One thing I’ve come to appreciate better in recent months is the constraints your own understanding can place on your historical research. We’ve all likely run into a preposterous claim–say, that Kant was the first to discover the incompleteness theorem–and rolled our eyes, having recognized there is some anachronistic reasoning going on here. But the troubles of anachronism are often deeper and more subtle.
As an example, consider the realism–instrumentalism debate. One natural way of leveraging historical research for one side or the other is to dig up inquirers from the past and see: were they a realist or an instrumentalist? Then, based on the success or failure of the inquirer in question, you either champion or denigrate, respectively, that inquirer’s philosophy. Here the idea seems to be that it was the inquirer’s philosophy that is responsible for their success or failure, and hence we should, on their example, either adopt or reject it ourselves. Thus, why was Newton successful? Because he was a brand-X instrumentalist (or, as you’ll also sometimes see, brand-Y realist). How do we know he was that brand of instrumentalist (resp., realist)? Well, because he said on-brand stuff! The more sophisticated of these takes then investigate to determine just which of these brands actually affect the work and, if so, where and how.
I take there to be many indictable offenses being made in this kind of history (both in principle and in practice), but here I mean to single out just one: why should we take realism–instrumentalism as an appropriate lens through which to view the thoughts and behaviors of past inquirers? More to the point, since there are obviously a variety of ways of slicing up the realism–instrumentalism dichotomy, why should we adopt the historian’s preferred understanding of the dichotomy? This seems especially salient given that even today, among colleagues, there seems to be a fair amount of cross-talk because of varied understandings of, e.g., what the debate is even about. Assuming that misunderstandings are generally a thing to be avoided today–or, to put it in its positive form, that shared understandings among colleagues are generally to be desired–, it would seem a good idea in historical research to follow the lead of historical figure’s understanding, so to speak. (I happen to believe this is a valuable ideal more generally, though I am also inclined to believe that what this means in any given situation–and whether it’s there advisable or even (practically) possible–is a hellishly subtle matter. So it’s not clear to me how much work the ideal is really doing as a guide to thought and behavior, even in a world where everyone agrees with it as a generalization.)
To take a more concrete example (at least for me), consider Hilbert’s philosophy of mathematics. How is this usually presented? Well, there were three camps in philosophy of mathematics in the first third of the 20th Century: formalism, intuitionism, and logicism. A popular story goes that Hilbert was the primary champion of formalism, which, in rather rough terms, is supposed to mean that he thought mathematics was just “symbol pushing.” In this story, it is rather easy to condemn Hilbert: he either provides a trivial metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics, or simply provides neither because of his “obvious” distaste for philosophy. Often, this sort of story is told by pointing to several of his published writings in the late teens and twenties, and sometimes also his correspondence with Frege. Hilbert’s frequent references to Kant (e.g., the epigram to Foundations of Geometry) are either ignored or explained away as insincere or dilettante-ish. Hilbert’s immense body of unpublished work–deemed perhaps the most significant part of his work by his contemporaries and the Hilbert scholars most familiar with his work–is rarely mentioned.
Of course, there have been a number of more sophisticated interpretations of Hilbert, which have made hay of his unpublished foundational writings and his references to Kant. However, many of these, I suggest, still fail to “follow Hilbert’s” lead on his foundational thinking. (To be clear, there are a handful of modern Hilbert scholars for whom this doesn’t appear to be a problem. For fear of missing someone, I will not name names.) In fact, quite a few of these more sophisticated views end up adverting to either realism–instrumentalism or Kant to explain Hilbert’s view. Admittedly, these uses are often heuristic: what was Hilbert’s view? Well, it’s kinda like [insert well-known figure]’s view. I don’t have too much of a problem with this. However, what I do question is whether it is even appropriate to conceive of his view in metaphysics+epistemology terms, which is pretty regularly assumed. For one, it seems now to be openly debatable whether the “correct” view in philosophy of mathematics should be so construed, given what we’ve learned from a variety of lines of inquiry (e.g., on mathematical cognition), and I think there are some plausible explanations for why Hilbert may have thought something like this, too.
Of course, this, too, could be an anachronism, which is why I will be plumbing the depths of the archives, among other things. But at this stage it at least seems worth entertaining that Hilbert didn’t share the neat M&E picture us philoso-folk grew up with. (On more firm ground is my (and others) belief that Hilbert should not be associated with a program or a view.) Along these lines, too, I have to wonder what Hilbert would think of philosophy/mathematics/science today. (My own hot take? He–like Newton or Galileo and unlike, say, Huygens or Poincaré–had the methodological wherewithall to find his way relatively easily.)
The point I mean to make with all of this is that even when you know what a historical figure knew and said (as reflected in the writings that have been preserved), there is the still-more-subtle question of how they understood this information to come together. (Or, if they even thought it could–incidentally, I am a pretty firm believer that historical research that tries to “make consistent” the views of historical figures is (1) bound to fail in its more ambitious aims because it’s silly to think anyone’s views are so consistent, and (2) often fails to be of any use to us.) And one major hurdle here is your own understanding of this information. In the case of Hilbert, my suspicion is that philosophy itself has put blinders on some historians.
Bottom line: As a corrective, it’s worth wondering what historical figures would think of our philosophy/science, not just what we think of theirs.
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