EINSTEIN HAS UPSET THE VIEW THAT SCIENCE IS STABLE
A philosopher has strong reasons to fumble and hesitate when he starts. In particular, he knows how much where he ends depends on where he begins: and where he begins may be all too arbitrary.
Existing canons of science insure the exclusion of too much arbitrariness, or at least the minimizing of its effects if it has intruded. Existing canons of the arts permit, and even encourage, certain kinds of arbitrariness, but on certain conditions which may be very constraining at times. How much arbitrariness is allowed in philosophy? What place does philosophy allot to idiosyncracy? These philosophical questions are difficult and the division over them is fundamental. Often the first step a philosopher takes is the answer he gives to these very questions. His first step, then, is at once much too difficult and much too final. Moreover, to tell you of my own idiosyncracy from the start, the two existing alternatives, the two currently popular answers to the problem of arbitrariness in philosophy, seem to me to be most unsatisfactory. Briefly, the tradition of modern philosophy, stemming from Bacon and Descartes, emphasized and stressed the wish to build a scientific philosophy, an objective philosophy, a philosophy with no arbitrariness and no idiosyncracy. Its chief pride was science, and it took science as the model for rationality in general, indeed, for humanity at large; what traditional philosophy shared with religions which are not esoteric, is the idea that man is superior to animals in his ability to choose intelligently. This ability of rational choice they equated with objectivity and with science.The rebellion against traditional philosophy started already in the 19th century; but it became prominent only in our century. It was. not serious, nor was it taken seriously by the intellectual leadership of the time. It is no accident, perhaps, that most of the rebels advocated rather esoteric alternatives to science.
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who are nowadays considered pioneers in the new movement, considered themselves journalists rather than philosophers; other pioneers of that movement were writers and artists like Dostoevskij and Wagner, and nationalist politicians of all sorts. The very first phase of the rebellion against scientific philosophy is known as romanticism; it embraced certain backward philosophical schools, as well as certain experimental literary and artistic schools, and some daring political movements. As a philosophy of art, romanticism gained grounds in the last century even within traditional philosophy; even John Stuart Mill, a pillar of scientific philosophy who saw man as a primitive learning machine, was romantically inclined when he spoke of self-expression of the individual in the arts. In epistemology, metaphysics, and even political philosophy, the popularity of the esoteric amongst intellectuals began when science showed itself to be as much in flux as other human phenomena - if not more. When the scientific revolution shook the intellectual world, esotericism emerged as an intellectual power par excellence. Nationalisms of all sorts and advocacies of esoteric, or semi-esoteric, religions became serious contenders; not due to their own merits, but because scientific philosophy started to decline. In his Religion and Science (chapter on mysticism) Russell records with chagrin the fact that in the ’thirties many men of science endorsed, and publicly advocated, some sort of non-scientific philosophy or another. This is one of the unintended consequences of the scientific revolution of the 20th century in general, and of Einstein’s work in particular.To be more precise, it is not so much the occurrence of revolutions ir science, the fact that science is in flux, that created the major change ir the philosophical scene; rather, what has happened is that suddenly the fact that science is in flux ceased to be a secret. When some Christian theologians were ready to admit that Christian doctrine is changeable, since the Bible is not infallible, they effected more radical a break with their tradition than the break created by the Renaissance protestant theologians who claimed that they were merely purifying the tradition and thus returning to the original unpolluted teaching.
In science, things arc not as bad, but prior to Einstein much effort did go into the rewriting ol history in concealment of the fact that science is in flux.1 The great agitation in the whole philosophical world which accompanied the revolution in chemistry of the late 18th century can be explained as the outcome of the first open revolution within the ranks of science: the disagreements on fundamentals between such established scientists as the phlogistonists and the anti-phlogistonists must have been as shocking to scientists as the split between Stalinists and Trotskyites was to communists. But, like the Trotskyites, the phlogistonists were declared enemies, traitors, etc. Then came the revolution in optics of the eighteen- twenties, the overthrow of Newton’s theory of light. Some writers of that period expressed feelings close to hysteria, others close to witch-hunting; but things were patched up rapidly, and as the Newtonians had not put up a serious fight they could switch positions quietly. There is evidence, however, that after the revolution in optics, even Laplace was a broken man. When the conservation of force was announced, it was declared romantic Naturphilosophies both Oersted and Helmholtz were suspected as romantics. In his obituary notice on his best friend, Michael Faraday, August de la Rive rejected Faraday’s views mainly, if not only, because they looked to him idealistic. But this was forgotten too. In all the changes, switches, surreptitious changes, and the rewriting of the history of philosophy and of science, the ideal 'of science and its rationality as unalterable was upheld, and the standard instance for the equation of science with rationality and of both with stability was Newtonian mechanics. Sir John Herschel, William Whewell, John Stuart Mill - these were the leading 19th-century methodologists, and they repeatedly insisted that Newtonian mechanics, at least, is entirely perfect, is in no need of improvement or modification to the slightest, and cannot be superseded even in being explained by a still deeper or more general theory: Newtonian mechanics was the last word on all the questions it answers - and in every sense in which it could be construed as the last word. When Maxwell tried a field interpretation of Newtonian action-at-a-distance and found this impossible, he declared he could not understand his own result and that he was rather baffled. He must have known Faraday’s suggestion that Newton’s theory needs modification since the action at a distance is not possible. But daring and revolutionary as he was, Maxwell could not entertain the possibility of modifying Newtonianism - not even as a mere exercise. (Later in life, as Poynting observes, he became much bolder; but he died young and so he never returned to that exercise.)And then came Einstein, and he openly and frankly declared science to be fallible. And people argued about Einstein in street corners and boulevards, in beerhalls and saloon bars, in salons and coffee-houses; not so much out of interest in atomic energy or in the curvature of space as out of interest in the intellectual role science was going to play from then on: was it going to retain its hegemony? If not, are we going to return to religion? If yes, how and why?
And the romantics now came for the first time with a serious argument against the rationalists. The argument has been very forcefully presented by Michael Polanyi, I think, in his Logic of Liberty and elsewhere. Some people believe in science, some people believe in the Bible, he said. It all depends on your starting-point, which is arbitrary and idiosyncratic; it depends on the tradition you align yourself with, and on the people you associate with. In science there is no objective standard of rationality; taste, style, idiom, and the like, matter as much in science as in the arts or in religion. Commitment is arbitrary; and where you stand is a matter of initial commitments.
The upholder of the objectivist tradition thus under attack, the old- fashioned rationalist epistemologists, themselves felt that some concession to the opponent was to be made. They admitted that those whose footsteps they were following had exaggerated their claims for the stability of science; and hence they had also exaggerated their claim for the objectivity and rationality of science; and when the exaggeration was found out, so the story continues, those unable to discriminate threw out the baby with the bath-water, the exaggerations concerning rationality, with rationality pure and simple.
Science, some of the old-fashioned philosophers now say, is not certain but only highly probable. So, we may live to see a revolution in science, a modification, or even a rejection, of some well-established theory in science. But this is neither too likely nor too unsettling: after all, Einstein’s work is but a slight modification of Newton’s, and as modified Newton’s work still stands, as safe as ever (if not safer). It is out of all proportion to pin on such a rare and small need for modification and improvement a licence for all arbitrariness and caprice.This is, at least, how Lord Rutherford saw the situation when he delivered his somewhat cryptic presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913, when he declared the view that Einstein had overthrown Newtonianism to be a popular prejudice, since, on the contrary, Einstein had “broadened its basis”. How popular Rutherford’s view is nowadays I do not know, but I think it is very popular indeed amongst those philosophers who try to retain the old standards in minimum modifications, as well as amongst biologists. Amongst physicists the more popular view is that of science as a branch of formal mathematics, or perhaps of applied mathematics, and hence as utterly certain. View Newtonian mechanics as a system of total differential equations, and you have no philosophical problems left. What is obviously common to those who view scientific theories as empirically probable and those who view them as mathematically certain is the view that the value of science rests in its stability.
II.