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The Sciences Now Have Masks on Them
| Article
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10597 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
9,994 Words |
| Author
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Colin M. Turbayne
Colin M. Turbayne is Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Rochester, in Rochester, New York. His best known work is
The Myth of Metaphor. This selection is reprinted by
permission of the University of South Carolina Press. |
In this piece I try to do two things. First, in order to give content to the distinction between using metaphor and being used by it, I offer some illustrations of actual victims of metaphor from the history of science. My main examples are Descartes and Newton, two scientists who first invented or developed procedures for describing the process of nature and then confused ingredients of their procedures with the process they described. Second, in order to find a method that may help me to avoid the errors of these giants, I preset their methods in some detail.
More than others in modern times, Descartes and Newton have influenced the attitudes of subsequent scientists, philosophers, and ordinary people, so that our vision of the world remains largely a complication of the Newtonian and the Cartesian. Moreover, they were both philosophers of science as well as scientists, having left us not only their own descriptions of nature but also higher level accounts of what they thought they were doing in making these descriptions. Finally, in spite of their mistaken beliefs about what they thought they were doing, their methods worked.
In different degrees Descartes and Newton were aware and unaware of what they were doing. To some degree they did not confuse the ingredients of their procedures with the process they described. But they also thought that many ingredients of procedure were duplicated in the process. They thus added qualities to the world, thinking that these ingredients were not just inventions or decisions in the realm of procedure but actual discoveries of fact. In this respect they were like cooks who first use a recipe with great skill and then added the pages of their recipe to the stew.
To change the picture, they were in part victims of Bacon's Idols of the Theatre, "because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays representing worlds of their own creation… neither only of entire systems but also of many principles and axioms in science which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received." I shall show how these scientists confused their "stage-plays" with the events they depicted in the way Bacon describes. Then, following the lead given by Descartes, I shall try to do away with the "stage-plays": "The sciences now have masks on them; if the masks were taken off they would appear supremely beautiful." Finally, I shall show how the "stage-plays" may be re-performed, or the "masks" put back, but with this crucial difference, with awareness that they are only "stage-plays" or only
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