Words of wisdom from the positivist Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach (1838-1916), positivist

Suppose we have always been constructivists, as I suggested in the last post. And suppose we have too many big pictures, not too few, as I argued in the last post but one. What then? What consequences does this have for the way we do the history of science? Here is one consequence: we should pay more attention to dead historians of science. If they were wise enough to be constructivists, perhaps they were wise in other ways. And if we have not discarded their big pictures, perhaps there were some grains of truth in those big pictures. Consider Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (1883; mine is the 1960 English edition). Mach was nothing if not a positivist. Some would say he was the original (logical) positivist. But there are many passages in his book that defy the present-day caricature of positivists. Here is a collection of the choicer passages of this kind.

1. You cannot understand the science of mechanics without understanding its history:

The gist and kernel of mechanical ideas has in almost every case grown up in the investigation of very simple and special cases of mechanical processes; and the analysis of the history of the discussions concerning these cases must ever remain the method at once the most effective and the most natural for laying this gist and kernel bare. Indeed, it is not too much to say that it is the only way in which a real comprehension of the general upshot of mechanics is to be obtained. (xxii)

2. The study of rejected ideas is an important part of the history of ideas:

We shall recognize [in studying the mechanics of Galileo, Huygens and Newton] that not only a knowledge of the ideas that have been accepted and cultivated by subsequent teachers is necessary for the historical understanding of a science, but also that the rejected and transient thoughts of the inquirers, nay even apparently erroneous notions, may be very important and very instructive. (316)

3. The study of history can show that some taken-for-granted ideas are historically contingent:

Historical investigation not only promotes the understanding of that which now is, but also brings new possibilities before us, by showing that which exists to be in great measure conventional and accidental [Mach's italics]. From the higher point of view at which different paths of thought converge we may look about us with freer vision and discover routes before unknown. (316)

4. Early modern scientists took theological doctrines for granted, and they built these doctrines into their science:

Every unbiased mind must admit that the age in which the chief development of the science of mechanics took place, was an age of predominantly theological cast. Theological questions were excited by everything, and modified everything. No wonder, then, that mechanics is colored thereby. But the thoroughness with which theological thought thus permeated scientific inquiry, will best be seen by an examination of details. (546)

[there follows examples from the published and unpublished writings of Galileo, Fermat, Leibniz, Maupertuis, Euler, and Descartes, before Mach concludes as follows:]

During the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the close of the eighteenth, the prevailing inclination of inquirers was, to find in all physical laws some particular disposition of the Creator. (551)

5. The act of communicating an idea can change the idea in profound ways (or, as we would say nowadays, science is constructed in the process of its communication):

These beginnings [ie. of the science of mechanics] point unmistakably to their origin in the experiences of the manual arts. To the necessity of putting these experiences in communicable form and of disseminating them beyond the confines of class and craft, science owes its origin. The collector of experiences of this kind, who seeks to preserve them in written form, finds before him many different, or at least supposedly different, experiences. His position is one that enables him to review these experiences more frequently, more variously, and more impartially than the individual workingman, who is always limited to a narrow province. The facts and their dependent rules are brought into closer temporal and spatial proximity in his mind and writings, and thus acquire the opportunity of revealing their relationship, their connection, and their gradual transition the one into the other. The desire to simplify and abridge the labor of communication supplies a further impulse in the same direction. Thus, from economical reasons, in such circumstances, great numbers of facts and the rules that spring from them are condensed into a system and comprehended in a single expression. (89-91)

6. Books and chairs and tables are constructions, ie. their existence is not self-evident but an inference from our sensations, and this inference depends on our needs and interests:

Nature is composed of sensations as its elements. Primitive man, however, first picks out certain compounds of these elements—those namely that are relatively permanent and of greater importance to him. The first and oldest words are names of ‘things.’ Even here, there is an abstractive process, and abstraction from the surroundings of the things, and from the continual small changes which these compound sensations undergo, which being practically unimportant are not noticed. No unalterable thing exists. (579)

7. Our ideas change our experiences:

This [never mind what] explains why a person of experience regards a new event with different eyes than the novice. The new experience is illuminated by the mass of old experience. (581)

8. We should study the past so that we do not mistake passing fads for genuine truths:

They that know the entire course of the development of a science, will, as a matter of course, judge more freely and more correctly of the significance of any present scientific movement than they, who, limited in their views to the age in which their own lives have been spent, contemplate merely the momentary trend that the course of intellectual events takes at the present moment. (9)

Conclusion: this last point holds as well for past history of science as it does for past science.

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