Can we ascribe to past thinkers concepts they had no linguistic means to express?

History and Theory

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 15-31

  Prudovsky, Gad ^a  

^a HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM   (Israel)

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EID: 0007294387     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00002     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. A previous version of this paper was presented to the philosophy department seminar at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. I thank the participants for their constructive remarks. Thanks are also due to Yemima Ben Menahem, Dalia Drai, Debbie Eylon, Yuval Eylon, Gideon Freudenthal, Daniel Kaufman, and Amnon Levav for their helpful suggestions in matters of style and content. I am especially grateful to Orna Milo for sharing with me her immense knowledge of Galileo and her good philosophical sense.
2. Alexander Koyré, "Galileo's Treatise De Motu Gravium: The Use and Abuse of Imaginary Experiment," in his Metaphysics and Measurement (London, 1968), 44-88.
3. In a void r = 0; hence the expression for v is undefined. This is one reason for Aristotle's rejection of the very possibility of a void. The Galilean argumentation which follows is meant to show that the assumption of a void is not absurd.
4. Already here we can see Koyré's leap of imagination. No one in Galileo's text had represented Aristotle in Koyré's way. This does not stop him from using the answer he puts in Aristotle's mouth in order to argue that the two-stones thought experiment is not conclusive enough, and hence cannot reveal the true essence of Galileo's argument. But in this paper I wish to focus on another, more radical, leap of imagination in Koyré's reconstruction of Galileo's argument.
5. Koyré, "Galileo's Treatise," 56.
6. (Thomas Kuhn, "A Function for Thought Experiments," in Scientific Revolutions, ed. Ian Hacking [Oxford, 1982], 17). In the next section I shall show how the question of the historian's willingness to accept the possibility of portraying one of his or her heroes as simply making a mistake, is connected to the issue of anachronism.
7. This very distinction between two types of questions is rejected by more "empirically" minded historians, and I shall discuss their objections in the following sections.
8. Koyré, "Galileo's Treatise," 62. The grammatical form is crucial to this passage. The original French carries the same implication, that of the sharp distinction between the use of a term and the use of the concept it denotes: "Masse inertiale? Sans doute Galileé n'emploie-t-il pas ce terme, il n'en reste pas moins vrai que dans ses raisonnements, il fait constamment usage de cette notion" ("Le De Motu Gravium de Galilée: De l'expérience imaginaire et de son abus," Revue d'Histoire des Sciences 13 [1960], 217).
9. Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, transl. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio [1638] (New York, 1914), 71-72. Emphasis mine.
10. Koyré need not claim that the puzzle presented by Galileo's text could not be solved in other ways, namely, that concepts other than inertial mass could not have supplemented Galileo's argument. He only needs to show that his explanation does indeed solve the puzzle, and that it is plausible to ascribe it to Galileo. I will say more on the topic in the final section, but here I wish to stress that a third requirement-the invalidation of all competing solutions-is one which no interpreter can meet.
11. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History and Theory 8 (1969), 17.
12. For an analysis of the various types of historiographical mistakes, which culminates in the anachronistic one, see Andre du Toit, "Legitimate Anachronism as a Problem for Intellectual History and for Philosophy," South African Journal of Philosophy 10 (1991), 87-95
13. Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding," 12.
14. Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Eng. , 1980), ix.
15. I do not mean to imply that a rational reconstruction is legitimate only in such clear-cut cases. Many debates on interpretation of a given text can be analyzed as debates concerning the appropriate location of the reconstruction, and where such debates occur the issue is no longer clear-cut. My position is that there is a matter of fact to argue about in such cases, but this is not part of my claim in the text. There I outline a non-contestable fact about writing, and argue that when it occurs it lends full justification to rational reconstruction.
16. This aspect of Skinner's position has been understood as posing a limit on both authors and their interpreters.The interpreter must not ascribe authorial intentions which cannot be described in the language used in the time and place of the author in question.Authors, for their part, must "express their intentions conventionally" (Mark Bevir, "The Errors of Linguistic Contextualism," History and Theory 31 [1992], 277).
17. This reading is supported by some of Skinner's remarks. For instance he writes that "if there is simply no convention such that to inform the Emperor that he is wearing no clothes will be acceptable as a case of intending to inform (rather then intending to challenge or ridicule) him, then the Emperor will go naked" (Skinner, "Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts," Philosophical Quarterly 20 [1970], 132).
18. The implication being that the famous boy could have formed an intention to warn the Emperor, but must have failed to express it.This implication licenses Bevir's understanding of Skinner as a soft linguistic contextualist.I think that Skinner should be read as posing a tougher limitation on the author: "Any writer must standardly be engaged in an intended act of communication.It follows that whatever intentions a given writer may have, they must be conventional intentions in the strong sense that they must be recognizable as intentions to uphold some particular position in argument, to contribute in a particular way to the treatment of some particular theme, and so on" (Skinner, "Motives, Intentions and the Interpretation of Texts," in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed.James Tully [Princeton, 1988], 77)
19. The implication here is that the author cannot even have a "non-conventional" intention, hence the question of expressing it becomes nonsensical. This, I think, is the way in which Skinner's critique of anachronism should be read.
20. See Stillman Drake, "Galileo's Experimental Confirmation of Horizontal Inertia: Unpublished Manuscripts," Isis 64 (1973), 291-305.
21. See the first chapter of his Magic, Reason, and Experience (Cambridge, Eng. , 1979).
22. G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, Eng. , 1990), 69.
23. Even if the principle is loosened so that it enables the interpreter to use all the resources known to the agent in order to construct an implicit category, Koyré still violates it. Galileo did not possess the resources needed for the construction of the later concept of inertial mass.
24. But has Koyré explained anything by focusing our attention on the one element in Galileo's thought which transcended his (Galileo's) times? A recent study of the scientific revolution gives a negative answer to the question claiming that: "[W]e must attempt to explain how for instance the law of free fall . . . could be developed and formulated within the conceptual framework of preclassical mechanics, which did not possess these concepts. To accomplish this task is precisely to explain a conceptual development, i. e. , the emergence of something genuinely new from within the old" (P. Damerow, G. Freudenthal, P. McLaughlin, and J. Renn, Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics [New York, 1992], 2). Koyré does not explain Galileo's thought merely in terms of the emergence of the new from the old. He portrays Galileo as inventing a new concept and thus initiating a conceptual revolution. The authors of the study quoted above deny that this is an explanation. They claim that it is a mere introduction of a vis creativa. I cannot do justice here to their profound methodological position, though I think there may be explanations of conceptual innovations which do not belong to their recommended brand. What I should insist on, for my present purposes, concerns not the explanatory power of Koyré's rational reconstruction of Galileo, but rather the question of whether it could in principle be true. It may be that Koyré's story of Galileo's intellectual development is both true and non-explanatory. My aim in this paper is mainly to counter any argument which aims to deny the very possibility of its being true.
25. There are two separate issues here. First, there is the question of whether it is legitimate to ascribe to Galileo the concept of inertial mass. Second, there is the question of whether Galileo's implicit use of this concept changed the course of history. The two questions are logically independent, and to my main philosophical interest a positive answer to the first is all I wish to establish.I chose, in these last remarks of the section, to conflate the two issues since the legitimacy of ascribing implicit concepts is of minor interest to the historian if the case is not made for their historical significance.