Craig Miller dropped by and we got to reading some Locke, as visitors to my office are wont to find themselves doing:
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; - which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge. To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance will be, I suppose, some service to human understanding; though so few are apt to think they deceive or are deceived in the use of words; or that the language of the sect they are of has any faults in it which ought to be examined or corrected, that I hope I shall be pardoned if I have in the Third Book dwelt long on this subject, and endeavoured to make it so plain, that neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the significancy of their expressions to be inquired into.
They don't write them like that any more. Read it aloud to get the full flavour. It's from the "Epistle to the Reader" of the Essay on Human Understanding. I've underlined some crucial passages.
Locke's view of philosophy as the "underlaborer", or as we might say "subcontractor" for science is an apt one. In my opinion philosophy's best work is done when it engages with the activity of knowledge building. And for my money (this is a philosophically contested claim) knowledge building is done in science and nowhere else. In any event, the role of the philosophy of science is to clear away the conceptual rubbish, to clarify and expound the implications of those concepts that are properly part of science, and to suggest some new ones where science itself has none but some are needed.
That said, and as I said to Craig, I think there is a place in science for the occasional vague term. Had "gene" been exactly defined at the start (for instance, as "whatever assorts into a Mendelian ratio") then all kinds of features of genetic material might not have been investigated (such as meiotic drive, which doesn't assort Mendelianly). So philosophers need to be careful they don't over-define scientific terms.
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Or is science a subcontraction of philosophy, for the tedious detailing of the facts, and the distancing of the money-making bits, such as technology and law?
C'mon, John. We know the real reason you want vague terms in science is to give you philosophers something to do. Species, eh?
More seriously, it's not clear if you include the "what is this thing called science" type of philosophy of science in this. I actually find that that can be valuable too (even if I don't believe anyone has the answers yet), as a way of clarifying concepts at the epistemic level.
Bob
Only to see the rubbish returned and in an even more disorderly fashion by postmodern relativists who think the proper role of science should be to serve some half-baked leftist ideology. :-/
I love philosophy of science, but it can be very frustrating at times.
This passage isn't just about imprecision and vagueness. This is a relatively infamous attack on rhetoric and tropes in general (the "abuse of language" passage). It would excise from science not only vague language which is sometimes useful, but also the evocative phrase and the illuminating metaphor. Science would quickly become not just dry but - the consequence of fraught being inevitable - barren as well.
"... consequences of drought", not "fraught". Now if there was a Locke passage about avoiding the mischief of auto-correct - that would certainly resonate.
Science would quickly become not just dry but - the consequence of drought being inevitable - barren as well.
That remains to be demonstrated. Most scientific papers I read are fairly specialised and exact in their language, and this shows no signs of making science barren. If metaphor is used at any point, or not, this does not matter until the metaphor has been cashed out in exact non-metaphorical language.
As to vagueness, I think a certain degree of slop in language is needed for science to progress - in a manner not unlike simulated annealing - but not for long. Any long-standing vague terms indicate a confusion and failure of that theory or discipline; hence my interest in "species", "gene" and "biodiversity".
You're undeniably right that imprecision sometimes has tangible, discernible, and deleterious effects on scientific discourse and practice (I know, how magnanimous of me to concede the obvious, right?). In addition to "gene" and "biodiversity", I would even add terms like "equilibrium" and "fitness". Together they form a cluster which has been quite unproductive in, say, certain fields attached to and claiming the mantle of sociobiology.
But the critical distinction is between long-standing vagueness and the development of new concepts. Your point about empirical and necessary precision in scientific papers is also something I would not hesitate to agree with - by the time scientists get to that point, they're done feeling out a new concept and are ready to literally and figuratively put it on paper.
But Locke is advocating far more than that. He wanted to banish metaphor (and a whole host of other tropes without which I very much doubt we could talk) from informal and formal scientific *discussion*. This wasn't just a prescription for talking about science, it was a prescription for how scientists should talk - and not just about science. This is the polemical side of a stick dedicated to beating the rough corners off of speech in the quest for what would literally (rim-shot) be a language without ambiguity.
The science studies folk in comparative literature departments will of course insist that all scientific discourse is metaphoric, etc etc. Their mistake is to make no distinctions where there are degrees of difference that make a difference. But Locke's mistake is to go too far the other way and to forget that scientific *thought* is still thought - and therefore cannot proceed with at least some ambiguity, some colorful pictures, and some striking comparisons.
And if I may be so bold, I think I could win a small concession from you on the point that Darwin's notebooks are a masterful display of moving between such language and increasing precision of concepts. Perhaps the only real "science" comes at the precision end of the spectrum - but I don't think it's plausible to say that he could have gotten to that side without starting at the other one.
It pays, I find, to distinguish between the conceptual elements of a theory or hypothesis, and the rhetorical flourishes and metaphors with which that theory is sold to the discipline.
Darwin's theory is not, at that stage, a theory as such; it is a promissory sketch of a theory. It doesn't become a theory until Castle, Sturtevant, Morgan, Fisher and Wright begin to mathematise genetics and work out how selection operates. At this point, it becomes a well-worked theory, and all Darwin's rhetoric becomes irrelevant.
No theory or science is born full-fledged like Athena. It takes time to develop it and elaborate it increasingly precisely. And this occurs largely these days by mathematica precision - models that are interpretable and applicable. Locke doesn't deny that metaphor is useful - he denies it is the end point of science. [It was Hume who made number and reason the hallmark of science.] Locke is absolutely right, particularly of the occult properties so nicely skewered by Moliere of the day, that obscurantism is a replacement for actual science. In some disciplines it remains that way, even today. And well that it does or philosophers would have nothing much to talk about. But in any mature science, metaphor is to be eliminated. I think that a lot of rhetoric in evolution might have been avoided if the terms were better explicated, if not defined.
I do wish that Locke, in his construction of sentences, had been a little more fond of the full stop, and less so of the comma, as to give me less of a headache, as it does now, while trying to read his extraordinarily long sentences, as they are wont to be, that are full of qualifiers, and seem to be, at least to myself, unnecessarily complicated, as the complication, it would seem, obscures the clarity of of thought, which I believe he possessed, and may have come though, if only he had been more fond of the full stop.
Those were the days when books were written to be read aloud. In these days of screens and individuals reading alone, the lyricism of the prose has been lost, except in rare cases.