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Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously

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Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously

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 The European Legacy, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 605–622, 2008

Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously

MENACHEM FISCH

ABSTRACT Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying
science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy
seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical
enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of
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the most profound latter-day findings of philosophy. What makes this issue highly relevant in the present
context, is that at its heart it is a dispute about language.
This paper explores the possibility not of adjudicating this dispute, but of somehow bridging it. What it
asks and proposes to answer positively is whether it is possible to remain committed to both horns of the
dilemma: to salvage a philosophically viable account of science as a self-critical enterprise, without having to
breach the latter-day philosophical framework that would seem to deem this impossible.

Comparing the languages of the natural sciences and the humanities can teach us much
about what they share and how they differ. But looking to the different ends to which
they employ these languages reveals an important asymmetry between the ‘‘two cultures’’
and with it a profound discrepancy, both of which are little discussed in the lively debate
to which C. P. Snow’s well-known distinction gave rise.
The asymmetry between science and the humanities first concerns their attitude
toward each other. The humanities study science. It is one of their topics. Centers of
‘‘science studies’’ world-wide keenly seek systematically to understand what science can
aspire to achieve, and how it does so. They ponder its history, the structure and life of its
institutions, communities and societies, the worlds it pictures, the methods it employs,
the life work of individual scientists, and much much more. Science, on the other hand,
has no such interest in the humanities; no desire to peer over C. P. Snow’s fence, as it
were, except defensively on occasion. It isn’t even curious. Science studies the world,
but the humanities are not considered part of that world.

Tel Aviv University, The Cohn Institute for Hhistory and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, P.O. Box 39040, Ramat Aviv,
69978 Israel. Email: fisch@post.tau.ac.il

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/08/050605–18 ß 2008 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770802268790
 606 MENACHEM FISCH

But science’s indisposition toward informed systematic second-order reflection is

quite general and not limited to the humanities. Most importantly, science refrains from
systematically reflecting on itself! This is not to say that scientists proceed blindly or
thoughtlessly. Like all serious professionals, scientists conduct themselves with a firm and
broadly shared (and, therefore, seldom articulated) understanding of what their business is,
and how best to go about it. But it is largely an instinctual and an unexplained account; a
view from within that is taken for granted, blinkered and biased for lack of the historically
and philosophically informed stepping back of impartial reflection. To paraphrase the late
Peter Lipton, science cultivates and employs its languages in its search for truth, but shows
no interest in employing them for knowing what Truth is (which, as Lipton points out,
was how the young Thomas Kuhn explained his giving up of physics for the
humanities);1 science persists in explaining its data and testing its theories, but shows no
interest in articulating what it is to explain or to empirically test; science is the epitome of
rational endeavor, but has no interest in understanding what it is to act rationally.
Formulating and deliberating theories of scientific truth, scientific explanation, scientific
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testing, and rationality remain the work of philosophers. The business of doing science
must be left to the scientists, of course, but that of understanding science cannot. Like all
deeply transformative human undertakings, artistic, moral, political, social, and
intellectual, science too demands serious reflection and study––not because anyone
seriously believes that science needs outside help to improve its performance or to run its
institutions more effectively. Science performs perfectly well and requires no external
advice or coaching on that count. We in the humanities study science intensely because
we desire to better understand one of humankind’s most ambitious, most influential, and
most successful undertakings in the modern era.
The humanities are thus (self-)charged with the threefold task of explaining (a) what
scientists do and can achieve; (b) what they believe they do and can achieve; and (c) given
(b)’s great motivational role with respect to (a), how does (b) in fact contribute to (a)’s
success. None of this, we’d have thought, should pose much of a problem. Given
science’s basic lack of considered self-reflection, we would expect (b) to be but a crude,
poorly articulated, unphilosophical, ahistorical and (therefore) poorly theorized version of
(a), no different than the way skilled and creative writers, athletes, legislators or artists tend
to describe what they do and achieve in comparison to the systematic and comparative
work of professional critics and commentators. But in the case of science the discrepancies
between the two levels prove enormous. Philosophers who take the philosophical
developments of the last century seriously into account, find themselves forced to deny
any credence to science’s self-image as a more-or-less steadily progressive, self-critical
enterprise, while those who aspire to take what scientists do and feel more seriously, find
themselves forced to ignore some of philosophy’s most profound latter-day findings. For,
as I shall explain immediately, these findings forcefully call into question the very
coherence of describing scientific theories as testable, improvable and highly successful
attempts to truly represent the world as it is. What complicates the story even more is that
for the last several decades professional philosophers of science seem paradoxically to fall,
almost without exception, on the other side of the divide, siding with science against
philosophy, while those in science-studies who cast their gaze wider and less
philosophically––historians, sociologists and anthropologists of science––seem to have
better understood and internalized the philosophical lesson of late that many philosophers
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 607

of science seem to prefer to ignore. What makes the issue highly relevant to our
discussion here, is that at its heart it is a dispute about language.
My aim in what follows is to explore the possibility not of adjudicating the dispute,
but of bridging it. What I’ll be asking is whether it is possible to remain committed to
both horns of the dilemma: to salvage a philosophically viable account of science as a
self-critical enterprise, without having to breach the latter-day philosophical framework
that seems to deem it impossible. First, though, to the problem.

1
Few would disagree that the linguistic turn represents the most significant new
development in twentieth-century philosophy––at least in the English-speaking world.
It is important, however, to distinguish between two very different, if related, twentieth-
century philosophical turns toward language, which are not always easy to view apart.
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The first, inaugurated by Frege and centrally represented by the early Wittgenstein, and
introduced with ingenious ambivalence in the 1967 volume of essays edited by Richard
Rorty that gave it its name,2 represents a decidedly modernist redirecting of philosophical
attention from an outward focus on the perennial problems of philosophy (such as the
problem of evil, the mind-body problem, the nature of the good, etc.) toward a reflexive,
inward focusing on the normative vocabulary of philosophical discourse itself (asking,
rather, what we can coherently mean by using the term ‘‘evil’’ and ‘‘good,’’ indeed, what
it means to mean anything at all; or how to understand and analyze utterances about what
is better than what, and, indeed, what it means to understand and analyze any utterance
at all). It is this turn toward language that gave rise to much of analytical philosophy as we
know it––both of the reformative and ordinary language varieties.
But twentieth-century philosophy underwent a second and more challenging
linguistic turn, one forged of a heady mélange of neo-Kantian and neo-pragmatist
elements, which undertook a systematic reflection on the very role of language in mind,
thought, knowledge and practice. From at least one major perspective, it originated from
reflection on a crucial scientific development. The acceptance of relativity theory
challenged its early neo-Kantian interpreters (especially Hans Reichenbach and Moritz
Schlick, joined by Rudolph Carnap, who later generalized their insights to apply to
scientific language in general) to consider for the first time since Kant, the possibility of
a development in physics, in the course of which what Kant had taken to be science’s
permanent, unchanging constitutive framework (its ‘‘synthetic a priori’’ in Kantian
parlance) was found to have been radically transformed. Kant had famously argued that
our very ability to experience things as thus and so, requires an ability to conceptualize
them as such; as objects or events of certain kinds, set in space and time, and standing in
certain relations to each another, etc. But why should the world we experience present
itself in this manner? His answer, which was to revolutionize our thinking about
knowledge, was that experience is fundamentally a process of recognition, not by virtue
of some miraculous pre-established, God-given harmony between the ways we think
and the ways things are, but because what we experience are not ‘‘raw feels’’ of external
reality at all, but sensations thoroughly informed in advance by the ways we think.
Space, time, causality and so forth are, on a Kantian showing, not features of the world
 608 MENACHEM FISCH

that are learnt by or acquired from experience, but features of the conceptualizing
framework that must be in place prior to any experience. Science was for Kant the systematic
study, exposure and formal articulation of these a priori frameworks, which he believed
were fixed, universal features of human sensation and cognition. Newtonian physics is
an empirical science. But parts of it, Kant forcefully argues––Euclidean geometry, the
conservation of matter and inertia and Newton’s laws of motion, etc.––are not
themselves derived from experience but, on the contrary, form the prior necessary conditions
for any such derivation.3 It is in this sense that he believed they enjoyed a priori
constitutive status. The fact that Einstein’s new physics displayed a radically new and
different set of such constitutive principles pertaining to quite different notions of space,
time, motion, and action, left its neo-Kantian interpreters no choice but to conclude that
such conceptual frameworks, though constitutive of how a science sees and understands
the world, are nonetheless the contingent products of human making. Michael Friedman,
on whose work I shall comment shortly, has played a major role in drawing attention
in recent years to this important aspect of logical empiricism.
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This second linguistic turn, if I may call it so, was not to remain an exclusively
logical empiricist affair, and certainly not one limited to science. From the early 1950s on,
the work of Wilfrid Sellars, especially his ‘‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’’ of
1956, along with the massive impact of the later Wittgenstein, combined independently
with the later Carnap, to lay the foundations for the twin philosophical insights that
have grounded much of the philosophy of mind, knowledge, ethics and action of the last
fifty years––at least in the English-speaking world. The first––to use a turn of phrase
introduced separately by Rorty (late of Davidson) and Foucault––is the idea that language
is not a medium capable of representing an independently experienced external reality or
of expressing an independently experienced self.4 Language renders our ‘‘raw feels’’
experience, lending them the form, meaning, and value they have for us. Reality cannot
‘‘correct’’ our language, because the reality we experience is wholly determined by it.
Our knowledge of the world and ourselves is not merely mediated, but thoroughly
constituted by the words we have and know how to use. Nothing can be known by us
for which we do not possess a concept, for to know is to conceptualize. And what we do
know, judge and plan for is thoroughly determined by the concepts we use and their
rules of association, for there is no neutral, concept-free ground on which to stand
outside the ‘‘language game’’ we play from which to objectively assess and correct its
function or compare it to others. Language thus construed, I stress, is normatively
constitutive not merely because languages necessarily contain their users’ entire repertoire
of evaluative concepts, but because concept use in general is essentially a norm- or rule-
governed practice that imparts normative content in application to everything we think
and say.
The second insight, which lends this sobering neo-Kantian realization its latter-day
urgency, is the further realization that, without detracting from their constitutive
function, the normative vocabularies we utilize are the constantly shifting, frequently
modified, occasionally overthrown, contingent products of human fashioning, and
thus a far cry from the hard-wired fixed-for-all-time transcendental ego envisaged
by Kant.
The two ideas, the constitutive function of our linguistic frameworks, on the one
hand, and their susceptibility to change, even radical change, on the other, combine to
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 609

frame the most challenging problem exercising philosophy today. Some call it the
problem of cultural relativism, or, as I prefer to call it here, the problem of the rationality
of framework replacement.

2
To modify or replace a conceptual framework rationally is to do so for a reason, and the
only possible good reason for doing so would be to find it in some meaningful sense
normatively deficient. Pittsburgh philosopher John McDowell nicely captures this idea in his
widely discussed Mind and World:
Any thinking . . . is under a standing obligation to reflect about and criticize the
standards by which, at any time, it takes itself to be governed. . . . [this] is implicit in the
very idea of a shaping of the intellect. . . . This does not mean that such reflection
cannot be radical. One can find oneself called on to jettison parts of one’s inherited
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ways of thinking; and [that the] weaknesses that reflection discloses . . . can dictate the
formation of new concepts and conceptions. But the essential thing is that one can
reflect only from the midst of the way of thinking one is reflecting about.5

The problem is that our linguistic frameworks are, by definition, not only constitutive
of what we experience but also of how we judge and value what we experience. They
determine what we take to be true and good, worthy and unworthy. Our linguistic
frameworks are normative in that they comprise both descriptive and evaluative
vocabularies. But how is it possible for thought to criticize the very standards by
which it is governed? In view of their constitutive function with respect to the discourses
they support, normative linguistic frameworks, the argument goes, cannot be critically
appraised from within those discourses. Normative frameworks cannot deem themselves
normatively wanting; they cannot become the object of the principles of critical, rational
reasoning and reckoning of which they themselves are constitutive and, hence, though
the product of human endeavor, a normative framework cannot be considered the object
or product of rational human endeavor. Richard Rorty makes the point forcefully:
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions,
their beliefs and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our
friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects. Our deepest self-doubts,
our highest hopes. . . . [I]f doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no
non circular argumentative resource. Those words are as far as he can go with language;
beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force.6

A final vocabulary, Rorty’s term for a constitutive normative framework, is not,

and in principle cannot be the outcome of the kind of reflective critical deliberation,
valorized as quintessentially rational by McDowell. Rorty does not find this in the least
problematic. Aware of the inherent contingency of her final vocabulary, the imaginary
‘‘ironist’’ strong poet with whom Rorty identifies, is portrayed in his Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity as someone who,
spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into
the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. . . . But she cannot give
 610 MENACHEM FISCH

a criterion of wrongness . . . she thinks [therefore] that there is no reason to think that
Socratic inquiry into the essence of justice or science or rationality will take one much
beyond the language games of one’s time. (74–75)

She, therefore, experiments with new vocabularies by blindly casting around for new
metaphors by which to redescribe herself and her world. Unable to question, she doubts;
unable to criticize, she tinkers. She gropes blindly because she assumes, with Rorty, that
from the vantage point of her currently held final vocabulary it is impossible to review,
and hence to improve it rationally. And the same, Rorty argues, applies to the loftiest of
scientific, artistic and intellectual achievement:
The Wittgensteinian analogy between vocabularies and tools has one obvious
drawback. The craftsman typically knows what job he needs to do before picking or
inventing tools with which to do it. By contrast, someone like Galileo, Yeats or
Hegel . . . is typically unable to make clear exactly what it is that he wants to do before
developing the language in which he succeeds in doing it. His new vocabulary makes
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possible for the first time a formulation of its own purpose. (13–14)

Precious as it might seem to McDowell, Rorty insists, our admirable capacity for
self-criticism and self-improvement is required by his philosophy to stop short of its
seemingly profoundest, to be replaced by the aimless tinkering of clueless irony.
To accept the claim that there is no standpoint outside the particular historical
conditioned and temporary vocabulary we are presently using from which to judge this
vocabulary . . . amounts to giving up the idea that intellectual or political progress is
rational, in any sense of ‘‘rational’’ which is neutral between vocabularies. (48–49)

Absurd as it may seem, Rorty insists and many agree, that to take the linguistic turn
seriously prohibits us from viewing normative changes of framework as reasoned changes,
even in the sciences. For Rorty, even the most significant scientific upheavals add up to
no more than an uncritical process by which practitioners ‘‘gradually lose the habit of
using certain words and gradually acquire the habit of using others’’ (20).

3
How has the philosophy of science fared in all this? Backtracking for a moment to my
initial distinction between the analytical and neo-Kantian linguistic turns, it would be fair
to say that for the latter half of the twentieth century, Anglophone philosophy of science
has limited itself almost exclusively to the former, namely, to the squarely analytical.
Thomas Kuhn is the exception, of course, but then Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions doesn’t really rank as a work of philosophy. Although it was commissioned
and published by Carnap and Charles Morris––in whose collaboration neo-Kantianism
and American pragmatism began their fruitful fusion––Kuhn’s renowned book and
subsequent writings nowhere seriously engage or even join in discussion with the likes of
Carnap, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty or anyone else in the long list of
philosophers who have grappled with the philosophy of language his famous book
implicitly premises. Kuhn’s impact on philosophically informed historians and sociologists
of science has been enormous, but philosophers of science proper have remained by and
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 611

large squarely and safely analytical, keeping their distance in knowing and even happy
ignorance from the more challenging of the two linguistic turns. In unsettling contrast
to the last several decades in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, philosophy
of mind, philosophy of action, not to speak of philosophy of religion and aesthetics,
one would be hard-pressed to name a single work of philosophy of science systematically
and meaningfully engaged in this discussion.7
The challenge to the way most philosophers of science tend to understand science,
issuing from latter-day philosophy of language and mind, cannot be met by trying to
determine where the ‘‘external’’ influences on science—social, political, cultural and
psychological—end, and the supposedly ’’internal’’ scientific business of confronting hard
facts may be said to begin. The challenge stems from the understanding that science is
no exception to the rule, and that even with regard to the very best of scientific efforts,
the so-called external and internal are equally mediated by language––language forever
contingent on the external yet, at the same time, constitutive in the deepest sense of the
term, of all we consider internal.
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This is why Michael Friedman’s 2001 Dynamics of Reason stands out, in my opinion,
as the single most important contribution to the philosophy of science in recent decades.8
I say this despite disagreeing with its conclusions. Friedman’s importance resides, first,
in his detailed acknowledgment of the problem, and second, in his problematic solution
to it, which offers philosophers of science, for the first time in many years, a philosophical
account of scientific achievement and development in which to sink their teeth, and
which is aware of and sensitive to what I’ve been calling the second linguistic turn.

4
Those of us who are unwilling to accept Rorty’s radical conclusion, that no final
vocabulary, even in science, can be subjected to rational review and reform by those
whose form of life it determines, would seem to have three options. One, is to contest the
contingency premise, namely, to argue for there being some kind of fixed, universally
shared mega-framework, or meta-framework comprising a set of standards external to,
and shared by all similar frameworks, against which they can be criticized, and compared.9
A second option, which, I believe, is no option at all, would be to contest the
neo-Kantian premise, dismissing the problem by arguing that language does not play the
constitutive role in human experience and self-identity that Rorty’s argument assumes.10
The third option, which I wish to explore here, is to attempt to meet the challenge
head-on, fully accepting both the contingency and constitutive role of linguistic
frameworks, yet arguing that their rational appraisal and reform from within remains a
live and real option, despite arguments to the contrary such as Rorty’s or Davidson’s.11
Such an option, if viable, would allow us to salvage a philosophically feasible account
of science as a rational, self-correcting enterprise even with respect to revolutionary
moments of scientific framework replacement, without breaching the central insights of
contemporary philosophy of language and mind. In this respect, Friedman’s Dynamics of
Reason presents the most comprehensive attempt of this sort in recent years. But he does
so at the price of emptying the rationality of framework replacement of any critical
element.12
 612 MENACHEM FISCH

Friedman views science as a practice and a body of knowledge constituted at any

one time by a normative linguistic framework that defines its ‘‘space of empirical
possibilities (statements that can be empirically true or false), and the procedures of
empirical testing against that background’’ (84), which the job of philosophy of science
is to make explicit.13 He fully endorses a generalized version of Riechenbach’s account of
relativity theory mentioned above (according to which the constitutive framework of
science changed radically in the transition from Newton’s to Einstein’s physics), which,
he claims, finds its ‘‘most mature expression’’ in Rudolph Carnap’s formalistic account of
linguistic frameworks.14
What we end up with . . . is thus a relativized and dynamical conception of a priori
mathematical-physical principles, which change and develop along with the
development of the mathematical and physical sciences themselves, but which
nevertheless retain the characteristically Kantian constitutive function of making the
empirical natural knowledge thereby structured and framed by such principles first
possible. (30–31)
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Kuhn’s historiography of scientific paradigm-shifts offers Friedman ‘‘an informal

counterpart’’ of the relativized conception of constitutive a priori principles introduced
by the logical empiricists, that avoids the overly formal grounding that exposed Carnap to
Quine’s devastating critique.15 Friedman, however, parts company with the stratified
and dynamic picture of scientific knowledge outlined by Carnap and historicized by
Kuhn on the question of scientific framework replacement. Carnap insisted that for lack
of higher-level rational criteria for choosing between frameworks that define rational
choice differently, questions related to the acceptance or rejection of linguistic
frameworks can only be resolved as a matter of convention or convenience, with
reference to considerations of pragmatic preference (such as simplicity, symmetry,
elegance of expression, greater predictive power, usefulness, etc.). Kuhn’s views on the
matter were somewhat more complex, oscillating between the gestalt-switch rhetoric of
some of the formulations found in Structure, and the more nuanced, linguistic,
instrumentalist account of paradigm change one finds in his later work. Friedman is ill
at ease with both. Against the later Kuhn’s instrumentalist rationality, Friedman argues
that it is one thing to treat scientific theories as mere devices for achieving maximum
computational accuracy, precision, simplicity and so forth, as Kuhn argued toward the
end of his life, but quite another to see in them contentful and testable attempts to
formulate ‘‘properly empirical laws.’’ ‘‘Both a Newtonian and an Einsteinian physicist,’’
he argues,
can and must agree that general relativity yields more accurate predictions for the
advance of the perihelion of Mercury, for example. From the Newtonian physicist’s
point of view, however, general relativity can only be accepted as a pragmatically
acceptable device for prediction; it cannot be a true description of empirical reality.
For, from the Newtonian point of view, the constitutive framework of general
relativity is not even possible or coherent, and there is thus no sense in which
Einstein’s field equations can actually be empirically true. Only when the constitutive
framework of general relativity (the Reimannian theory of manifolds, the light
principle, the principle of equivalence) is already in place is it possible for the field
equations to be [considered] empirically true; and it is only within the context of
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 613

this already accepted framework, therefore, that Einstein’s calculation of the

perihelion of Mercury can then count as genuine empirical evidence––again either
for or against (83–84).

Friedman’s Kantism runs deeper in this respect than both Carnap’s and Kuhn’s.
An up-and-running constitutive framework provides the set of standards by which a
world-picture is not merely entertained, but taken (as) true. It makes no sense at all to argue
that adherence to it should be made to turn on merely conventional or instrumentalist
norms. Hence, for Friedman,
The most fundamental problem raised by the Kuhnian account of scientific revolutions
is to explain how it can be rational to move to a new constitutive framework, . . . despite
the fact that this new framework, from the point of view of the old framework, is not
even possible. What rational motivations can there be––and how can it be rationally
intelligible––to make such a radical shift? (99–100; italics added)
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5
Friedman would thus appear to take the bull by the horns. But does he? Even as he
formulates the problem, a closer look reveals that, while his picture of scientific
knowledge internalizes the full radicalism of what I have termed the second linguistic
turn, his concept of rationality remains disappointingly different from the critical,
reflective self-questioning, of which McDowell speaks and to which Popper dedicated his
life. Rationality for Freidman, turns out not to be a forward-looking evaluative category
of creative, problem-driven scientific inquiring, but a backward-looking evaluative
category of scientific choice. Friedman seems to despair in advance of explaining what
might rationally motivate researchers to seek and construct a constitutive framework
different from the one they are working with, and concentrates exclusively on trying to
explain how a fully-formed new framework can possibly earn the rational approval of
those still committed to the old. For McDowell, as for a (neo-) Popperian like myself
(who, unlike most others of his ilk, is determined to take the linguistic turn seriously) the
fundamental problem of rationality is to explain how, prior to there being a viable alternative
in sight, a functioning normative framework can come to be considered so problematic,
by those whose work and very thinking it constitutes, to the point of meriting
replacement. If a robust notion of normative criticism from within a framework can be
articulated, then, we believe, peer approval will take care of itself.
These differences are further accentuated when one looks at the way Friedman
purports to solve the problem. Locating the rationality of scientific paradigm shifts in the
act of approving and endorsing the new (while still committed to the old), rather than in the
critical pondering of the old (prior to formulating the new), commits him to an essentially
comparative agenda. If the problem is conceived as that of rationally choosing between two
well-formed alternatives (while committed to one), solving it necessarily requires being
able to somehow hold them in the balance. Friedman’s way out is to remain fully
committed to the two prongs of his philosophy of linguistic frameworks (namely, their
constitutive role and contingency), while substantially toning down Kuhn’s picture of
scientific revolutions.
 614 MENACHEM FISCH

For two consecutive frameworks to be comparable in this manner, they cannot be

allowed to be too radically different. Friedman continues throughout the book to pay lip
service to Kuhn by describing scientific revolutions as ‘‘transitions between radically
different frameworks’’ but, in fact, as Alan Richardson aptly notes,16 he posits exceedingly
‘‘kinder, gentler revolutions in the realm of science’’ than Kuhn, picturing them as a series
of nested and converging developments in which, looking back, earlier frameworks
‘‘are exhibited as limiting cases’’ of the new, while looking forward, ‘‘the concepts
and principles of later paradigms’’ are seen to ‘‘evolve continuously, by a series of natural
transformations from those of earlier ones’’ (63).17
To sustain all of this, Friedman is forced to render the process not only far less
‘‘catastrophic’’ than Kuhn, but also, as the following quotation clearly indicates,
deliberately less problem-driven. Friedman portrays science as unfolding smoothly while
interacting with an independently cultivated mathematico-philosophical discourse
external to it
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in such a way that controversial and conceptually problematic philosophical themes

become productively intertwined with relatively uncontroversial and unproblematic
areas of scientific accomplishments[.] [A]s a result, philosophical reflection can facilitate
interaction between different (relatively uncontroversial and unproblematic) areas of
scientific reflection, so as, in particular, to facilitate the introduction and communica-
tion of a new scientific paradigm at the same time (107).

The problems that initially prompt the formulation of these options are hence
not scientific problems at all. They take form elsewhere, among philosophers and
mathematicians as moves in very different discourses, and are supposedly introduced into
science ready-made, not as means to rectify or replace a set of existing a priori principles
deemed to be faulty, but as ‘‘natural extensions’’ of a set of a priori principles perceived
to be ‘‘uncontroversial and unproblematic.’’
Friedman purports to render science a smoothly evolving rational enterprise by
confining all scientific deliberation and critical discourse to periods of ‘normal’ inter-
paradigmatic puzzle-solving, and relegating the critical deliberation on elements of what
will eventually become the science’s new paradigm to the more turbulent, and
supposedly culturally relative, seas of philosophical and mathematical discourse. And thus,
Friedman is forced to redescribe the most unsettled and exciting moments of creative
scientific upheaval in extraordinarily placid, almost phlegmatic terms: ‘‘When we move
from the Aristotelian framework to that of classical physics,’’ he writes as if ticking
a checklist,
We retain Euclidean geometry intact, discard the hierarchical and teleological
organized spherical universe, and modify the Aristotelian theory of natural motion––
in such a way that we retain the idea, in particular, that there is a fundamental state of
natural motion following privileged paths of the underlying geometry. (63)

The price of rendering this story of momentous conceptual upheaval rational, as

Friedman understands the term,18 is to retell it in the form of a series of Whiggish
retrospective acts of stock-taking that succeeds in remaining astonishingly indifferent
to the intensely erotetic process of critical dialogue by which the elements retained
were judged suitable, those discarded deemed unfitting, and those modified wanting.
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 615

The processes of painful pondering that motivated and eventually produced the
succession of moves listed by Friedman, pose, I would like to argue, a philosophical
problem quite different from the one his purports to ease. It is one thing to formulate
a radically new constitutive framework that, by the aid of hindsight, can be viewed as
a natural, reasonable and responsible development of the old. It is quite another to explain
how a functioning constitutive framework can be rationally called into question by its
own very standards. This latter question is to my mind the gravest challenge to rationality
posed by the linguistic turn in philosophy that Friedman has been so instrumental
in bringing to the fore. But it is one that Friedman’s otherwise important book does not
succeed in meeting. The great challenge to our understanding of science posed by the
second linguistic turn in philosophy, is to the very idea of rationally motivated
modification and replacement of science’s constitutive frameworks. It seems absurd not to
be able to describe those responsible for developing the new frameworks as motivated by
a real sense of justifiable crisis with respect to the old, and yet philosophy firmly deems
such talk incoherent. Friedman’s rich discussion of framework replacement, I submit,
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leaves this question unattended. But can it be met?

6
I believe it can, but to see how, the problem needs to be further narrowed and better
stated. As much as we would like to say with McDowell that as thoughtful rational agents
we are required (both in and outside science) not only to exercise our norms in self
criticism, but to make them themselves the object of such criticism, no philosophical
account of normativity and personal identity makes room for such feats of self-negation.
By what standard can the very standards by which a person deems things good or bad,
worthy or unworthy, be themselves deemed bad or unworthy?! As the foremost latter-
day thinker on personal identity, Harry Frankfurt, explains,19 we hold the steady flow of
our feelings, desires, and beliefs in review by ‘‘introducing a sort of division within our
minds’’ that ‘‘establishes an inward directed monitoring oversight.’’ We identify with those
desires, motivations and beliefs that we want to have, and dissociate ourselves from those,
which although ours, we treat as external and unwanted alien intruders (such as the urge
for a cigarette or to throttle a critic) denying them ‘‘any entitlement to supply us with
motives or with reasons.’’20 Our core self––call it our I-part––the part that conducts
the process of review and identification, is the seat of our deepest volitions; the set, not
merely of what we earnestly want, but of what we earnestly want to want. These constitute
the seat of our norms and standards.21 It is the part of us with which we wholeheartedly
identify and with which we reflect and pass critical judgment on the rest. Our I-part is
capable of self-reflection, but its capacity for normative self-criticism is limited to
prioritizing. It can rule a passing desire worthy or unworthy of identification, but cannot
normatively criticize any part of itself––which is just another way of saying that
we cannot change our higher order volitions at will. So the problem of rational
framework replacement cannot be addressed at the level of personal, intra-subjective
normative self-criticism simpliciter. Left to his own devices, a person’s I-part is incapable of
further dividing and is, therefore, incapable of finding his norms normatively wanting of
his own accord.
 616 MENACHEM FISCH

But as Friedman rightly insists with respect to science, no serious, deliberative

human undertaking is ever pursued in a void. All such enterprises boast a plethora of
broad and varied contexts––political, cultural, religious, economic, technological,
intellectual––in which their normative frameworks are reflected on and at times
criticized in ways in which those whose discourse they govern are of themselves quite
incapable. And yet, as much as a scientific framework, for example, may be keenly
challenged and deliberated by non-scientists, it can only be effectively modified or
replaced from within, by scientists whose work and thinking it governs. Hence, the
problem of the rationality of normative framework replacement can be reduced further
to that of our capacity to endorse and internalize such criticism. Although practitioners
are unable of their own accord to deem their normative frameworks normatively
deficient, to what extent can they be stimulated to do so by trusted external critics?22
We know that such criticism can be very effective, but to what extent can its
transformative effect be considered rational? How can a trusted critic get us to do what we
are incapable of doing alone, namely, set in motion a considered, thoughtful, truly
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transformative process of normative self-reflection we would be comfortable calling

’’rational,’’ as opposed to the kind of gestalt-switch type of conversion the later
Wittgenstein called mere ‘‘persuasion’’?23
Rationally accepting or dismissing criticism is in ordinary cases a straightforward
matter of evaluating premises, inferences, and data. But normative criticism is different,
for it purports to question things a person cannot help care about. Normative criticism
inevitably runs up against the very boundaries of will, or as Frankfurt has it, a person’s
‘‘volitional necessities.’’24 In other words, for the same reason that normative self-
criticism is unthinkable, normative criticism by others can never convince, at least not in
the first instance.

7
The question of rational framework replacement––if by now it can still be considered
a question at all––reduces further to whether (and if so, how) external criticism can
effectively stimulate transformative normative self-criticism despite being inevitably rejected?
The very idea of a consciously dismissed argument having such an effect will strike most
of us as downright absurd. The fact that we have reached such an impasse, they will argue,
proves by reductio ad absurdum that Rorty and Wittgenstein were right in asserting that our
normative frameworks mark the outer boundaries of rational consideration, rendering
unfounded the very idea of rational framework review and replacement.
But does it? It is true that arguments critical of a person’s heartfelt norms can never
convince, but their disputative ineffectiveness has little to do with the quality of their
premises or arguments. Normative criticism is rejected not because its logic is deemed
faulty, but because its conclusions are deemed preposterous (or unthinkable, or repulsive)!
This is its strength, but it is also its weakness. To understand why, a word must be said
about criticism in general.
The aim of prudent criticism is for it to be endorsed as self-criticism. All critical
arguments resemble existence proofs. They argue not merely that the shortcomings they
point to follow logically from their premises, but that they exist and demand attention;
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 617

not that ‘‘if these premises are true, then the system must be defective,’’ but that ‘‘because
they are true, the system is defective!’’ Critics must, therefore, frame their arguments from
the perspective of those they criticize, arguing from premises that they hold true, and in
ways they deem valid. The same applies to normative criticism, except that in the case of
normative criticism there exists no set of premises a person is liable to consider true that
entails a denunciation of his very norms. Think, for example, of a ‘‘conservative’’ whose
normative outlook is shaped by such concepts as family-honor, tradition, conformity,
and modesty, who purports to prudently criticize the way of life of a ‘‘liberal’’ colleague
who does not use these concepts at all, and whose normative outlook is shaped by such
concepts as spontaneity, freedom, criticism, and creativity. There is no way to do so from
squarely within his colleague’s normative framework.25
Prudent normative critics are aware of this. They know (or sense) that arguing from
their addressee’s perspective is impossible, but they also know that for their criticism to
somehow register and be taken rationally to heart, they must address him, as far as
possible, in his own terms, on the basis of premises he can recognize as his own.
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Therefore, they form their arguments from an imaginary point of reference as close as
possible to his, but sufficiently (and subtly) different to make their point, presenting it as
if arguing from his perspective. Arguing from the left, critics will surreptitiously premise
certain liberal and social norms to make their case, while those who argue from the right,
will tend to tacitly presuppose just enough conservative value to make their arguments
stick. This sort of partially empathic mode of reasoning becomes most apparent when one
compares parliamentary debates on matters of principle, to prudent attempts to convince
the other side. In the former, the parties make no effort to frame their arguments from
perspectives they believe their rivals could live with. On the contrary, their debating
resembles a sparring match in which each side does its best to articulate their own
positions from their own perspective, speaking to the media or to their voters over the
heads of the other parties to the dispute.
Honest and reasonably articulated normative criticism challenges its addressee with
an argument that premises a picture of his I-part, which, though to a large extent true,
differs significantly from his own. If the norms challenged are truly heartfelt, the
argument itself will be dismissed. Yet because its premises are not refuted the picture of
our normative identity that they imply can linger on, register, and be retained uncoupled
from, and without being automatically dismissed along with the argument itself.

8
The transformative power of prudent, trusted normative criticism lies, then, in the
disturbing picture it implicitly paints of us. Its effect resembles that of a recording device
that allows us a disturbing glimpse of what we can never see ourselves, namely, how
others think we think and should be thinking, and how they judge the way we judge and
should be judging. The better informed and more trustworthy we deem our critics to be,
the more honest we deem their account, and the more serious their criticism, the more
profound the disorienting sense of self-estrangement it is capable of arousing.
We do not need to deem our critics’ picture of us true for it to attract our attention
in this way. It is enough that we consider them sincere for their picture of us to resonate
 618 MENACHEM FISCH

and disturb, alerting us to the discrepancies between how we appear to ourselves and
apparently appear to them. The subtle but crucial difference that distinguishes ordinary
criticism from normative criticism is, as we have seen, that in the latter case, the picture
they present us with, though incongruous with our own, is not one we have actively refuted
and rejected, so that for a moment at least, we find ourselves entertaining both pictures side
by side. And since the points of disagreement between the two pictures pertain to the
very norms being questioned, their incongruity, just as in the case of a disturbing
playback, may well have the effect of rendering our commitment to them ambivalent.
And norms rendered ambivalent lose their wholehearted volitional grounding, and with
it their I-part status. Once demoted, they are subjected to the normative scrutiny of the
self’s new I-part. In this way, I submit, deep reaching and trusted normative criticism can
give rise to a sense of inner-discordance and self-estrangement capable of creating the
inner leeway necessary for truly transformative normative self-criticism.
If there is any truth in the account here briefly sketched,26 then it is possible to take
the linguistic turn seriously, and still retain a notion of normative self-criticism sufficiently
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robust to sustain the idea of rational framework review and replacement. The argument
is quite general, and should apply equally well to science––in which case the wishful
thinking of Popper and McDowell can be deemed an up-to-date philosophically viable
reality, and the sharp tension regarding the humanities’ understanding of scientific
development from which we set forth, significantly eased.
However, the possibility of truly transformative normative self-criticism necessarily
depends on a discursive environment of prudent and sufficiently disturbing, trusted critics.
But who are science’s trusted critics? Who is capable of producing in scientists the sort
of normative ambivalence capable of transforming a scientific framework? Friedman
makes much of the relevance to science of the debates among philosophers and
mathematicians. I think his is an unnecessarily restrictive view, first in limiting science’s
critical environment to these two fields only, and more importantly, in consigning all
critical discourse to within the two non-scientific fields. In this respect I find Peter
Galison’s notion of scientific ‘‘trading zones’’ exceedingly more fruitful.
Galison has drawn attention to the complex ways scientists engage other disciplines
relevant to their work––theoretical, material, etc.––and how such ‘‘business’’ is
conducted in what he calls ‘‘trading zones.’’ Galison’s Image and Logic27 explores the
‘‘trading’’ of scientific and technological know-how, but his suggestive model would
work equally well with respect to other forms of scientific interfacing, such as ‘‘trading’’
for financial or public support, interacting with other scientific disciplines, and other
schools of thought within the field, ‘‘exporting’’ scientific expertise in courts of law,
deliberating the didactics of teaching one’s subject,28 as well as, indeed, engaging the
philosophers of their fields. Central to Galison’s account is his analysis of the way such
trading requires the use of simplified ‘‘pidgin’’ and ‘‘creole’’ versions of the various parties’
‘‘languages.’’ For in order to trade, they must be able to present their world pictures,
expertise and techniques in a manner accessible to the non-professionals with whom they
trade. One aspect passed over by Galison’s analysis of ‘‘talking shop’’ to the uninitiated,
which is highly relevant here, is how practitioners are often required in such contexts
to articulate in simple terms the very basics they take for granted among themselves.
It is often the case that only in ‘‘trading’’ with such significant others are practitioners
required to explicate, discuss and field questions and queries regarding the frameworks
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 619

constitutive of their work. And it is here, I suggest, at the trading posts, far more than
among their professional milieus back home, that scientists become exposed to the kind
of normative criticism they and their peers are incapable of leveling. By joining Galison
in taking a broader view of scientific discourse, so as to include the diverse and
multifaceted ‘‘tradings’’ science conducts with the various professional groups it engages
professionally, it is possible, I believe, to chart a philosophically viable account of scientific
rationality, capable of doing justice to the languages of science while taking the linguistic
turn seriously.

9
But there is a price to pay, which, I believe, is very small considering the problem from
which we set forth. Our picture of the crucial moments of scientific upheaval, especially
of the heroic individuals centrally responsible for them, needs to be significantly refined.
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According to the account proposed here, the creative individuals capable of rationally
transforming a field are those lucky to be exposed to the challenge of trusted normative
criticism. But the transformative rational moment is not one of enlightened discovery
in the light of criticism, but one of deeply disturbing ambivalence; a moment of
inner discordance fraught with tortured dithering and painful indecision. Ambivalence,
self-estrangement and indecision are, as a rule, not the most inspiring and motivating
states of mind. But in moments of normative crisis, if I am right about them, they become
reason’s very driving force.
Had space allowed, it would have been fitting to end this all too sketchy reflection
with one or two historical examples of individuals whose work attests to the crucial
transformative force of normative ambivalence at actual moments of substantial scientific
upheaval. Such individuals are not easy to see. Thomas Kuhn’s influential depiction of
scientific revolutions presents us with vivid ‘‘before’’ and ‘‘after’’ pictures set side by side
in dramatic, unbridgeable contrast, as in a weight-watchers’ ad. Kuhn’s picture passes over
in perfect silence the crucially important intermediary figures, those accomplished
practitioners who were torn between commitment to the old, while groping toward the
as-of-yet unthinkable new, whose scientific work embodied their ambivalent, indecisive,
yet creative dithering, and whose standing in the community enabled them to have an
impact. We are blinkered by more than Kuhn, however. The ‘‘official’’ textbook
histories of science save no record of the doubters and ditherers whose creative, yet
exasperating indecision, prompted others to propose decisive changes of course. They can
be found at all such junctures, but to even begin making a historical case for the
transformative effect such people had on their fields would take us far beyond the already
seriously violated limits of the present essay. Had this not been the case, I would have
expounded on such studies as Peter Damerow, Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin,
and Jurgen Renn’s account of Galileo’s mechanics and its dramatic impact, and the
present author’s study of the genesis and formation of George Peacock’s work on algebra
and its dramatic impact on early-nineteenth-century British mathematics, both of which,
I believe, vividly exemplify the main thesis presented here.29 But to do so in any
acceptable detail would require a separate paper.
 620 MENACHEM FISCH

NOTES

An early version of this essay was presented at the ‘‘Cultural Relativity and the Scientific
Enterprise’’ conference, marking the centennial of Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis, Tel-Aviv
University, 6–7 March, 2005. The present version owes much to Oren Harman’s queries and
comments on an earlier draft.

1. Peter Lipton, ‘‘Kant on Wheels,’’ The London Review of Books, 19 July 2001, pp. 30–31.
2. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1967; rpt., 1992 with two retrospective essays by Rorty: ‘‘Ten Years After’’
and ‘‘Twenty-five Years After’’).
3. E.g. Critique of Pure Reason B20.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
10; Donald Davidson, Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
chap. 9; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Press, 1973), chap. 1.
5. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81.
6. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 73.
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7. Parts of Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London:
Sage, 1985), Ian Hacking’s contribution to World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of
Science, ed. Paul Horwich, and more so Thomas Kuhn’s notable ‘‘Afterwords’’ to that
volume—by far Kuhn’s most philosophical work—are interesting yet extremely modest
beginnings, if one bears in mind that 1993, the year World Changes was published, was the year
that, say, John McDowell and Robert Brandom were putting the finishing touches to their
monumental works.
8. Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications, 2001); henceforth page references are cited in the text.
9. Such an approach is typical of the more orthodox latter-day Kantian positions in ethics, such
as Christine Korsgaard’s. The modest absolutism, premised by Ronald Dworkin’s critique of
Michael Walzer’s interpretivist ethics, is another good example.
10. This is the position consistently taken by Karl Popper and his school, most conspicuously in
his The Myth of the Framework: In Defense of Science and Rationality (London: Routledge, 1994).
It is my contention that to argue so, as Popper does, without the benefit of a serious
alternative non-Kantian philosophy of language and mind, which is unavailable at present to
philosophers, is not to solve the problem, but to ignore it.
11. See, especially, Donald Davidson, ‘‘Paradoxes of Irrationality,’’ in Philosophical Essays on Freud,
ed. Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
289–305.
12. In this respect, the case Friedman makes for the rationality of scientific framework
replacement resembles Robert Brandom’s claim for the rationality of norm making in his Tales
of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
13. The Brandomian turn of phrase is not accidental, but it is impossible within the confines of
the present essay to even outline the interpretivist premises shared by Friedman and Brandom.
For a relatively detailed and comparative critique of the three positions, see chapters 5–8
of Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji, The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of
Self-Criticism (forthcoming).
14. Referring especially to Carnap’s The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Kegan Paul, 1937);
originally published as Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1934).
15. Willard V. O. Quine, ‘‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’’ Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43.
16. Alan Richardson, ‘‘Narrating the History of Reason Itself: Friedman, Kuhn, and a Constitutive
A Priori for the Twenty-First Century,’’ Perspectives on Science 10.3 (2002): 253–74.
17. Aristotelian and Newtonian mechanics share Euclidian geometry but differ radically in
two other respects. The former presupposes ‘‘a hierarchically and teleologically organized
 Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously 621

universe’’ and basic ‘‘conceptions of natural place and natural motion appropriate to this
universe’’ (61) heavy terrestrial bodies naturally move in straight vertical lines toward
their natural place at the center of the universe, while celestial bodies move naturally in
circular orbits around it. The conceptual framework of Newtonian mechanics does away with
both the hierarchy of realms and the notions of natural place and motion in favor of ‘‘an
infinite, homogeneous and isotropic universe in which all bodies naturally move uniformly
along straight lines to infinity’’ (ibid). Friedman tones down the radical transition by arguing
that Galileo’s treatment of free fall and projectile motion constituted an ‘‘essentially
intermediate stage’’ in which the hierarchical and teleological organization is discarded, but
the notion of natural, rectilinear inertial motion remains circular. Henri Poincare plays the
same role for him in the transition from classical mechanics to relativity theory (62). More on
intermediary figures, but in a sense different from Friedman’s, in the last section of this paper.
18. Which he does with reference to Jürgen Habermas’s much discussed notion of
‘‘communicative rationality.’’ For a detailed critique of the suitability of Habermas’s notion
to the problem in hand, see Fisch and Benbaji, The View from Within, chap. 6, esp. x4.
19. For recent and concise formulations of his views, see Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting
It Right, ed. Debra Satz, with comments by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman,
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and Meir Dan-Cohen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

20. Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, 4, 10.
21. ‘‘The origins of normativity,’’ writes Frankfurt, ‘‘do not lie . . . either in the transient
incitements of personal feeling and desire, or in the severely anonymous requirements of
eternal reason. They lie in the contingent necessities of love. These move us as feelings and desires
do; but the motivations that love engenders are not merely adventitious or (to use Kant’s
term) heteronymous. Rather, like the universal laws of pure reason, they express something
that belongs to our most intimate and most fundamental nature. Unlike the necessities of
reason, however, those of love are not impersonal. They are constituted by and embedded in
structures of the will through which the specific identity of the individual is most particularly
defined.’’ Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, 48.
22. Those familiar with Michael Walzer’s account on social criticism and Robert Brandom’s
notion of normative discursive scorekeeping will no doubt recognize my debt to their work.
However, while Frankfurt and Korsgaard limit their accounts of normativity and personal
identity to the purely intra-subjective discourse of self, both Walzer and Brandom confine
themselves equally purely to the realm of inter-subjective discourse. All fail to even consider
the possibility of the latter’s transformative impact on the former.
23. Wittgenstein raises the question of the effectiveness of criticism leveled across language-game
barriers in On Certainty, his posthumously published response to G. E. Moore’s widely
discussed defense of common-sense realism: ‘‘Proof of an external World,’’ Proceedings of the
British Academy 25 (1939): 273–300. However, he finds no third way between an all-out
rejection when ‘‘each man declares the other a fool and heretic’’ and unreasoned
‘‘persuasion,’’ the term he uses for ‘‘what happens when missionaries convert natives.’’ See
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969, rpt., with corrections and
indices, 1974), 80e–81e.
24. E.g. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, 46. This is not to say that necessities of will remain
necessarily fixed over time, and certainly not to say that they are in any sense inborn. Good
examples of the kind of necessities of which Frankfurt speaks, outside the obvious realm
of ethics proper, would be the norms and standards of scientific research or of artistic
performance that are firmly imparted to novices and internalized as ‘second-nature’ in the
course of their training and apprenticeship.
25. For a fairly detailed discussion of this point, see Yitzhak Benbaji and Menachem Fisch,
‘‘Through Thick and the Thin: A New Defense of Cultural Relativism,’’ Southern Journal of
Philosophy 42 (2004): 1–24.
26. The argument is presented in significantly greater detail in Fisch and Benbaji, The View from
Within, chaps. 8 and 9.
 622 MENACHEM FISCH

27. Peter L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), esp. chap. 9.
28. For a detailed account of the transformative role such didactical deliberations played in the
formation of William Whewell’s understanding of mathematical physics, see menachem Fisch,
William Whewell Philosopher of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 2.
29. See P. Damerow, G. Freudenthal, P. McLaughlin, and J. Renn, Exploring the Limits
of Preclassical Mechanics, 2d ed. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002), and Menachem Fisch, ‘‘The
Making of Peacock’s Treatise on Algebra: A Case of Creative Indecision,’’ Archive for History of
Exact Science 54 (1999): 137–79.
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