Much interesting stuff came up last night at the launch of the Franklin Institute Galileo symposium–but for now I’ll just highlight one central matter that dominated much of the discussion.
In attempting to make the famous scientist relevant to us today, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, argued strongly that Galileo was a “pragmatist.” As a man without independent wealth, who lived in a society where the Church had absolute “juridical power” over his and everyone else’s life, Galileo had no choice but to cozy up to patronage and to papal authority. In the book that got him condemned, the 1632 Dialogo, Cowan explained that Galileo was under order not to advocate the position that the actually Earth moves–so he instead wrote an “on the one hand/on the other hand” treatment of the issue, to meet the letter of the law and leave it to the reader to decide.
But this raises a very stark question–if Galileo was such a pragmatist, then how did he get himself into so much trouble?
Maurice Finocchiaro, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Joel Primack, Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, both took issue with the “pragmatist” claim. As Primack put it, Galileo took a “hell of a risk” in writing the Dialogo. He directly took on “a Barberini pope” by placing the Pope’s words in the mouth of the book’s simplistic Aristotelian character, Simplico, the doofus of the dialogue.
I have to confess that as someone who has been studying Galileo a bit at Princeton, I too was baffled by the pragmatist claim. Galileo is nothing if not a man who, when the time came, took a strong stand on principle. No wonder much of the debate on the panel last night came to turn on what was exactly meant by “pragmatist.”
But there was something deeper that Cowan was getting at, and that is surely more valid. She was trying (as we all inevitably do) to relate Galileo to the modern day conflict over science and religion, and to argue that on this subject, most people always have been, and always will be, Galileian pragmatists in the sense that they’re not absolutists on either the religion side (rejecting all of science in favor of scripture or faith) or on the scientist side (saying that the impulse towards scientific research should always prevail on issues where ethics are also at stake, or that science can wholly supplant religion, and so on). Or as Cowan put it, most people “use what they feel they need for the purposes of pursuing their lives and careers.” They don’t get super ideological about science and religion. They take what they want and need from both realms.
Galileo was one of these pragmatists in the sense that he, too, sought to reconcile the Bible with the cutting edge science of his day. However, the Church’s view at the time concerning the proper nature of such a reconciliation was a vastly different one, and Galileo was not particularly pragmatic in how he differed from the Church.
So to the extent that we still have absolutists today–on either side of the aisle–Cowan’s point strikes me as a very worthy one. But at the same time, it’s pretty dicey to call Galileo a “pragmatist” without these very considerable qualifications.
Anyways, such are the fruits of my Galileo blogging thus far. If inspired by what I hear in Philly today–and if you folks seem to enjoy it–I may do more.
I also hope to continue my responses to Jerry Coyne next week–travel and work have just made it impossible over the past week or so.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:51 am
I remember reading that the Pope, I think it was Urban VII, got angry because he put something he had insisted on being in the dialogue in the mouth of one of the stupider characters. You didn’t mess with those late Renissance Popes, they were tough customers.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Let’s not forget that people change over their lifetimes, and that they make mistakes. There are a variety of hypotheses to explain Galileo’s predicament. It is highly likely that he was more submissive in early life; as a young man, he respected the male hierarchy. However, as he aged, his reputation grew and by the time he wrote the dialogue in question, he enjoyed great renown. He might have cold-bloodedly calculated that the Church wouldn’t dare go after a man with his reputation; from his character, I suspect that the more likely explanation is that, having reached a certain age and grown confident of his reasoning, he had simply grown tired of putting up with all the crap and decided to press the matter harder.
I also doubt that putting the Pope’s words into Simplicio’s mouth was a conscious act. More likely, it seems to me, he thought he was quoting some idiot he had heard somewhere and didn’t realize that the idiot he was quoting was the Pope himself.
His behavior during the trial is itself revealing. I have not read the transcript, only a digest of the crucial points in the trial, and it seems to me that he could have gotten off scot-free if only he had taken an appropriately abject position. Instead, he mouthed the politically correct words but there was always a subtext of defiance in his statements. His statements started off politically correct, but they always ended with a little rider or qualifier that demonstrated that he wasn’t quite toeing the party line. I think his judges got tired of the verbal games and hit him with house arrest out of frustration.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
People’s personalities are complex and nuanced. It isn’t as simple as saying someone is or isn’t a pragmatist and expecting that that person will always act consistently within that one single parameter. He was probably conflicted between his principles, his scientific discoveries, his allegiances, and his personal well-being and safety. That conflict is reflected in his testimony at his trial, ie pc words with a twist as the 2nd commenter said. People also change over a lifetime as the first commenter pointed out. What always strikes me about the absolutists is how extreme they are and how much pleasure (or at least energy) goes into their battles with each other.
June 19th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Galileo seems pragmatic in many ways, including how he chose the publisher for his book, and the way he made it into a dialog.
On the other hand, he seems to have screwed up, possibly because of egotism and having an abrasive personality.
What I’m saying is that I don’t know most of the details, but one could be pragmatic in outlook without implementing one’s pragmatic endeavors with skill. Hence his dialog seems a pragmatic means of presenting his argument, while making Simplicio the buffoon take essentially the pope’s position appears like poor execution, or possibly Galileo’s ego got the better of him.
One should not forget that one of Galileo’s “arguments” for heliocentrism was completely wrong. It was about the tides, and again, I don’t know exactly what it was, but it fails by all accounts. Screw up with one of your major arguments, especially when your dialog puts the pope in the role of the fool, and you’ve got problems. What might have skimmed through on pragmatic terms without committing a major error in argument, does not skim through when your “argument” about tides blows up in your face.
Galileo certainly was pragmatic enough to recant, regardless, even though he was right about heliocentrism (of the solar system). Then he was pragmatic enough to work under “house arrest,” producing his results on gravity and motion (at least the write-up occurred after he was punished), probably his greatest achievement.
One can argue that he was pragmatic, I think, so long as one can give reasons why his purported pragmatism fails to win the day at times. Was he perhaps too ornery to make it work?
Glen Davidson
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
June 19th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Pragmatism is a loaded term within philosophical circles. Many years ago I attended an undergraduate class on American Philosophy (largely lectures and discussion on pragmatism or Pragmaticism as its referred to by CS Peirce, James et al). So when I hear “pragmatism”, I can’t help but think of its more formal usage. But it sounds like Cowan was using “pragmatist” in a more informal sense.
Still despite the differences between the informal and philosophical meanings of pragmatism there is clearly overlap. Maybe implied by Cowan as well ? Its also interesting that Pragmatism is considered a very American philosophy. So there you have it: Galileo – the first American Philosopher!
June 19th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Mooney: “…on this subject, most people always have been, and always will be, Galileian pragmatists in the sense that they’re not absolutists”
I read a lot of Galileo as well…at Purdue. However, it wasn’t my lit. but my stat prof who said the plural of anecdote is not synonymous to data. In other words, yours is an unsubstantiated claim, whose conviction is undercut with your own skepticism over the accuracy of its very namesake: was Galileo really a “Galileian pragmatist?”
More importantly, say for example that “most people,” in whatever land your “most” census is derived from, were strident atheists and religious fundamentalists. Lacking this oft-repeated “most people” line of support, where does that leave your accommodation argument? Point being, arguments based on populism aren’t arguments, just appeals to pathos.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I think Galileo was a pragmatist in the way that Obama is a leftist…
June 19th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I’ve been teaching the history of astronomy to some college kids in the Middle East, and some important points emerge that might give a perspective on Galileo and the modern debates on science and religion.
Greek astronomy – Aristotle and then Ptolemy – folded Babylonian observational records into Pythagorean/Platonic number mysticism to produce a geocentric model of the universe that was very friendly to mathematics and spherical geometry. Circles and spheres were divine, as well as mathematically tractable. The heavens above were perfect – thus circles – and the earth below imperfect.
Islam brought together Hellenistic and Persian culture – the two dominant strands outside of Eastern Asia 1500 years ago – and took Aristotle and Ptolemy as gospel. However Islamic science – the building blocks of much later European science – had a much stronger empirical bent, in no small part because of the Koran, than Greek science, which exalted reason above all else.
Islamic observational astronomy and the developments in mathematics in support of it – algebra, “Arabic” numerals and notation, algorithms, advances in spherical geometry and mathematics – were particularly strong. After an extraordinary 12th century of translation into Latin, Islamic science – and its emphasis on empiricism as opposed to the Aristotelian emphasis on pure reason – was slowly incorporated into European thinking.
However Islamic philosophy – especially its fading Aristotelian thread – was adopted much more quickly, about 350 years earlier. I think this was because it could be attributed to Greek sources, because it met the needs of emerging European bureaucracies and the need for legal training, and because it brought powerful theological tools into play useful to the church and to the religious orders.
What this meant for astronomy – and science – was that it took 350 years before the Islamic mathematical and empirical methodologies took root, and when it did, it had to fight off a powerful and entrenched pure reason-based Aristotelian scholasticism. Empiricism – and its cousin pragmatism – was not in the game plan.
More than anyone else, Galileo, a master empiricist and polemicist, took on the pure-reason crowd of Aristotelian authoritarianism. From Copernicus and Brahe, from his studies of cannon-ball trajectories, and even more powerfully from his telescope observations, he knew Aristotle was wrong. He was wrong about physics and he was wrong about the heavens. Galileo saw it directly with his own eyes through his telescope.
What does it mean for the Science and Religion debates now? Well, for one thing, we are about 350 years into the scientific revolution, suggesting that we can expect once novel insights and methods to harden into dogma. The leading New Atheists, tellingly, are not scientists, but science writers or polemicists. For them, it is not pragmatism and empiricism that holds sway, but science as the one true way.
So, on one hand, we see people wanting to take certain concepts they draw from science over into to hard and fast truths – a pure-reason based endeavor akin to Aristotelian scholasticism. On the other hand, we see a growing re-embrace of religion – in both good and bad way, angering the hard-truth crowd.
I think we are seeing the end of philosopher-priest-scientist dream, and the embittered reluctance to let go of that dream. The scientists wrested authority from the philosopher-priests, but in turn are seeing it wrested from them by larger forces they can’t understand or control. Some are angry and venting, and their followers are following suit.
If the scientist priest as a guide to truth is self-destructing, and I think that is what we see happening, where is the good to come from?
The answer, I think, is that people – all of us – are eventually going to mature to replace the priest – and the scientist priest – by thinking for ourselves, by seeing with our own eyes and hearing with our own ears. (Journalists and science writers, take note. We are going to need you more and more.)
It is here that the tools of science – not things like the fundamentalist exaltation of theological interpretations of evolution, but rather the broad and important empirical/pragmatism tradition of testing truth by evaluating its translation into action, will fully come into play. This is the true heritage of Galileo.
June 19th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Very interesting comments, Stephen Friberg. I’ll point out that scholasticism was well on its way out the door by the time Galileo came along. A fellow name Erasmus led the charge more than a century before Galileo, and dealt scholasticism some serious blows. But, as you point out, it was still hanging around the Church a full century later in weakened form.
Your concept of the scientist-priest especially interests me. In truth, I can’t recall any time in Western history when the scientist enjoyed an elevated position. Prior to the 20th century, scientists were rare and of little consequence. During much of the 20th century, the scientist was perceived as powerful but unaccountable to anybody and therefore vaguely dangerous. Lots of movies featured scientists as bad guys unleashing the forces of evil. The term “mad scientist” wasn’t a fluke, it expressed a common fear.
Yet it is also true that scientists were regarded as especially powerful people, and one current of popular thought DID accord them priest-like powers. The phrase “scientists say” before a clause was often intended to establish the veracity of the clause. Especially during the 1950s, when scientists had bestowed nuclear weapons and all manner of war-winning technologies upon the military, the scientist was accorded great authority. And when Sputnik went up, the rush to improve science teaching in the nation’s schools was unrestrained by distrust of scientists.
Thirty years ago, James Burke, in his masterpiece of video, Connections, urged that people learn more about science. Thirty years later, I think that the problem is worse than he saw it to be.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Erasmussimo, maybe scientists weren’t distrusted after Sputnik, but were they listened to and understood?
My personal recollection of “the rush to improve science teaching in the public schools” in the post Sputnik era is of the announcement of one of my elementary school teachers that we needed to immediately drop study of the old math, arithmetic, and take up the new math instead, so as to prevent the Russians from invading. I think that the idea of warding off Communism by the use of Venn Diagrams muddled up my education in both math and social studies that year. It fit right in there with drills in which we learned to dive under our desks to protect ourselves in case of nuclear attack. At least for me, it wasn’t a high point for science in schools.
I agree that Connections was a great show, and a concept that ought to be modernized and revived somehow.
June 20th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Sort of on topic, sort of not, John Hodgman had a very funny monologue last night at a press dinner:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY&feature=player_embedded
June 20th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Actually, I take that back. Now that I watch it again, very on topic.
June 21st, 2009 at 8:51 pm
The June 2009 issue of Analog (SF magazine) has a story by Harry Turtledove called “But it does move,” which relates a (somewhat fictional?) encounter between Galileo and a member of the Inquisition. A bit of a twist at the end, and very moving. Check it out!
June 22nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Everyone (except Eramusissmo in 2) is assuming that Galileo deliberately insulted the Pope by putting his words in Simplicio’s mouth. For this idea, here is a list of all the contemporary evidence:
1. The Inquisition said so, or at least implied it.
2. There is no 2.
It is a fact that the Pope was angry at Galileo after the book came out. Here is his own explanation, quoted by an official who talked to him at the time and tried to mollify him:
“Galileo knows why.”
We are not obliged to take the Inquisition’s word as conclusive, or to read a particular meaning into the Pope’s non-explanation. Are there other versions that do not contradict commen sense so badly as to require great efforts to explain things away?
Finocchiaro seems to accept the malice-aforethought story, and he has a professional repuation. So do others, however, who do not: Annibale Fantoli, for instance, who shows sepcific reasons for the Pope’s anger, which are well connected to other facts about the case, which is more than you can say for the malice story.
(Basically, in this version, the Pope believed that Galileo had committed the worst sin for a courtier, letting the boss get blind-sided by withholding information. His belief was reasonable and was based partly on misinformation. I didn’t say the situation was *simple*, just that it’s based on evidence and does not have to explain things away.)
Erasmusissimo charitably suggests that Galileo didn’t quite remember where the theory came from. This in fact is not possible, as he was directly ordered to put the thing in his booand he knew the order came from the Pops, as you can see from the text in the Dialogue.e. But we can ask, what would he have done with this argument if he had not been ordered to put it in? In this case, unlike so many “woulda” arguments, we know the exact answer: he would not have mentioned it at all. We know because he *did* write the entire book and submit it in final publication form to the censors without any mention of the thing.
Why give the argument to Simplicio? Well, you know, Simplicio was the advocate for the conventional wisdom throughout the book. When you’re ordered to put in a supposedly crushing argument for the c.w., I fail to see what’s unnatural about giving this, the final word, to the person who has been arguing that side. Galileo slipped up there; how badly, we can debate.
PS: Simplicio is not the word for “simpleton” in modern Italian; does anyone have firm knowledge abut the 17th-century language? It is, however, the name of a highly respected Roman philosopher of the Aristotelian school: Simplicius. This fact is not so obscure that it could not be noticed by honest scholars, considering that Galileo states it explicitly in his introduction.
PPS: Nobody has mentioned what the Pope’s pet idea was. It was, in fact, that Almighty God could make the world any way He wanted, and could make it *look* any way He wanted, so all that so-called evidence doesn’t prove anything.
Anyone familiar with the early debates on evolution might exclaim “Omphalos!” here. Basically the Pope had an early version of Sir Philip Gosse’s idea that God made the world in 6 days but fudged the evidence to make it look like evolution over millions of years. Gosse was not a simpleton, by the way, but an educated Victorian naturalist.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Sorry about the sloppy editing above, but I think it’s intelligible, mostly. Except “So do others, however, who do not” which is amazingly ambiguous; read, “Other people who have professional reputations do not accept the malice theory.”
How about the main point, Galileo as pragmatist? If you drop the one crazy inconsistency, about his deliberately tweaking the Pope’s nose, and you take “pragmatist” in the vulgar non-philosophical sense, it seems quite on target. You did have to have rich patrons in those days. Galileo angled for good positions for himself and his son. He used his work with the telescope to get a position as philosopher to the Grand Duke in Florence, which paid better than his academic post in (Pisa? Padua? My memory is slipping.) When he had worked out the orbits of Jupiter’s moons, he pursued a project to use them as a clock to measure longitude, and tried to sell the idea to powerful people who could use it. It didn’t become practical till the end of the century, and never was practical on board ship, but he tried. And there was his clever proportional compass, years before the telescope, which made him some income that he defended vigorously against thieves of intellectual property.
While we’re up: just what offensive things did he say at the trial? I’ve read excerpts from his interrogation and have seen none of that. He *was* a bit evasive on one point, but he was not rude about it. And I assume no one believes he said “But it does move!” to the Inquisition, if he said it at all, which incidentally is quite probable.
So, yes, he definitely know how to curry favor with rich patrons and make a buck. Does this make the Malice Theory even less plausible? Or does it mean we have to stretch farther to support that theory? I like the former.