the mechanical philosophy. Rather, ‘they were meant primarily to act as illustrations of how things might work mechanically in the invisibly small world in order to show that there was not an overriding necessity to invoke substantial forms or other explanatory agents’. I fully agree, notwithstanding the fact that, as indicated above, on at least one occasion Boyle referred to his accommodations as ‘confirmation’ of the mechanical philosophy. It is no part of my position that Boyle did not make a case for the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. Nor do I deny that in doing so he made telling points against at least the more extreme forms of scholastic Aristotelianism. Whatever the merits of the case Boyle was able to mount for the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense, there remains the issue of the connection between that philosophy and Boyle’s experimental investigations. Newman can insist that there was a productive link between the two only by interpreting ‘mechanical’ in a weaker sense than the strict one. But, as I have stressed above, this is not compatible with the details of and the case made for the mechanical philosophy by Boyle and undermines Newman’s own construal of Boyle’s philosophy as an alternative to Aristotelian hylomorphism. 3. The mechanical philosophy and chemistry As I stress in Chalmers (2010, p. 2), there is no doubt that Boyle aimed to develop productive links between chemistry and the mechanical philosophy. In the light of the discussion of the previous section, it is clear that an analysis of what is involved here must carefully discriminate between the various senses of ‘mechanical’ evident in Boyle’s writing. Did Boyle seek to forge links between chemistry and mechanism in a strict or common sense? I have argued that the former is the case, and that Boyle’s efforts were not productive as far as experimental chemistry was concerned. In Boyle’s own attempts to interpret chemistry in mechanical terms, it is the strict sense of ‘mechanical’ that is involved. His rejection of the ‘principles’ of the chemists on the grounds that they were insufficiently ‘fontal’ and of anything akin to what
2
I endorse and commend the account of Boyle’s philosophy in Anstey (2000).
became referred to as chemical affinity make perfect sense in the context of the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. But there is no reason why those notions could not be treated on a par with Boyle’s explicit stand on the weight and spring of air if what is involved is the mechanical philosophy in the common sense. As I document both in Chalmers (2009) and Chalmers (2010), Boyle reconciled chemistry with the mechanical philosophy by attributing chemical combination to the interlocking of corpuscles of various shapes and sizes, that is, by invoking mechanisms in the strict sense. All of these points can be substantiated by reference to an extended essay by Boyle (2000, Vol. 8, p. 315ff.) on ‘The Mechanical Origine or Production Of divers particular QUALITIES’. It is true that Boyle interpreted experimentally established ‘reductions to the pristine state’ and ‘redintegrations’ as evidence for persisting corpuscles or for the separation and coming together of corpuscles, as Newman has documented in detail. But these were post hoc accommodations of experimental findings to the corpuscular view. The fact that speculations about combining portions of matter were incapable of usefully informing experimental chemistry is implicit in Boyle’s own critique of atomism that both Newman and I have drawn attention to. In his pneumatics Boyle could draw on a reasonably clear notion of weight that already had a productive history. Notions capable of informing experimental chemistry were not so readily available. The notions of acids, alkalis and middle salts that were incorporated into eighteenth-century affinity tables, for example, drew on a body of experimental knowledge only partially available to Boyle, and the fashioning of which, incidentally, involved extensive use of indicator tests pioneered by Boyle. It is no part of my agenda to blame Boyle for failing to father modern chemistry, but it is part of my agenda to establish that the emergence of that chemistry owed little to the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense. I am not sure that it owed much to the mechanical philosophy in the common sense either, unless ‘mechanical intervention’ and ‘experimental intervention’ are treated as synonymous. 4. Approbation and denunciation or disinterested analysis of arguments? According to Newman (p. 204) I see things ‘in binary terms of approbation or denunciation’ so that ‘there is little room for disinterested analysis of arguments’. Insofar as my case involves a focus on the relationship between Boyle’s experimentation and his mechanical philosophy it does portray things in binary terms. Boyle experimented to great effect and offered an early, well-argued and influential characterisation of experimental knowledge. He was also an astute philosopher and presented one of the clearest formulations of the mechanical philosophy that fed productively into the philosophy of John Locke and beyond.2 There were no productive links between the mechanical philosophy in the strict sense and experimentation. The brand of atomism involved in Boyle’s mechanical philosophy was transformed by Newton’s introduction of attractive and repulsive forces but petered out in the eighteenth century. Atoms re-entered physical science in the nineteenth century by a route that owed little to ultimate matter theories. These are all historical claims that I attempt to substantiate by a ‘disinterested analysis of arguments’. My interest in doing so is to throw light on the nature of scientific knowledge. To imply that my thesis is a ‘positivist manifesto’, as Newman (p. 204) does, is to fail to discriminate between philosophy, of the kind involved in seventeenth-century accounts of the ultimate structure of matter, and theory, of the kind involved, for instance, in Newton’s mechanics or, on a lowlier scale, in Boyle’s pneumat-
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ics. My recent book on atomism concludes with an account of how highly theoretical knowledge of unobservable atoms was confirmed by experiment. This is not a positivist thesis. There is an aspect of my case that implies something like ‘denunciation’. If, by way of ‘disinterested analysis of arguments’, I find scholars arguing for some weak sense of mechanism and then proceeding as if they had established mechanism in a much stronger sense, then I believe I do something useful and important from a historical and philosophical point of view when I identify this lack of discrimination, even when the scholars involved are as illustrious as Robert Boyle and William Newman. References Anstey, P. (2000). The philosophy of Robert Boyle. London: Routledge.
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Anstey, P. (2002). Robert Boyle and the heuristic power of mechanism. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 33, 161–174. Boyle, R. (2000). In M. Hunter & E. B. Davis (Eds.). The works of Robert Boyle (Vols. 14). London: Pickering and Chatto. Chalmers, A. (1993). The lack of excellency of Boyle’s mechanical philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 24, 541–564. Chalmers, A. (2009). The scientist’s atom and the philosopher’s stone: How science succeeded and philosophy failed to gain knowledge of atoms. Dordrecht: Springer. Chalmers, A. (2010). Boyle and the origins of modern science. Newman tried in the fire. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 1–10. Newman, W. (2006). From atoms to alchemy: Chymistry and the experimental origins of the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newman, W. (2010). How not to integrate the history and philosophy of science: A reply to Chalmers. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 203–213. Sargent, R.-M. (1995). The diffident naturalist: Robert Boyle and the philosophy of experiment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.