ON THE NOVELTY OF IDEAS IN GENERAL

To begin with, the criterion of novelty which stands behind the game I have just described is not so very good. It is rather uncritical to accept as a matter of course that if you can quote every idea of a thinker from previous thinkers then he has nothing new to add.

It is not easy to criticize criteria. Imagine an aesthetic criterion, for instance, criticized by the production of counter-examples. These counter­examples ought to be beautiful, but not by the criterion under scrutiny. The holder of the criterion will, of course, declare them not beautiful; if you say he is doing so ad hoc, and in order to evade criticism, he will answer that he is doing so since he is told to do so by a criterion that he is systematically and consistently applying regardless of whether he is under critical fire. And so, as long as one employs one’s criterion systematically and consistently one is immune to criticism. But we expect beauty to do more than comply to a criterion, namely to impress us one way or an­other. And so the safest manner to criticize the criterion is to appeal to its open-minded adherents by a barrage of diverse counter-examples in the hope that some of these examples will move some of the adherents, and that they be open-minded enough to see this as criticism.

Here, then, is my barrage of diverse historical cases, some of which might impress the reader as cases of striking novelty or surprise of one kind or another, and all of which are in open conflict with the accepted standards of novelty.

At the very least there is that thing which we all know as putting 2 and 2 together and miraculously getting 5.

Let me mention another simple example to show how strange novelty can be, and how narrow it is to approach novelty with certain set criteria in order to deprecate a thinker. James Watt improved the steam engine and made it much more marketable than before. It was alleged that James Watt had applied Joseph Black’s theory of latent heat to the im­provement of the steam engine. James Watt was a friend of Joseph Black, but in the face of this allegation he found it necessary to speak for the truth. He admitted that he owed much to Joseph Black, particularly in his calculations; but, he said, the major innovation, the invention of the cooling chamber, was based on the ‘old established fact’ of condensation of steam in cold. The major improvement of Watt’s engine over New­comen’s was that whereas Newcomen’s had one chamber in which to produce alternately heat and cold, Watt designed a two-chamber system, one chamber permanently hot, one permanently cold. In brief, he dis­covered the exhaust system of the combustion engine.

Let me mention one more example of an acknowledged great novelty, which in a sense is very old: it is the idea known as logicism, or the theory that mathematics is the branch of logic. This theory not only is ancient, but it was extensively discussed by Peirce. Yet we all ascribe logicism to Frege and Russell and Whitehead, because they took the idea seriously enough to try it out in all detail. Here we come again to the idea of being systematic. Somebody may be original in being systematic; even if he is not successful in his effort to be systematic. One of the important results of Russell’s study is his failure in his systematic application of the idea of logicism to current mathematics.

The examples cited thus far suffice to show that our naive and intuitive criteria of novelty are quite objectionable - even on intuitive grounds. Indeed, one facet of real novelty is that it may break and shatter old criteria of novelty and suggest that we think again about what novelty is. More generally, a novel idea causes some rethinking about novelty or about logic or about research. Consider, for instance, the work of August Kekule - the invention of the benzene ring. It is hard to realize how im­portant this innovation was unless one knows some history of the chemistry current in the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular, the background of Kekule’s discovery. For, the novelty of Kekule’s idea was in Kekule’s approach or even in his choice of a problem.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, organic chemistry started to develop with the theory of radicals. Chemists then looked at certain groups of atoms, such as one carbon and three oxygens, as if they played the role of one single atom; and the idea was that it is easier to shift such a group from one compound to another than to break it into its constituent atoms. Radicals were things between atoms and molecules. This was the great breakthrough in organic chemistry just before Kekule entered the scene. At that time people were working on every kind of problem which could be attacked that way.

My next example relates novelty to problems even more strikingly. It is from the work of Theodore Herzl, the founder of the Zionist move­ment. His major work is The Jewish State, subtitled ‘a new solution to the Jewish problem.’ The preface starts with the claim that the author’s main idea is very old and is to be found in the ancient Jewish prayerbook. This is very interesting: a new solution, but an old idea. The old idea could not have arisen as a solution to any problem that Herzl had in mind, because the chief problem that he had in mind was new. He was chiefly concerned, of course, with the Jewish problem. The Jewish problem as Herzl understood it was something that did not exist before the French Revolution. There were other Jewish problems, we may well suppose, which existed in different times, but this is a different matter. Here again, I am applying a technique which is not new, but which springs from Popper’s philosophy most forcefully. It is not enough to refer to a new idea: we have to show that it is a solution to some problem if we wish to stress its novel character. In all the literature of Zionism, for example, this point is eloquently absent. Let me present it, then.

Herzl saw the Jewish problem in a way which is partly very nice and partly not so nice, but all round in a new way. The nice part of it is that he saw the Jewish problem not as the problem of the Jews, but the problem of the whole of Western Europe, Jewish and Gentile alike. And that is as nice as the current claim that the negro problem in the U.S.A, is not a problem of the so-called American negro, but the problem of all the Americans, discriminators and discriminated alike. The not so nice part of Herzl’s problem is that the Jewish problem, according to him, was how to stop the Jews from flocking to the socialist movements and other trouble-making revolutionary organizations. This is as unpleasant as the claim that the negro problem ought to be solved in order to stop the race riots. In other words, Herzl recognized that Jewish rebels were often people who had become rebels out of a just grievance; but it neither occurred to him that other rebels could have just grievances, nor did he think (in view of the Dreyfuss affair) that Jews could be compensated in Europe. In particular, and this is the unpleasant part of his teaching, he did not stress that grievances, rather than the violence they lead to, have to be rectified. In as much as he would have blamed the cause of the grievance, namely, antisemitism proper, for the inability of the Jews to settle down comfortably in Europe, he would be addressing the perennial Jewish problem, not the new one as he saw it. And so, in his very narrow approach he discovered a distinctly new problem, one which could not have existed before the revolutionary turmoils struck Europe. So here is a new problem to which the old idea is offered as a new solution.

An old idea as a new solution is another kind of putting of the 2 and 2 together, the putting of a new problem and an admittedly old idea together. The novelty is not of the idea, then, but of declaring the idea to be a solution. Supposing (with Popper) that all important ideas are solutions to some problems, one can see novelty in regrouping problems and solutions.

All this may sound somewhat scholarly and abstract. Herzl’s solution was old: I am suggesting, with him, that it is new because the problem it answers is new; why should this suggestion be accepted? Why should we not join those who (applied old criteria and) ridiculed his claim for novelty by quoting the Jewish prayerbook? The answer can only be given in detail, and again, by employing a Popperian criterion of novelty: Herzl’s solution led to consequences which were rejected by all his im­mediate predecessors. The prayerbook led no one to organize a new institution which claimed to represent those Jews who wished to return and for the purpose of political negotiations with governments as an equal amongst equals. And the ability of the Zionist movement to negoti­ate with the big governments is rooted in the recognition that they were a party in the situation - that the Jewish problem was their problem too, not only the problem of the Jews. Thus, the novelty of the solution can be shown in its new corollaries in the new problem-situation.

The retort to this answer may be: let us credit Herzl with the novel idea of organizing Jews to go to Israel, and never mind how novel was his idea of return which made him organize the return. One may support this argument by historical evidence; it mattered little to Herzl whether Jews should leave Europe to go to Isreal or to Uganda, and indeed, in one session of the Zionist Congress he succeeded getting passed a resolution to go to Uganda rather than to Israel.

This retort is false. The idea of organizing a Jewish movement to leave Europe and go to Israel was not novel with Herzl; indeed, in addition to its adumbration a few times, by various Utopian and semi­Utopian thinkers, politicians, and writers, there was already such an organization forming in East Europe. The East European Jews soon joined Herzl and viewed him as their intellectual and political leader. Even when they left the Zionist Congress meeting, when the Uganda resolution had passed, with tears in their eyes, they clung to him as their leader. The Jewish problem in the East, where anti-Semitism was state policy, was much more traditional than in the West; the Eastern Jews did not think Herzl understood the Jewish problem in the East; but they admired the West and viewed him as their spokesman there.

Even when you have a problem in one hand and a solution in another, then, you may get new insights and new practical ideas by putting the two together. It is no accident that Herzl achieved things others failed to achieve; it is no accident that he achieved new results in a field in which he was most unsuitable to act - he being a naive dreamer and a sentimental journalist, and the field being harsh power politics and the inflexible institutions of political intrigue. Nor is it accidental that his successor, Weitzmann, was a leading politician and diplomat with no proper political backing even in the post World War I arena which was almost destroyed by political cynicism.

Leaving political history, then, we may easily generalize the point at issue in more than one way. Discovery of problems, even discovery of the relative significance of problems, is sometimes a significant novelty. It follows immediately that declaring a known but unappreciated solution to a given problem to be important may change our view of the field in which the problem occurs and thus may lead to a series of major dis­coveries; it may then be itself considered a discovery which renders one of many given problems the central problem in that field.

Let us, then, take examples from diverse fields to show that a change of emphasis may be a discovery.

If we take Lord Kelvin’s view of what the central problems of physics of the turn of the century were, we acknowledge his contribution, even though he neither created these problems nor advanced (or even outlined) any cogent or interesting solution to them (indeed he was highly con­servative with regard to the desirable or even possible solutions). Similar­ly, Galileo’s very perception that the Copernican Revolution is a revolu­tion not only in astronomy but at least also in mechanics and in theology - this perception is itself novel. (He was anticipated here, in part, by Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler; still his ideas are novel - like Frege’s and Russell’s - in their very extension.)

Here we arrive at perhaps the most important kind of novelty, and the one most easily amenable to dismissal by quoting predecessors. It is doubtless true that Locke was not the first to advocate toleration, yet he was the first to base a political philosophy on the principle of toleration not merely as a moral principle and political desideratum, but also as a prime political principle. Hence, all he said on toleration has predecessors, yet his political philosophy, his accent on toleration, does not. Similarly, though Locke spoke of substance as something which always eludes us, he cannot be called more than a minor predecessor of Kant; he did not approach Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself because he did not bother seriously to examine the significance of the elusiveness of the substance he passingly admitted was elusive.

This brings us to the novelty - the striking novelty, I think - of Popper’s philosophy of science - even on the assumption that every specific idea of Popper’s in the field is not novel. In line with Kant’s critical idealism and its novelty, I shall now expound Popper’s critical realism and show its novelty. Critical realism is the view - definitely not original with Popper - that any view of the world, being of the world, is realistic, is a set of assertions about the thing-in-itself,³ yet the elusiveness of the thing- in-itself insures that our assertions about it may be false and perhaps even validly criticized. Apply this to science and you get Popper’s philosophy of science. In order to show its novelty let me contrast it now with the philosophies of science preceding it.

To conclude this section, I have illustrated the narrowness of existing criteria of novelty by showing cases where novelty is manifest not by the introduction of new pieces of information or unheard of hypotheses, but by new uses of old materials. These were matching old pieces in new ways, particularly new matchings of problems and solutions; similarly, they were cases of shifts of emphasis, concerning centrality of problems and of modifiability of tenets accepted as more stable and less likely to be modified than others in the field.

In all this I stressed the centrality of problems: to understand a thinker we have to know his problems.

II.