An Ontic Space in the History of Science: The Unpredictable Contingent

If we have moved into methodological territory, what philosophical work is there left to do? It would seem that it is a contest between two tendencies: absolutizing history and relativizing knowledge (historicism) or relativizing history and submitting it to knowledge (idealism).

We can write history since not everything is historically determined, since certain supra- historical elements exist which, present in our day, give us the possibility of using them as a guide to read the past and likewise to understand which different collocations and functions they were able to receive in that past (Agazzi 1984: 9).

That is, science shows something that, although partial, is real: partial with regard to the historical context, real with regard to that which it attempts to describe.

One might think that, as certainty is never guaranteed, science constructs inter­pretative pictures which inasmuch as possible are plausible. This would be the rea­son for which, throughout history, no matter what Laudan says in his famous list of false but tenacious arguments (Laudan 1981), those theories that paint a realis­tic picture of reality have a better chance. And yet Putnam wrote

The assertion that ‘the Earth is flat’ was, without doubt, rationally acceptable for three thousand years. Today it is absolutely not. And yet it would have been wrong to hold that such a statement was true three thousand years ago, as that would mean the Earth had changed shape since then.” (Putnam 1981: 55).

Putnam’s observation is useful to us not so much for the questions it raises about the relationship between science and reality, which we cannot deal with here, but rather about the relationship between science and scientific reality, in its “historical” characterization. In effect, historical facts carry a great deal of weight in science.

Yet, they are not only historical facts:

In itself, it was certainly a good thing to introduce historical and social awareness to the understanding of science, and it is also useful to submit the scientific enterprise to socio­logical study: the information we get is always interesting and enlightening. It is another thing, though, to insist on reducing scientific knowledge to nothing more than a social product. This is the error of much sociological epistemology, which has never really been able to show the causal link between the social conditions in a given place and time and, for example, the shape of the natural laws expressed there, in addition to the inability to explain the cross-cultural acceptance of the contents of scientific knowledge (whose validity, therefore, doesn’t seem “relativized” by the social circumstances that produce it) (Agazzi 1992: 39).

We can use Agazzi’s words to pose a problem: how to pinpoint Agazzi’s cognitive value in the history of science and make it useful in addressing reality? Adopting the mentality of classical metaphysics often followed by Agazzi, we might ask how the history of science can contribute to investigating the thing which is and not only its representation? A balanced view of history’s role in science which doesn’t reduce everything to history is therefore epistemologically important in order not to relin­quish saying something ontic, not to give into the idea that everything is mere repre­sentation, and not to reduce knowledge to an entirely relativistic sociocultural matter.

In other words, the historical dimension of science shows us how contingency plays an important role in the growth of scientific knowledge. This fact has an interesting philosophical dimension which forces us to ask ourselves what is to be understood by the word “science”, if it means not just formal analysis and experi­ment, but also contingency and fortuity. In his book Epistemologia e scienze umane (Agazzi 1979) Agazzi looks into the concept of “scientificity” itself with the aim of piecing together a constructive interdisciplinary definition of it. It is undeniable that certain disciplines such as physics and mathematics are dominant, when it comes to establishing criteria for scientificity, because of their ability to present themselves as highly persuasive fields of knowledge, and have inevitably become models for other types of knowledge. But “science can have many meanings,” wrote Aristotle.

What we need to do is to propose a kind of model of the concept of science, one which is flexible enough not to be taken prisoner by a single example yet at the same time avoids emptiness. That is, namely, to avoid the outcome in which any and every subject may in the end call itself scientific.

As with scholasticism, analogic is that which is a halfway to “univocal” (indi­cating a single type of reality) and “equivocal” (vague and multipurpose enough to be attributed to many realities). Agazzi pauses here to discuss two aspects which are more or less attributed to scientific discourse: rigor and objectivity. Without going through Agazzi’s entire reasoning process, I will look at his conclusions:

• As regards the concept of rigor, it is suggested that all types of knowledge that wish to call themselves “sciences” must be able to show the deductive rigor of their reasoning based on the elucidation of their own premises and the logical connections between premises and conclusions, as well as the ability to return to the facts that are to be proved. This doesn’t mean that the initial hypotheses can’t be modified, but simply that such modification must be done openly so that one’s reasoning may come under scrutiny.

• As regards the concept of objectivity, it is not reducible to either that of math- ematization or that of quantification. If anything, it is reducible to that of intersubjectivity, as something which does not depend exclusively on a single subject. In effect, “objective” should be that which is inherent in the object much more than “something which is not inherent in the subject.” But science, before it is a discourse on being, is a discourse on being known. In this sense science shouldn’t settle for an intersubjective agreement “of awareness” (risking the reduction of knowledge to awareness) or of “perception” (risking the reduc­tion of knowledge to perception), but should rather focus on an agreed use of a given predicate. If in this regard the exact and natural sciences have amassed a great literature, the same cannot be said of the humanities.

Agazzi proceeds suggesting that knowledge cannot be considered scientific only in relation to the object under investigation: any object can in fact be the object of various scientific disciplines. Even the objects of the exact sciences are susceptible and can be dealt with through “non-exact” approaches (Agazzi 1979: 74-75). To illustrate this point, we shall think of a hot air balloon: this object that can be stud­ied in the fluid dynamics, or in the history of the means of transportation, or be the subject of a poem like the famous poem by Vincenzo Monti Al signor Montgolfier. The history of science moves ahead precisely along this ridge between the human­ities and the exact sciences, since it employs languages, concepts and reasons from each of these areas. Thus, a philosophical approach to the history of science needs to consult and integrate all those other approaches, in order to offer a complete and objective account. This is why history of science also raises profound philosophi­cal questions.

A wide-ranging theoretical response to the issues Agazzi has raised would be desirable, for these issues are vital also to the philosophical and scientific disci­plines.

Trying to discern a common trend among these suggestions, we might hypothesize a historical analysis, which questions the transformations of the “objects” (including concepts, laws, or theories) which populate science. A trivial example already men­tioned is the semantic slip of the word planet, but we might also consider terms like epigenetics, probability, and many others. Hacking speaks of a “historical ontology” by asserting that there are objects that begin and cease to “exist”, and historical ontol­ogy should investigate the causes of their “birth” and “death”. That is, we should investigate how the various scientific entities were introduced or rejected in the course of history (Hacking 2002). Similarly, we might speak of a “historical ontology of sci­ence” as the completion of a “historical epistemology”: i.e., of the study of the pro­cesses by which theories themselves (or paradigms, or similar meta-entities) and their objects appear and disappear in the history.

Of course, a “historical ontology” cannot by itself decide which entities have some value which is not purely historical, i.e. which ones really exist or don’t. To be sure, this is a question we cannot avoid asking, but which must be answered in the light of the best presently accepted theories.

So, why should a historical ontology of science interest us? Of course, in order to explore the various kinds of critical approach, cultural backgrounds, and practi­cal or political interests orienting the research, etc.

Secondly, a historical ontology helps to find out whether something “true” and “real” remains despite scientific change (e.g., the trigonometry used in the Ptolemaic astronomy). This is significant for two reasons: showing that “truth can resist tenaciously”, and that science, while having an intrinsic historical nature, can nonetheless represent reality. The history of science is not just a story of theo­ries that merely imagined reality, but of theories that somehow grasped at least some authentic part of reality; the image we get from the history of science is not that of a merely conventional enterprise, but of how reality is progressively under­stood in a deeper and deeper way.

Nevertheless, if we wish to speak of a “historical ontology of science”, the presence of unique events and their role in the construction of the scientific theo­ries has to be justified and included. This is not of course a question that we can even initially take up here. Rather, I just want to notice that one of the main prob­lems we encounter in this discussion is the peculiar nature of historical events: they are often unique and unrepeatable, totally casual and accidental. According to the classic metaphysical tradition, there cannot be a science about this kind of facts. In order to be an object of science, an event or an object must be predicated necessarily and universally (An. Pr. I, 13) or, at least, usually (ok sni òî ïîêè, ut frequenter: An. Post. I, 11).^[CLI]

Even setting aside the interpretative problems concerning this complex issue in Aristotle, it is clear that in his view frequent events can be studied scientifically because what happens frequently has a constant (although not necessary) cause. Nonetheless, it should be noticed that even when historical events are unique, apparently casual and accidental, still they have causes. So they too can be studied scientifically. No doubt, they are contingent, for their causes are themselves con­tingent; and they seem accidental (i.e., they cannot be predicted exactly, and never happen in the same way) because since they typically depend on an open plurality of always changing causes.

Theories, paradigms, discoveries, etc., are precisely historical entities in this sense, unique and unpredictable, but amenable to (meta) scientific study. So, a “historical ontology of science” must be very clear about this when it seeks to find out the truth about them, and to provide an ontology for them. Even history has an ontic space to be understood.

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