Our Earth in Continuous Change by David M. Baird (review)

Leonardo, Vol. 8, pp. 75-88. Pergamon Press 1975. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to reconmend books to be reviewed. Only books in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Those who would like to be added to Leonardo’s panel of reviewers shorrld write to the Forrnder-Editor, indicating their particrrlar interests. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. John Losee. Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1972. 218 pp., illus. Paper E0.90. Reviewed by P. T .Landsberg* What is the ‘philosophy of science’? It has been interpreted to be: (1) The elaboration of world views based on scientific theories and dealing with the nature of physicochemical processes,of biological systemsand of society. (2a) The analysis of assumptions, stated or unstated, made by scientists in various ages. Discussions of the belief in the existence of scientific laws and of the contrast between mechanistic and teleological explanation come under this heading. (2b) The analysis of the procedures and the logic of scientific explanation. Here one deals with the status of scientifictheories, how they are tested, thus complementing (2a), which emphasizes the role of the scientist. (3) The analysis and clarificationof concepts and theories of science. Philosophy of science under this heading is more liable to suffer in standards of scholarship than under any of the other headings, since the concepts and theories of science are liable to be misunderstood by the non-expert. Under this heading, too, the philosophy of science sometimes merges into the popularization of science. The latter is an important activity but is performed best when one is explicitly and admittedly concerned with popularization and it is often done badly when a writer adopts a philosopher’s cloak. It obviously deals with a different set of facts. At its simplest, it says that this law was discovered then and this was (or was not) the result of the invention of say, the interferometer . History is always incomplete: to make it complete one has to live through it and one never gets to know more than a part of a century! However, the study of history knows not only the sin of omission, it also knows the sin of unknowing popularization, to which reference has been made in (3) above. How, then, can the history of thought be communicated? Surely only by selecting thinkers and their writings, inwardly digesting the writings (not the thinkers) and expounding their thoughts, presumably more concisely. The typical scholar of the history of thought in some area of knowledge is thus a poprrlariser in an important sense: he expounds, hopefully, in an easier-to-read form the thoughts of original thinkers. For each scholar one can associate a conipression ratio. This is the number of printed pages required by him to cover an area divided by the number of printed pages taken by the original thinkers. The smaller this compression ratio the more arduous the task-at least that is what one would expect. Apparently, then, a history of thought is always also a popularization of thought. Perhaps it is helped along if this realization is ever present in a scholar’s mind. These observations have been sparked off by John Losee’s introduction to this book. He covers the whole period of views about scientific method in a very readable *Dept. of Mathematics, University of Southampton, Southampton SO9 5NH, England. Then, of course, there is the history of science. way. Each chapter has useful short biographical sketches of the main thinkers who are mentioned. In this way Losee covers a galaxy including: Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Grosseteste, Scotus, Ockham, Autrecourt, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, Hume, Kant, Herschel, Whewhell, Meyerson, Duhem, Campbell, J. S. Mill, P. Frank, Berkeley, Mach, PoincarC, Hanson, Bridgman, Carnap and a number of living philosophers for good measure (Hempel, Herse, HarrC, Nagel, Ayer and Popper). Many great scientists are missing from this list, but it must be remembered that this is a history in which one expects to meet the thinkers who, having thought about science, came up with primary contributions to the philosophy of science. This book is about such persons and their thoughts, and, in...