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There is but one question before us: can a philosopher utilize historical facts without collapsing into the “genetic fallacy”? If he can, will his analyses be improved?

From what is contingent nothing necessary follows. And from what is necessary nothing contingent follows. Let us call this ‘the Hume-Leibniz dictum’. These theses never occur full-blown in Hume or Leibniz, but the dictum is implicit within the philosophies history has come to associate with these thinkers.

The earliest tracts of Aristotle to reach the reviving West were the logical works - the Logica Vetus - rendered into Latin by Boethius during the sixth century. A good deal of Boethius’ work in mathematics and astronomy, as well as his Commentaries on the logic of Aristotle and Porphyry, were available in the earliest middle ages. In the early twelfth century Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics - part of the Logica Nova - were translated into Latin. Then in 1126 Adelard of Bath translated the fifteen books of Euclid’s Elements from the Arabic into Latin. In short, logical studies, and the analysis of cogent argumentation, were themselves responsible for much of the intellectual quickening which we now recognize as the medieval revival of learning. The Schoolmen were very early aware of the logical distinctions to be drawn between knowledge of facts and appraisals of valid argument. They knew the difference between factual proofs and logical consistency. And they realized that consistent consequences might be shown to follow from factually untrue premises. They could also detect logical inconsistencies in arguments generated invalidly from factually true premises. These distinctions, pellucidly clear in Aristotle’s own works, reinforced the cleavage between (1) the dogmatic Truths which had been injected into the ‘Christianized’ cosmology of The Philosopher, and (2) the logical and mathematical consistency so obvious in the treatises of Ptolemaic astronomy.

Copernicus calculated with respect to the distances and periods of Mercury as follows. Consider the diagram in Figure 69a. The inside circle represents Mercury’s orbit; the outer circle, the earth’s. Clearly, from the earth Mercury should always be seen close to the sun ‘oscillating’ to either side of it. E1 and M1 denote the earth and Mercury when the latter is farthest to the west. The angular distance between the two bodies at this time averages out as about 23°.61

Imagine Mars to have been observed at intervals (following opposition) equal to one, two, and then several orbital periods of that planet. It is obvious that Mars will always be at the same intersection of celestial coordinates during these observations - at the same position in its orbit. Meantime the earth will be occupying different position, since the orbital periods of earth and Mars are different.

My objective here is vulnerable to some spurious semantics. I aim to delineate how the development of physical theory in the later 19th century was essentially dependent on the reflections and discoveries of Chemists, Biologists and Mathematicians. But when one alludes to some professional Chemist or Biologist as having affected the history of physics, it can always be countered “to that extent he was doing physics, he was being a physicist”. Thus when Urey helped to separate U235 from U238, and when he invoked theoretical thermodynamics to determine the age of the solar system, he might be said then to have been doing physics — despite being a Nobel laureate in chemistry. And when Pauling applied quantum theory to studies of complex substances, and when he considered the rotation of molecules in crystals — he too was apparently being a physicist, although, again, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. So also of great moments in the work of Nernst, Boltzmann, Helmholtz, Faraday, Young… and so on. That is, one can always say that whatever helps physics is physics. But this is 20–20 hindsight focused to the point of tautology. For it suggests that a Biologist might one day awaken with the pronouncement “Ithink I’ll do some physics today”; a Chemist or Mathematician might muse “this problem will put demands on the physicist in me”. The history of science can be thus chopped up only by destroying the organic interplay between disciplines, an interplay which constitutes the very pulse of scientific research. The picture of disciplines rigidly fixed as to content, and of scientists as compartmentalized thinking machines — both pictures are unreliable reflections of the ways in which problems and their solutions have actually shaped the history of science. Just as being a ‘natural philosopher’ in the 17th century was not identical with being a theoretical physicist in the 20th, so also the divisions between biology, chemistry and physics in the 19th century may not always have been drawn along the same lines as we should sketch them today. In short, one must be an historian when tracing the lines of development through 19th century science. Not everything that is embraced today in physics texts began in physics labs, or in the minds of professional physicists. Therefore, I propose to correlate the contributions of scientists now known to us as important in the histories of chemistry and biology — with moments in the development of 19th century physics. Should one then choose to dub all such individuals as really physicists, a la bonne heure.

U. J. J. Leverrier was a colossus of nineteenth-century science. But for philosophers and historians his work has lain largely undiscovered; a suboceanic mountain beneath the scientific sea. We have surrendered 1859 to another giant. This is indeed the year of the watershed; it divides history into everything which went before, and everything which has flowed to us since. But 1859 is not only the year of The Origin of Species. It is also when Leverrier announced his ill-starred “hidden planet hypothesis” to account for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. The very discovery of this aberration is itself due to Leverrier. Its negative consequences for history of science are at least as great as was the positive work of Darwin.

Is there such a thing as a ‘Logic of Discovery’? Do we even have a consistent idea of such a thing? The approved answer to this seems to be “No”. Thus Popper argues (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) “The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it”, (p. 31.) Again, “… there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process”, (p. 32.) Reichenbach writes that philosophy of science “… cannot be concerned with [reasons for suggesting hypotheses], but only with [reasons for accepting hypotheses]”. (Experience and Prediction, p. 382.) Braithwaite elaborates: “The solution of these historical problems involves the individual psychology of thinking and the sociology of thought. None of these questions are our business here.” (Scientific Explanation, pp. 20, 21.)

Perplexities concerning Scientific Theories persist because the usual ‘singled valued’ philosophical analyses cannot do justice to the problematic features of so complex a semantical entity. The components of theories are like law statements, and like models and hypotheses, being conceptual entities which are used in a variety of ways—not all of these being always compatible with the others. Thus many physicists characterize the classical laws of motion, as if they functioned in a definitional way.1 But sometimes these laws seem remarkably empirical.2 Others characterize such laws as ‘conventional’; they shape entire disciplines much as the rules shape the game of chess.3 Law statements are not exclusively any one of these — definitions, factual claims or conventions. They are all these things.

In his early book Reality, Paul Weiss says interesting and important things. Some remarks however, besides being interesting and important, require further examination. The following quotation is a case in point.

Einstein told a charming fish-story. It concerned 2-dimensional sardines swimming along straight lines in a plane. They noted an ‘attraction’, a mystifying deflection toward a certain region in their flat sea. They were drawn toward it, their swim-paths ‘bent’ in the direction of that peculiar point. Some fish were drawn so close, so sharply deflected from their ‘natural’ rectilinear paths, that they described circles around the magic spot — ad indefinitum. The brainiest of these creatures resisted the usual accounts of this inscrutable attraction; something rational just had to structure such a phenomenon, even for sardines. He imagined a hill — a shallow cone — rising up into a ‘3rd dimension’. Paths near the base of the cone were bent, he argued, by being tilted; paths cutting near the top of the hill, however, became continually more circular, or were at least twisted into tight helices. Such swim-paths were inexplicable, indeed incomprehensible, in 2-dimensional terms — save by reference to mysterious effluvia, evanescent currents, subtle attraction and diaphanous influences. Einstein heroically invites his reader to imagine that we 3-dimensional beings might have our paths of travel ‘bent’ towards large masses in some analogous way. We, and ours, may even end up circling some such large objects — somewhat as our planet encircles the sun. The ‘explanation’ here may also lie in there being a bump, a cone, or a hill, jutting somehow into a 4th dimension — which is to us what the 3rd dimension was to the 2-dimensional fish. Large masses, then, may generate protuberances, bumps, or ripples, in the space-time continuum within which we live and calculate. They may affect the basic geometry of the vast spaces they inhabit. Perhaps, then, gravitation can be understood without mysterious appeals to miraculous influences ‘attractions’, gravitational influences — which operate over great distance (e.g., 93 million miles!), through fields of force themselves as difficult to comprehend as the action at a distance they were meant to replace.

When Gabriel Almond introduced the concept of political culture, he wryly observed that what is true of souls is also true of new conceptsmany are called, but few are chosen. For a while, at least, his concept appeared to be among the elect. It was endorsed and used by many eminent scholars of the day, including Pye, Ward, Rose, LaPalombara and Barghoorn.' Of course, it was central to The Civic Culture, in which Almond and Verba claimed that political culture formed the connecting link between micro-level and macro-level politics.2 In later years, however, the concept came to be viewed with suspicion. It was thought to be too imprecise and impressionistic, and cultural explanations of behavior were often criticized for being circular and conservative.3 Consequently, use of the concept declined in the study of comparative politics. Now, however, it has been reactivated by some students of American state politics. At least seven recent studies have employed political culture as an explanatory variable to account for interstate differences in political structure, electoral behavior and policy outputs.4 For the