Since you are reading this, you have probably read Adam Gopnik's recent essay-review about Galileo Galilei in The New Yorker. You might also have seen some reactions from unimpressed historians, one of whom calls the article “extremely pernicious.” I think that some of Gopnik's errors have been exaggerated, and that most of his felicities have gone unnoticed. The moral is that us historians should be as alert to what popular writers get right as we are to what they get wrong. After all, we can hardly criticise Gopnik for imbalance in his treatment of Galileo if we are imbalanced in our treatment of Gopnik.
To avoid over-balancing in Gopnik's favour, I've included some new “cons” next to some of the thirteen “pros” below. Most of the items on this selective list are included because they are pleasant surprises, ie. claims about Galileo that show a healthy level of historical acumen for someone who does not do history for a living. For example, if Gopnik had not made point 12 below, many would have privately groaned at his naive belief that science is insulated from its cultural context.
I'm not suggesting that historians should give a point-by-point assessment of every popular article they comment on; that would paralyse commentary. I've got nothing against the practice of picking out one error from a feature article and tearing it to shreds, as thonyc has done with the Gopnik's comparison between Dee and Galileo. But I do think that we should read popular articles as if we were about to write an analysis like the one I've tried to present in this post. If we look for pleasant surprises, we might find more of them than we expected.
My list covers three topics, in this order: Galileo and the Church, Galileo's science, and Galileo's context. My main source on Galileo is one of the subjects of Gopnik's review, an excellent 2010 biography by John Heilbron—the same John Heilbron who starred as Thomas Kuhn's student in my previous post.
Galileo and the Church
One. Gopnik writes that Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church was “traceable to his hubris.” This should please those who say, with Thomas Mayer, that “the fault [for the condemnation of Galileo] lies with Galileo, not the pope or the Inquisition” (quoted in this news article.)
(Mayer is the author of two works that Gopnik covers in his review; his take on Gopnik's article can be found in the comments of this post. I hope to read Mayer's books in full at some point, but for now I am relying on the snippets from their introductions that are available on Google Books).
In fact, the theme of Galileo's insolence in was strong enough in Gopnik's article to antagonise a blogger at the Cato Institute, who read Gopnik as saying that “Galileo could have avoided a lot of trouble if he'd been just a little less stubborn and impolitic.”
Two. “The Catholic Church in Italy then was very much like the Communist Party in China now: an institution in which few of the rulers took their own ideology seriously but still held a monopoly on moral and legal authority. … Like the Party in China now, the Church then was pluralistic in practice about everything except an affront to its core powers. … You could calculate, consider, and even hypothesize with Copernicus. You just couldn’t believe in him.”
Gopnik is right that the Church could tolerate a large amount of Copernican science, especially when it was useful for things like making calendars. This is a key point that is often missed by those who take a black-and-white view of Galileo's conflict with the Church.
On the other hand, I'm not sure where Gopnik got the idea that the rulers of the Catholic Church in Galileo's time did not take religion seriously. Even Galileo was a man of faith, at least according to Heilbron, who thinks that he “believed as surely as Bellarmine [the Pope's chief theologian until his death in 1621] and the majority of Catholic exegetes of their time that every statement in scripture is in some sense true.”
But Gopnik is right that the Church was especially sensitive to doctrinal violations that posed a threat to its power:
“In Rome they pardon atheists, sodomites, libertines, and other sorts of rascals, but they never pardon those who bad mouth the Pope or his court, or who seem to question papal power” (needless to say, I got this quote from Heilbron's biography, who attributes it to Gabriel Naudé, the librarian of Urban VIII's nephew).Three. “Galileo even seems to have had six interviews with the sympathetic new Pope, Urban VIII—a member of the sophisticated Barberini family—in which he was more or less promised freedom of expression in exchange for keeping quiet about his Copernicanism.” This is not the sort of concession you would expect from someone who wants to show that there was no room for compromise between Galileo and the Church. Gopnik could have added that Urban VIII was not only willing to publish Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (the book that triggered Galileo's 1633 trial) but that he considered it useful for the church. By showing that he knew all of the arguments in favour of the Copernican hypothesis, Galileo would show that he—along with all good Roman Catholics—had rejected that hypothesis out of piety and epistemic humility and not out of ignorance. I bring this up not to suggest that Gopnik should have mentioned it in his article, but because it must be one of the craftiest rhetorical manoeuvres in the history of Church-science relations. Four. “Though Galileo, vain as ever, thought he could finesse the point, Copernicanism was at the heart of what he wanted to express.” This sentence is a pretty good summary of Galileo's motivations for publishing his Dialogue. It captures the depth of Galileo's Copernican commitment, and the foolishness of his belief that he could dodge censure with verbal trickery. Five. “Galileo’s trial was a bureaucratic muddle, with crossing lines of responsibility, and it left fruitfully unsettled the question of whether Copernican ideas had been declared heretical or if Galileo had simply been condemned as an individual for continuing to promote them after he had promised not to.” “Bureaucratic muddle” echoes Mayer's point, reported in this 2010 article, that the irregularities of Galileo's trial were due to ineptitude rather than malice on the part of Church bureaucrats. The rest of the quoted sentence shows that Gopnik grasps Mayer's point, reported in the same article, that Galileo's punishment in 1633 was at least partly due to his violation of a precept issued against him in 1616. On the minus side, Gopnik omits another of Mayer's points, which is that Galileo was as clumsy as his judges, ie. he made things worse not just through “vanity” or “hubris” but also through sheer legal incompetence. Six. Other scientists have followed Galileo in “ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered”; in general, “science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals.” These claims, from the final paragraph of Gopnik's article, arguably make Galileo into even less a hero than he really was. Between his Sunspot Letters of 1613 and his trial in 1633, and especially before the precept issued against him in 1616, Galileo often did the opposite of “ducking and avoiding” the consequences of his Copernican views. Galileo's science Seven. Gopnik notes that Galileo's astronomical observations were due to his powers of his interpretation rather than his knowledge of the telescope, and that he did not invent that instrument: “since there were Dutch gadgets in many hands [by the time Galileo made the key observations], and many eyes, he understood what he was seeing as no man of his time had before.” Eight. Despite being a “founder of modern science,” Galileo wrote things that we consider false today, notably that the orbits of the planets around the sun are circular and that the tides are due to the sloshing caused by the acceleration and deceleration of different parts of the earth. As Gopnik puts it, he “had his crotchets.” Moreover, Gopnik suggests that he went wrong about the tides precisely because of the skepticism that makes him seem modern (shades of Paul Feyerabend?). A minor quibble is that Gopnik does not mention the best illustration of this theme, Galileo's 1623 book on comets, the Assayer. Heilbron shows that this work, which contains some of Galileo's most famous remarks about scientific method, was riddled with scientific errors and written out of groundless spite. A bigger complaint is that Gopnik does not mention that Galileo overstated the case for Copernicanism. Many of his arguments showed only that the earth's motion was consistent with sense experience, he completely ignored a compromise model put forward by the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, and his favourite argument for the motion of the earth was based on his dodgy theory of the tides. Many of Galileo's contemporaries, including some of his close friends, were aware of these problems. Heilbron puts it like this: “although [reason and experience] established essential and growing support for Copernican theory [by 1616], it gave no unimpeachable proof.” Nine. The Dialogue did not express a straightforward view about scientific method: “Though Galileo/Salviati wants to convince Simplicio and Sagredo of the importance of looking for yourself, he also wants to convince them of the importance of not looking for yourself.” On the minus side, Gopnik may be too generous when he implies that this two-faced attitude is “philosophically sophisticated.” Perhaps Galileo championed observation when it suited his case, and favoured a priori reflection when sense experience worked against him. Ten. “The temperament [of Galileo] is not all-seeing and curious; it is, instead, irritable and impatient with the usual stories.” This is not a bad paraphrase of Heilbron's point that “perhaps the best single-word descriptor of Galileo is 'critic.'” On the other hand, the reference to "usual stories" is misleading, since Galileo was often a conservative critic. This from pages 1 and 2 of Heilbron's biography:
Galileo was a humanist of the old school. He much preferred Ariosto, the darling poet of the sixteenth century, to Tasso, who would be a favorite of the seventeenth... He stayed with the geometry of the Greeks rather than employ the algebras of his contemporaries... He was not an innovator by temperament. And, we are told, he liked to wear clothes that were fifty years out of date.Another limit on Galileo's critical spirit was that he had trouble applying it to himself. Few people were convinced by Galileo's theory of the tides when he showed it off in Rome in 1615-16. Galileo must have been aware of the weaknesses of the theory, but once he got hold of it he could not let go. Gopnik's comparison between Galileo's temperament and that of his near-contemporary, John Dee, has been ripped apart by thonyc. I'm not going to try to put the pieces back together. But it does seem that the fault, if there is any, lies less with Gopnik that it does with his source. Gopnik could not have guessed that the biography he reviewed left out most of Dee's contributions to modern science, as thonyc seems to say it did. Galileo's context Eleven. The Dialogue was as much a literary achievement as a technical one. Indeed, “it uses every device of Renaissance humanism: irony, drama, comedy, sarcasm, pointed conflict, and a special kind of fantastic poetry.” Twelve. Galileo's “primary education” was in such things as music, drawing, poetry and rhetoric; and this cultural context had an effect on his natural philosophy. It gave him a “competitive, empirical drive” and “intellectual practices of doubting authority and trying out experiments.” A tick for paying attention to context, but possibly a cross for doing so selectively. Gopnik does not mention Heilbron's thesis that Galileo's early literary tastes foretold his black-and-white approach to debates, his heroic self-image, and (remarkably) the absence of the crucial notion of “force” in his mechanics. A determined critic might say that Gopnik has fastened on the cultural elements that make Galileo an ideal modern scientist, and ignored the rest. Thirteen. Galileo framed his discoveries so as to appeal to patrons: “A Tuscan opportunist to the bone, Galileo rushed off letters to the Medici duke in Florence, hinting that, in exchange for a job, he would name the new stars [ie. the moons of Jupiter] after the Medici.” Similarly, the telescope was not just a technical device for Galileo, but an “emblem and icon,” part of his “image.” These are key themes in Mario Biagioli's 1994 book Galileo, Courtier. True, Gopnik probably got this information second-hand, from Heilbron's biography. But it does not follow, as Darin Hayton has suggested, that he “ignores considerable recent work on Galileo.” ******* Gopnik's main errors, in approximate order of seriousness, are to ignore Galileo's overstatement of the Copernican case, to ignore the conservatism and dogmatism that went with his critical spirit, to underestimate the sincerity of his religious faith, to neglect Heilbron's novel and striking thesis about the relevance of Galileo's early literary tastes to his later career, and to omit Mayer's point that Galileo made elementary legal mistakes during his trial. These errors should be seen alongside the many pleasant surprises listed above, of which the most gratifying are, in my opinion, the recognition that Galileo was vain and stubborn, that the Church supported much Copernican science in Galileo's time, that the Pope himself agreed to the publication of an anti-realist version of the Dialogue, and that Galileo's critical spirit was partly responsible for his rejection of Kepler's ellipses and his acceptance of a mechanical tidal theory, two moves that we now regard as major blunders. In my view, and keeping in mind that this is a popular article by a non-specialist author, the pros outweigh the cons by a clear margin. If an unprejudiced non-historian reads Gopnik's article with care, there is a good chance that he or she will come away with a more nuanced and accurate view of the Galileo affair than they started with. In my next post I intend to look at some more general issues that the “Gopnik affair” raises about history-of-science communication. Expand post.
Malheureusement je ne traduis plus tous les posts que j'écrit sur ce blog. Si vous voudriez lire les posts qui ont été traduits, veuillez cliquer ici.
Agrandir ce message.
Moreover, Gopnik suggests that he went wrong about the tides precisely because of the skepticism that makes him seem modern (shades of Paul Feyerabend?).
ReplyDeleteIn this point I think Gopnik is seriously wrong. There was, as Galileo well knew, very solid empirical evidence for a luna tide theory and even more solid empirical evidence that refuted his own mechanical dynamic tide theory.
He didn't reject the luna tide theory through scepticism but because his own tide theory was the only 'proof' that he had for heliocentricity. This 'proof' was the central point of his book and in fact the book was supposed to be titled Theory of the Tides until the Vatical told him not to.
If he had abandoned his theory for the much more rational luna influence theory then he might as well have abandoned his book and never written it.
Hi thonyc, and thanks for your comment.
DeleteAre you saying that Galileo was entirely insincere in putting forward the tidal theory as proof of heliocentricity? If he placed so much weight on the theory, and held it for so long (Heilbron suggests that it sealed his commitment to Copernicanism as early as 1595) surely he thought it had at least something in its favour? And isn't it reasonable to take Galileo at his word when he wrote near the end of DTWS that Kepler "lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over the waters, to occult properties, and to such peurilities"?
Perhaps "skepticism" is too general a term. What Gopnik meant, I think, is that Galileo rejected the "moon's dominion over the waters" in the same spirit as today's self-described skeptics reject things like extra-sensory perception--namely that there is no known, transparent mechanism by which these phenomena could occur. My point in the above post was that Gopnik seemed perfectly aware of the irony that this insistence on intelligible causes, though it seems very modern, led Galileo astray.
But suppose you are right, and Galileo stuck with the tidal theory out of sheer dogmatism or self-preservation, and that his complaint about "occult properties" was a bluff. That means that Gopnik has overstated the Feyerabendian thesis that apparently rational methods (like insisting on intelligible causes) can lead to wrong results. But historians of science usually consider this quite a radical, sophisticated thesis that many popular writers have not grasped yet. So we should be pleased that a popular writer has not only grasped a radical point, but pushed it even further than the evidence allows!
I'd like to echo Michael Bycroft's question, do you believe that Galileo was insincere? I've always felt that a combination of wishful thinking and unclear physics lead to Galileo's solid belief in the theory.
DeleteThree things struck me unfavorably in Gopnik's article:
ReplyDelete(1) His early statement:
And the best argument, often the only argument, for all these beliefs was that Aristotle had said so, and who were you to say otherwise?
This sums up a paragraph that sets up a black-hat/white-hat, pigheaded-old-fogies vs. innovative-new-thinkers opposition, one which (as I understand it) is a serious misreading of the intellectual history, misrepresenting both Galileo's contemporaries and Galileo himself.
(2) The Chinese Communist Party comparison:
The Catholic Church in Italy then was very much like the Communist Party in China now: an institution in which few of the rulers took their own ideology seriously....
I wish he had stated more clearly what he meant by 'ideology'. Since I thought it too absurd to think that the Catholic hierarchy were all secret atheists, I assumed he meant they were all secret Copernicans. I believe Gopnik never really grasped the point that a scientifically sophisticated 17C. intellectual could disbelieve in Copernicanism. (I also wonder on what evidence Gopnik is so sure about the private beliefs of the CCP.)
(3) His statement, near the end of the essay, that
[Mayer's] argument is basically one of those “If you put it in context, threatening people with hideous torture in order to get them to shut up about their ideas was just one of the ways they did things then” efforts, much loved by contemporary historians.
My knowledge of Mayer's work is pretty much the same as yours (plus his article "The censoring of Galileo’s Sunspot Letters and the first phase of his trial".) I suspect though that Gopnik wanted Mayer to express a strong value judgement.
You've discussed the pros and cons of anti-presentism (or anti-Whiggism) extensively on this blog. Using your classification (from "Different kinds of Whig history..."), Gopnik appears to have fallen prey to the fixed-evidence fallacy, and some aspects of dogmatic side-taking ("black hat v. white hat").
I have no problem with Gopnik taking sides in the Church-Galilo conflict based on ahistorical free-speech values, provided that he appreciates why a professional historian, like Mayer, might want to maintain a more value-neutral stance. (Also of course that Gopnik himself realize how ahistorical such a value judgement is --- I'm not convinced that he does.)
Finally, how much of a pass should we give Gopnik because he's not a professional? The New Yorker prides itself for its fanatical fact-checking, and for its long-form essays that delve into levels of nuance not available in most other magazines. I grant your good points, but they are the least I would have expected of this writer in this venue.
Thanks for this thought-provoking comment. I'll go through your numbers.
Delete(1) Reading it again, I agree that the statement you quote is a "serious misreading of the intellectual history."
I guess this comes under my point eight in the above post, where I noted that "Gopnik does not mention that Galileo overstated the case for Copernicanism." To be clear, I should have added that he also understated the case against.
(Although it would be unfair not to add that some of Galileo's opponents really were "pigheaded-old-fogies", that it was not long after Galileo's death that Copernicanism gained wide acceptance among leading astronomers, and that this acceptance was partly due to Galileo's discoveries and arguments).
(2) I think that what Gopnik got right with his Communism/Catholicism analogy was a) the Church could tolerate lots of valuable Copernican science as long as the scientists treated Copernicanism as a hypothesis, and b) the Church was especially sensitive to threats to its power.
In exchange for these points, I'm willing to forgive Gopnik the disanalogies between the Church and Communism.
I'll also forgive another point that occurs to me in reading your comment, which is that the Church's "instrumentalism" was still a respectable philosophical position in the 20th century. As you probably know, the great Pierre Duhem argued that astronomical theories--like all scientific theories--should be seen as economical summaries of observed facts, not as claims about the deep structure of the world. The Pope's position on Copernicanism could be seen not as hypocrisy but as a precursor to modern positivism.
(3) I agree that the statement you quote commits the Whiggish errors you mention (and I'm glad my previous post at http://bit.ly/T3tJpC helped to identify them!).
The thing is, there are other parts of the article where Gopnik seems to avoid those errors. For example, in some places he recognises that the fault did not lie entirely with the Church, as when he says that Galileo was "vain."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Gopnik has a point regarding Mayer. I take Gopnik as complaining not that historians want to be value-neutral, but that they move too easily from neutrality to non-neutrality. For example, in the Introduction to his book on the Roman Inquisition Mayer makes it clear that he wants to assess the Inquisition *by the standards of the time.* At the same time, Mayer is quoted in articles where he seems to be saying that Galileo was at fault *by our own standards.* So Mayer seems to have switched from a context-independent judgement ("Galileo's trial was just by 17C standards") from a context-dependent one ("Galileo was at fault, period"). Is this legitimate?
I hope to say more about this in an upcoming post.
[4] "how much of a pass should we give Gopnik because he's not a professional?" I think we should at least be *a bit* more tolerant of his errors than we would be of a historian's. Though I take your point that we should be less tolerant of Gopnik writing in The New Yorker than some hack writing in, say, The Sun.
Maybe you are right, and I went too far in saying that "the pros [of the article] outweigh the cons by a clear margin." But the main point of my post still stands: if we read popular articles with a charitable rather than a critical eye, we may find examples of unexpected historiographical acumen.
Thanks for your response. I pretty much agree with all of it, but it does suggest a couple more points.
ReplyDelete(1) I'd add that it wasn't just more time and familiarity that carried the day for heliocentrism, but also more results: Kepler's Rudolphine Tables, and I believe there was a positive "Coriolis" result (anachronism alert!), obtained by dropping balls from a tower. (Although I can't lay my hands on the exact reference.)
I wish I knew more about when true heliocentrism -- both dynamic and kinematic, i.e., physical and astronomical -- became the "Standard Model".
Anyway, it all shows the difficulty of avoiding the fixed-evidence fallacy, or even knowing exactly what the contemporary evidence was. I haven't read Heilbron's book, so I don't know how much Gopnik can be blamed for his unbalanced picture.
(2) As for instrumentalism, wasn't "saving the phenomena" a common, or even default, position in astronomy back as far as 5C. CE, maybe even back to Plato?
I can see a family resemblance between positivism and "saving the phenomena", but this needs to be served with a huge helping of anachronism cautions.
Bruce Stephenson's Kepler's Physical Astronomy (and also Koestler's book) point out how much Kepler's success stemmed from his adoption of a realist position: this was how the planets really moved. Galileo also deserves a lot of (whiggish) kudos for insisting on the reality of the earth's motion. So I'll give Gopnik a plus for making this point.
(3) I'm not all that familiar with Mayer's work, as I said. Also I speak as a non-historian with an amateur interest. It occurs to me though that your discussion of the Normative Judgement issue in
Different kinds of Whig history... is on point. In particular:
The real problem, insofar as it is a problem, is that making normative claims in a work of history is a kind of disciplinary category-mistake. It's like beginning a scientific article with a limerick.
And having quoted that, I'd like to disagree a bit. As I said in more detail in my comments on Darin Hayton's post, I think this historian's convention is unfortunate. It's too bad that historians don't say up-front, "Here's how I feel about Galileo [or Socrates, or energy, or mono-energism, or whatever]. I've tried to prevent my personal feelings from coloring my historical inquiry. You, the reader, must judge how well I've succeeded."
Thanks for these further comments, and sorry for the belated reply. To your points in (1) I'ld add the detection of the long-sought-after stellar parallax as evidence for the earth's motion. I'm sure historians of astronomy could add many more examples.
DeleteOn (2) I'm not enough of a specialist to give a proper answer. I take it that Aristotle's distinction between the sciences of prediction and those of explanation created a natural division between (mathematical) astronomy and (explanatory) cosmology, that this division became a rift as mathematical models of planetary motion became more and more elaborate over the next two millenia or so, and that the realism of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo was a relatively novel attempt to bridge the gap between the predictive and explanatory parts of what we call "astronomy."
What I do not know is what were Urban VIII's sources for his arguments against the realist position.
On (3) I agree that there's something to be said for historians making clear their personal judgement of the past events they discuss (hence my "insofar as it is a problem"). I find that Heilbron does this well in his biography of Galileo, where he unapologetically passes judgement on many of the characters in his story. This makes for a bracing read, but it also helps to explain past events, eg. Heilbron gives Galileo a hard time for the vindictiveness and scientific incompetence of The Assayer, a portrayal that helps us understand why Galileo made so many enemies.
I'm less sure about whether a reader is better equipped to assess a work of history if they know the personal preferences of the author. This knowledge might help by putting the reader on guard against possible biases in the work, but then again it might cause readers to imagine biases that are not there.
Christopher Graney's paper, "Francesco Ingoli's Essay to Galileo..." arXiv 1211.4244 has useful info about your Urban question.
ReplyDeleteBradley's discovery of the aberration of light (1729) antedated Bessel's discovery of aberration (1838).
I still think a reader is likely to guess at biases if the author doesn't explicitly state his sympathies, but of course there are dangers with both approaches.