SCIENTIFIC REASON lan Hackingxvi SCIENTIFIC REASON Chung Cheng University. I also was able to meet clinicians and researchers into autism in the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, and teachers, clinicians, and parents of autistic children in Taichung, 1 well remember a long afternoon meeting with philosophy students and teachers at National Chung Cheng University. All my hosts were incredibly generous. I will mention only special thanks to Chin-Mu Yang and Ruey-Lin Chen, and above all to the mastermind and originator of my visit, Jeu-Jenq, Yuann. December 2007 ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON ‘These lectures address very traditional subjects of philosophical discussion: truth, reason, knowledge and the sciences. These are ancient topics. My spiritual ancestor is more Leibniz, and hence by indirection Plato, than it is Aristotle. What we ade, in our historicist times, is that we are aware that nothing is eternally fixed, unless it is purely formal, Everything evolves; most things decay, Even the constants of nature, such as Planck's constont and, the speed of light, may not be quite as constant as they are taken tobe, in simple down-home physics Many thinkers who are not analytic philosophers take it to be obvious, that even truth has a history. [shall say the opposite (for I take truth to be a formal concept), yet my colleagues, the analytic philosophers, may fear that I set my sails too much in. that direction, Caution is called for. In order to connect trath with, history, I shall invoke Bemard Williams’ recent idea about what ‘A standard receat survey paper is, Jean-Philippe Uzan, “The Fundamental ‘Constants and Their Variation: Observational and Theoretical Status” Reviews of Macdern Physics, 75 (2003): 4036855,2 SCIENTIFIC REASON he calls truthfulness. Ways to tell the truth have a history, or what Williams called a genealogy? In order to connect reason and practice I shall speak about reasoning, rather than some abstract ahistorical presence, the noble reason of more traditional philosophizing. These are not mere cosmetic changes: they represent new ways to pursue the Leibnizian project of understanding truth and reason, These topics are entirely impersonal, but shall take the liberty of making the occasional personal remark. People keep on asking me how I can identify as an analytic philosopher and yet ‘be so comfortable in making use of the past in order to understand the present. An occasional aside will suggest answers to that question ‘My approach is at once radical and simple. I shall keep on coming back to that. On the one hand I rely on truisms. On the other hand I make them yield conclusions about reasoning that are rather radical, so radical that sometimes I shall have to say, yes, T really do mean what I am saying. Among the many oddities of my approach is that | shall often cite, out of context, a well-known saying by a well-known dead philosopher—Schlick or Husserl, for example, as well as the canonical great ones—and say, that is very close to what I am saying here. I am not arguing from authority when | do this, for 1 do not go on to argue that the philosopher meant his words in the way in which I take them I want rather to say, it looks as if these seemingly unfamiliar ideas have been around for a long time, in slightly different guises. J shall also use folklore about the history of the sciences more than a respectable person should. ‘That is because I think there is a lot of wisdom in some folklore 2 Bemard Williams, Truth and Trufiftiess: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton Princeton University Press, 2002, See my review in Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 34 2006) 157-148, (ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON 3 that we are ill-advised to forget, even when it violates the rules of rigour, 1. Learning how to learn My fundamental observation is that reasoning, finding out, and techniques of discovery have a history. It is not just the istory of facts discovered, theories proposed, and technologies invented. We have not only learned an amazing amount about the world and how to change it: we have also had to learn how to find out. ‘There are two sides to that. We had to bring to the surface various kinds of inmate ability that human beings may have had forever, but whose exercise does not come naturally, And we had to evolve social organizations within which those abilities could be fostered. (On the one side, then, I wish to point to cognitive science, the study of mental capacities. On the other side, [refer to the history of civilizations and of their institutions, I deliberately say “point” and “refer.” Cognitive science is thriving but still in its infancy. There are many confident assertions about the brain and its abilities, but in all honesty our knowledge is sketchy and conjectural. Hence we can only point to current guesses about cognition. In contrast we know an enormous amount about the history of civilizations, but only recently have historians begun to think seriously about the role of the sciences within them. We are beginning to know a great deal of the microhistory and microsociology of this or that scientific incident, but I am interested in a larger view, philosophical and anthropological, of scientific reason in the life of our species. Thus I shall refer to stories about the past, but I shall not engage in historical writing,4 SCIENTIFIC REASON Tshould emphasize at the start that | am a philesopher who exploits facts about the past, but [ am in no way a historian of the sciences. Moreover, | use the past in a retrograde way, to try to understand the present. This can be dressed up as brilliantly up-to-date, using a phrase taken from Michel Foucault, “history of the present,” of it can be dismissed with Herbert Butterficld’s phrase, “whig history.’ But in truth I am not doing history at all; I shall only be using it Cognition and culture are, then, two dimensions that provide the space in which to understand scientific reason, We have many different cognitive abilities, and human history runs on many paths. Not surprisingly, there are many ways to conduct scientific research, For example, © Mathematicians construct deductive proofs (among other things). ‘= We make theoretical models of aspects of nature in order to understand them or to alter them. © ‘The laboratory sciences demand not just “experiment,” but also the building of apparatus to elicit, and often to create, phenomena. ‘© Taxonomists classify living things according to principles of hierarchic structure, although what those principles are, continue to be matters of intense debate. '* Decision under uncertainty, thinking in probabilities, is yet another distinct style of scientific thinking. 5 Sir Herben Butterfield wrote one of the first textbooks of history of eatly modeen Europea science, based on lectures he got up for science undergraduates in Cambndge University in 1948, The Origins of Moder Science, 1300-180, London ‘aud Cambridge: Deighton Bell, 1949. His chief authority was Alexandre Koy. his fame is for political and social history of England; he despised “Whies of ‘wham the philosopher cum historian David Hume isthe best example —who wrote our the pasts a series of events that made sense chiefly in that they led om to and validated the glorious present, (ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON | 5 + Thete may also be a genetic way of understanding, most successfull in such evolutionary theories as Darwin's theory of natural selection, but also tried out in enterprises as diverse as Freudian analysis and Marxist historiography. ‘These are distinct ways to find things out, practiced in what we call the sciences. They have histories that are to some extent independent. They are grounded in cognitive capacities about Which, at present, we can only speculate. These are distinct styles of scientific thinking, each of which has been developed in its own way, in its own time frame, and each of which contrizutes to the larger fabric of scientific imagination and action. ‘There is nothing peculiar to the sciences about the uncovering of innate cognitive (and other) human potentialities, and the development of social institutions within which they may thrive. A most obvious comparison is with music. Analogies between music and what we now call sciences struck ancient Greek philosophers, and were preserved in the standard course of education in mediaeval universities in Europe. The “quadrivium” consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. We now file three of those as sciences, and have moved music to Une side. This is in part betaune although we have “music theory,” we do not think of music itself as propositional, in the way in which we view arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy as being stiences whose knowledge can be expressed by sentences. In these lectures I shall take for granted that music is not a style of scientific thinking, yet that distinction may itself be a contingent fact about the history of thought. As it happens, after the new learning of the 17th century, the sciences evolved in one direction and music in another. Fethaps things could have gone differently. ‘The early European organization, which put music beside astronomy, does not seem ever to have been on the cards in6 {SCIENTIFIC REASON China. There, if we wanted to shake up our preconceptions, we might offer calligraphy as a science alongside astronomy. 2. Styles of scientific thinking Mathematical deduction, taxonomic ing hypothetical modelling, experimental exploration, life in the laboratory, probabilistic reasoning, historic-genetic thinking—I got the idea of a small manifold of distinct styles of scientific thinking from the historian af science A. C. Crombie, | encountered his ideas at a conference in 1978 in Pisa, and have never looked back# He thought in traditional terms of the more ot less continual evolution and growth of methods of scientific reasoning, all the way back to ancient times. He wanted to organize a global history of science on an encyclopaedic scale. He had an ambition to produce a “historical anthropology” of European science. That is a valuable phrase that I suppose he took from the French historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, Jean-Pierre Vernant? I do not really agtee with Crombie's project, but it faunched my own. Indeed you will see at the start of my second lecture that [regard my enterprise as, in a sense, anthropological. But not as historical anthropology; rather as what can be called philosophical anthropology, whose direct ancestor is of course Kant. + The proccodings were published in J Hinukha, D. Grusaer, and F. Apuzzi (eds.) Theor Change, ancient Axiomatics, and Galileo's Methodology: Proceedings ofthe 1978 Pisa Conference on the History and Philosophy of Sclence, 2 vals, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 198) > “Historical anthropology” has no standard usage in Foglish, but the French expression, “amhtopologie historique," is well known to scholars who work ip tha language. It started with historians ofthe so-caled Annales school, and in particular with Vernart's new way of studying ancient Greece and other Mediterancan civilizations. The term is wor used to name university courses, research groups, and 0 fort and isa standard entry in French encyclopedias. eg, the Liners, (ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIZ REASON /7- In 1994 Crombie finally produced his life work, the three-volume Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The Hisiory of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Aris.° These are three curious and obsessive tomes of which no one other than T has made much use, but which perhaps unwittingly conveyed to me a new vision of truth and reason, Crombie spoke of exactly six styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition, each developing according to its own trajectory and time scale, T have no commitment to his precise classification of six, as a definitive analysis of the history of Westem science, but I find it a very useful template. Here are brief tags for each of his styles: mathematical, hypothetical, experimental, taxonomic, statistical, and genetic. None of these six defines a scientific discipline. It is important to avoid a possible misunderstanding, Styles (in Crombie's sense) are noi sciences, at least not in the present usage in which we talk about chemistry or palacontology as sciences. Most of the sciences use most of the six styles of thinking. Take an extreme example. Taxonomic reasoning must seem wholly remcved from mathematics—until you reflect that some of the most profound theorems are about classification, say the exhaustive classification of the finite groups. Such theorems go back to the five regular solids that so impressed Plato and his heirs, Conversely, systematic biologists construct phylogenetic trees based on fossil and now molecular genetic evidence. A standard tool of analysis is the method of maximum likelihood, developed in applied statistics and using fairly elementary yet deep mathematical principles. Most sciences use most of Crombie's six styles of scientific reasoning. Arguably any well developed © London: Duckworth, 94,18 SCIENTIFIC REASON science uses all of them. That goes for relatively “lowbrow” sciences, such as meteorology or mineralogy, a5 well as for those that are usually ranked higher up on the pecking order. 3. “The European Tradition” ‘Two aspects of Crombie’ title should be noticed. There is the subtitle: The History of Argument and Explanation especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts. 1 shall not dwell on this, but it represents an unusual pairing of mathematics and biotechnology, not to mention the very old fashioned but fascinating juxtaposition of the sciences and the practical arts. Crombie had a great deal to say about medicine, and I shall say nothing, I regard that as my loss. A second feature of his title is that he is writing about styles ‘of scientific thinking in the European tradition. Crombie did in fact imagine a “comparative historical anthropology” of the sciences which, in particular, would compare what happened in Europe with what happened in Asia. A recent series of studies by Geoffrey Lloyd does exactly that, with ancient Greece and ancient China being the two civilizations up for comparison? But Crombie said nothing about science in Fast or South Asia Worse, he took only the most cursory glance at West Asia and ‘North Africa, which were the sources of so much Greek thought. Although I shall take up questions of Chinese mathematics briefly in the second lecture, my own work is thoroughly Eurocentric. If 1 were to tie my presentation more closely to Chinese science, I would take a page from Crombie and write about mathematical and medical traditions in East and West. Instead, my own predilection is to emphasize what I shall call 7 Geotey Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Mader Reflections: Philasophical Perspectives ‘on Greek and Chinese Science el Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, (ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON / 9 laboratory science, the laboratory style of thinking, and doing, “That is the topic of my third lecture. I shall argue that itis a very specific cultural invention, a crystallization of a very general feature of human nature, namely curious exploration and tinkering with the word as we found it. That event, which happened in Europe in mid-seventeenth century, has made the human race a parasite on the face of the earth, gradually devouring the planet and all that is to be found there. OF course the cultural invention, the laboratory, has long passed from Europe. The most important laboratories of the present day do biotechnology, and the most important labs in that field are the venture capital laboratories of California and the state enterprise laboratories of Shanghai. I shall touch on this, geopolitical observation at the end of the third lecture, 4. Styles as constituted by methods and objects Lam engaged in tuming Crombie’s odd history into an even odder philosophy. A single sentence of Crombie’s serves as a sort of pivot for making the turn: We can cotablizi in the dlassic scientific movement a taxonomy of six styles of scientific thinking, distinguished by their objeets and by their methods of reasoning." ‘The words here, with which T do the tuming, are objects and methods of reasoning, They are, in themselves, anodyne, The objects with which the mathematical style concerns tself are often called, by analytic philosophers, abstract objects, such as numbers, shapes, and groups. The objects with which the taxonomic style concems itself are, for example, the species and genera of systematic biology, not mere classifications of living © A.C Crombie, les of Staamafic Thiaking inthe European Tradition, vol. 1.8 A10 / SCIENTIFIC REASON things, which are found in all languages, but objects bearing a definite role of sub- and super-ordination to ather objects of the same sort 5. A erude template for organizing the past ‘Crombie's initial list of six styles, characterized by the objects they examine and the methods they use, had, for me, an initial plausibility. In the beginning it was convenient to have a historian hand me a simple catalogue on a plate. Nowadays the community of historians regards Crombie as a relic, a strange fellow who knew a lot but who worked outside the current sphere of historical practices. Nevertheless, when I began, I was able to blame any problems about a list of styles of reasoning on an eminent historian! Here is pretty much the first exposition that I encountered: ‘The active promotion and diversification of the scientific methods of late medieval and early modem Europe reflected the general growth of a research mentality in European society, a mentality tedly a history of when human beings began to talk, to say things informatively, to make what we can recognize as assertions. But there is no further history of truth than that. read Aristotle's maxim as an early version of Tarski’s equally formal semantic theory of truth. Its scheme, “s is true if end only if p”, makes as plain as Aristotle did that the adjective applies to sentences. The somewhat overblown theory of metalanguages derives trom that tnfling grammatical fact. Tarskl himself wrote that his semantic theory appeared to be consistent with, and even to express the core motivation for, every substantive “theory” of truth, every theory which says what truth “is” —correspondence, coherence or whatever. That is one way of saying that his own theory is formal, and content-free, That means that, strictly speaking, itis nota “theory” at all No philosopher dedicated more of his career to the concept of 28 Aristotle Menaphysics Book TV), (011825, In ranslation of Cristopte Kiran, ‘Oaford: Clarendon Aristotle, 1971; "To say that which isis, and that which i nos nots rae” In W, D, Ross, Oxford Clarendon Aristotle, 1908: "To sey tat what {s, and that what i bo, is 4, is tue”.32 SCIENTIFIC REASON truth than did Donald Davidson. He published at least a dozen distinct papers with “truth” (or “true”) in the ttle. They run from “Truth and Meaning,” in 1967, to "Teuth Rehabilitated,” in 2000.9 An unfinished volume was published after his death, with the litle Truth and Predication.”” Nothing would be more foolish than a summary, in a few words, of his thoughts about truth. I shall mention only the obvious: that he was ever loyal to Tarski, that he rejected substantive theories of truth, and that he thought truth is a bedrock idea that cannot be defined. He would not say that truth is a purely formal notion; he would not have said that truth has no semantics, because he would not have believed that was the right way to put the matter. Yet I am sure that my abrasive, “truth is a merely formal concept,” owes much to thinking about (and conversations with} Donald Davidson.* As a matter of both principle and convenience [ shall say nothing substantive about truth.” Why “convenience”? Because truth has recently been such a contested notion among, analytic philosophers, with their competing theories of truth, that it would be imprudent to dabble in waters held to be very deep, certainly over my head. I have views about those debates, as is shown by my doctrine that truth is a purely formal notion, but those views are not important to my investigation of styles of scientific thinking. © [refer only 1o papers inthe five volumes of collate esis published by Oxford University Press, © Cambridge, Mass. Belknap, The longest chapter in my Why Does Language Matter 19 Philosopio:? (Cambridge University Press, 1975), i ealled "Donel Davidson's Truth” Thus Ure-cxpress most of what | ssid about tout inthe (Wo previous papers ‘mentioned in footnote 6, in ers of tthe, (ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFICREASON / 33 14, Truthfulness about the past By truthfulness, Williams meant telling the truth about something, This has two aspects. The truthful person is both quite accurate and quite sincere. ‘These are fairly independent virtues. Williams was concerned with how and when it became possible to be accurate and sincere about some subject matter. A genealogy of truthfulness about X, will have two branches, whose rhythms may be very different. ‘Thus Williams’ history chapter focuses on accuracy and his chapter on self-knowledge focuses on sincerity. Since I am interested in the sciences, I focus on accuracy, although it is important also to see what happens to in the scientific context, Williams spured vague generalities. The transformation in the Wester conception of telling the truth about the past happened at a definite moment, at the time of the work of one man, And that man, in the European tradition, was Thucydides. ‘Thucydides has become emblematic, a sort of icon, standing for the beginning of the writing of history in the Mediterranean world. No man stands alone: it is Thucydides, his hearers, and his readers who count, in that highly specific social universe which was Athens. There is another specific social un verse in which history writing came into being in much the same way as it did in Greece: ancient China. The invention of wring is a precondition for history in Williams's sense, so China is the place to look for a decisive conceptual change like that which occurred in the Mediterranean at the time of Thucydides. ‘The standard candidate is Sima Qian (145-90 BCE) or perhaps his father, Sima Tan, One should not think that exactly the same change in conceptions of the past occurred in China and Greece. The Simas, father and son, had high official status at court for long periods, a status which had no counterpart in Greece at the34 J SCIENTIFIC REASON time of Thucydides, Sima Qian’s history of two millennia became the paradigm, quite literally, of Chinese historiography—the model of historiography that was followed for centuries. One could argue that it was a social and cultural history unknown in the West until the twentieth century. It is not news that Thucydides is the first real Wester historian, Hume said as much. So have generations of scholars, each with their own explanation of what makes this moment in. historiography something new. Williams's version is in terms of truthfulness: there was, “most basically, shift fn conceptions of what itis to tell the truth about the past.” This is the fundamental move in the historical parts of Williams’ genealogy of ‘truthfulness, It is a logical operator whose form is this schema, call it () (VA shift in conceptions of what its to tell the truth about X, ‘That sounds as if X is a given, a timeless given, X = the past, or, in the case of the emergence of authenticity, X = the self. No. New ‘ways to tell the truth about X change our conceptions of X itself Williams talks of a shift from "a ‘local’ to an ‘objective’ view of the past” (p. 163). Here ace some more snippets about the new idea of history: 1). Historical time provides a rigid and determinate structure for Une past. (p. 162) 2) this significant change that took place in the fifth century B. CC, the invention in the West of historical time, 3) Did the change being with it an increase in explanatory power? Sutely, yes; and this was so in terms of anyone's conception of ‘explanation. (p. 170) 44) Does that mean that those who operate in the new style, who have the “objective” conception of time, are mote rational or again better informed than the others? No, if that means (a8 it js usually meant to imply) that those in the traditional practice ‘ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON ! 35 \were confused or believed something else. (p. 170) 5) The invention of historical time was an intellectual advance, but not every intellectual advance consists of refuting error or uncovering confusion. (p. 171) Lwon't go on, you will see the point. We could add to Williams’ remarks that there can be completely different conceptions of the past, and not merely ones that evolve in our Western notions. ‘The anthropologist Michael Lambek has provided a splendid example from Madagascar, in which a people there express their sense of their past by ceremonies involving complex role playing, by spirits. This is so alien that the staunchly rationalist among us will hold that we “are more rational or again better informed than" these “others.” I cannot agree, although if their chronology completely differed from the Western one, I might have to say that they were not talking about the past (as we understand it}. Lambek’s genius is to give us an understanding of the rationality ‘of this other conception of telling the truth about the past. There was a new conception of the past, and correspondingly new kinds of statements to make about it. There is the demand that every event should happen before, after, or overlap with, every other event, Williams claims that eailier writers, including Herodotus, were not constrained by such an idea. But obviously he does not suggest the silly idea that events themselves got into a dateable ordering only in the time of Thucydides! ‘The schema extracted from Williams is altogether formal and can be applied across the board. To repeat, (C)a shit in conceptions of what itis otell the truth about X. Snippet (2) above suggests a 2nd schema; (¢*) This significant change fook place in the Y century, and its 4 Michiel Lambck, The Weight of Past Living with Hisiury in Muang, Madspsscar. London’ Palyave, 2002,36 / SCIENTIFIC REASON emblem is 2. ‘When X= the past, Y= the fifth century BCE, and Z = Thucydides. Using a terminology suggested above, Thucydides is a legendary trailblazer, an icon around whom crystallized new ways of telling the truth about the past, Here we have a sharp discontinuity, embedded within a longer and more continuous practice of talking about collective knowledge of times gone by. 15. Mathematics Williams's schema can be applied to the sciences, He might not have welcomed this. His Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy kept the sciences distinct from humane questions about values. # Let us see, however, how it can be done. Start with geometrical relations, Who shall stand in for Thucydides? Here is the legend: “Anew light flashed upon the mind of the first man (be he Thales or some other) who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles tviangle” —thos Kant? In that paragraph Kant waxes poetical about entering “upon the sure path of science,” “that royal road.” Kant calls this “the intellectual revolution” which was the coming into being of mathematical demonstration. It was the discovery of our capacity for mathematical proof, or rather proof in geometry. ‘The iconic trailblazer of the crystallization of geometrical proof is Thales, which is not to say that there was for sure any such historical figure. The legend is that when X ~ geometrical relations, Y = early in the sixth century BCE, and Z = Thales. We need two things to understand styles of scientific thinking: on the one hand, the study of mental capacities, and on the other, the history of civilizations and of their institutions, What cultural 4. Hlarvard University Pres, 1985, © Crque of Pure Reason, Bx. ‘ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON / 37 elements were needed to sustain a discovery about our cognitive capacities? In answer, ask why proof loomed so large in ancient Greece. There was lots of mathematics in Babylonia, and certainly in China, Chinese had splendid computational cevices, but no proofs such as matueed in Euclid. Why? The answer favoured by Reviel Netz starts with the familiar fact that Athenians were the most argumentative bunch of people ever known. They countenanced no higher authority than themselves, ‘when it came to settling an argument. On looking back at Crombie, ‘one finds a remarkable, similar account of the importance of argument, even though he did not fix on proof and deduction as | will do in the second lecture. China provides a contrast. To parody, an issue could be settled by edict, so compelling proof—Witigenstein’s “herdness of the logical must”—had no special interest. But in Athens, proofs seemed to have the strange power of establishing truths, of themselves, for those who could study them. That mattered, because of the practices of settling arguments current in Greece. Itdid not carry the same weight in China. There is a lot of evidence that spatial, geometrical, thinking involves cognitive capacities different from arithmetical, combinatorial and algorithmic reasoning. Let us introduce another legend for the algorithmic or combinatorial style of thinking, the legend of Al-Khwarizmi (about 780-850) working in the House of Wisdom at Baghdad, after whom the very word “algorithm” is named. The title of one of his books gave us the word “algebra.” So now we have a new X, Y, and Z: a shift in conceptions of what it is to tell the truth about numbers and other quantities; this significant change took place in the ninth % Reviel Neta, The Shaping of Dedhction int Gireck Mathematics: A Cognitive ‘istors, Cambcidge University Press, 1999. Geoffrey Lloyd also suppor this account Ancien Workds38 / SCIENTIFIC REASON century and its emblem was Al-Khwarizmi. This is a different aystallization from the one that happened in the time of the legendary (imaginary?) Thales, Notice that in both cases, geometrical and combinatorial thinking, the new methods of reasoning, including proofs, provide 2 wholly new level of “explanatory power.” See 3} above. And to repeat (4), this does not mean that those who operated in the new style, who attained the “objective” conception of space or of computation, were more rational or again better informed than their predecessors. Kant may have got it right, in the Transcendental Aesthetic, when he located arithmetic and geometry in separate compartments of the mind. He linked one to the experience of the succession of discrete unities in time, the other to the experience of spatial configurations. However we account for them, it is quite plausible to invoke the idea of “mental modules” here—fundamentally distinct capacities inherent in the human brain. Of course there is a big debate about modularity among cognitive scientists, ranging from Dan Sperber’s “modularity all the way down,” to that of Jerry Fodor, who pioneered the transfer of modularity from Chomsky on grammar to a wider range of applications.*5 “Modularity gone mad,” writes Fodor of Sperber It may nevertheless appear that module-talk in moderation is a good parable, while we are still finding out about Dan Sperber, “la Defense of Massive Modulwity”, in Dupoux, E., Langage: Bruin and Cognitive Development: Essars in Honor of Jacques Meher. Cambridge, Mas: MIT Press, 2002, pp. 47-57, on p. 4. 45 Jemy Fodor, The Mudiduriy of Mind An Essay on Kaculty Psychology, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Pres. 1983 46 Jemry Fodor, “Modules, Frames, Fridgeons, Sleeping Dogs. and the Musi ofthe Spleres” In J. Garfield (Ed) Modularity in Krowledge Representation and Natural-lanzveace Understanding, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 26-86, oap.2? ON THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SCIENTIFIC REASON / 39 the brain, As Bernard Williams says about modules somewhere in Truth and Truthfulness, “Why not?” Why not, especially if there has been a long-standing awareness of what appear to be distinct, faculties, long preceding Kant, Advocates of parallel distributed processing will say that there are very good answers to the question “why not?” Thus in the case of taxonomic reasoning there is an entrenched tradition that favours the idea of innate classificatory modules, especially when it comes to classifying living things. Thus the picture for the taxonomic style of thinking is that it is back-grounded by modules, But altemative models of cognition are very much to hand. A recent paper illustrates the claim that all the phenomena evidenced for innate classificatory modules are better accounted by a general processor of the paraliel distributed type?” But suppose the research programme of modules does pan out, No single module will correspond to exactly one style of thinking. Each demands many, and modules of different types. What will soon be called the laboratory style requires a combination of hand and eye coordination, of deductive skills, and a fot ese. Recall the paired virtues associated with truthfulness. There is a wholly new standard of accuracy about geometrical relations, fo the extent that “accuracy” no longer seems quite the right word. On the other hard sincerity seems to drop out because proof becomes the sole criterion of correctness in this new domain. Or from a social point of view, what matters is not that the geometer is sincere, but that initiates see that the argument of the goometer is indeed a proof. We reject the Kantian xgenius-in-history lore that “a new light flashed upon the mind of © Timothy T. Rogers and James L. McClelland, “Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distibuted Processing Approuch,” Behuviora and Brain Sciences 2007