The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination by Jacob Bronowski (review)

Leonardo, Vol. 12, pp. 247-261. Pergamon Press Ltd. 1979. Printed in Great Britain. BOOKS Readers are invited to recommend books to be reviewed. In general, only books in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Those who would like to be added to Leonardo’spanel o f reviewers should write to the FounderEditor , indicating their particular interests. The Orjgins of Knowledge and Imagination. Jacob Bronowski. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Conn.. 1978. 146 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by David Perkins* This book is a transcript of six lectures delivered at Yale University in 1967 as the Silliman Lecture Series. The lectures address no lesaa theiiie than the nature of humankind’squest for scientific knowledge. In exploring a topic of such scope for a varied audience, the late Jacob Bronowski presented his arguments clearly and engagingly, drawing on a remarkable range of knowledge. The book does not suffer from being a transcript. On the contrary, a bit of Bronowski’s somewhat charismatic personality comes through. In a number of ways,he attempts to probehow human mental, conceptual and social structures make scientificinquiry possible. For example, he contrasts human and animal communication. One point he makes is that animal communication consists only of ‘instructions’ whereby one.animal signals another to flee, to mate, or whatever. Human languages, on the other hand, can transmit knowledge as well as instructions. At the same time. Bronowski emphasizesthe limitsof scientific inquiry. Heholds that there isno god’seyeview of the universeto be discovered and that scienceis a hypothesis-making enterprise whosehypotheses will characteristically bedisplaced by others in a few years. He argues that science always is bound by the necessity of isolating phenomena for theoretical purposes when in fact those phenomena are importantly related to others. But the great gift of humankind, Bronowski says, is the ability to transcend the boundaries of any particular formal system.The human mind is not a computer and is not as constrained as the scientificand mathematical systemsused to represent knowledge and theories. Through processes of metaphor, imagination and chance, the human inquirer can devisenew sytems of knowledge that avoid the limits of the old ones. If Bronowski’ssweepisadmirable, the details are not as much so. Again and again, individual themes are not as fully or carefully developed as they might be. To mention just one example, recent scholarship has probed much more deeply the nature of scientificdiscovery and scientificrevolutions. Whereas Bronowskimerely givesusthe human mind triumphant,work by such writers as T. Kuhn [TheStructure o f Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1962)Jand I. Schemer [Science and Subjectivity (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967)]offers much more in the way of historical evidence and philosophical precision in this controversial area. Perhaps one might distinguish loosely between breadth of insight and depth of insight. Bronowski, at least in his most public persona, was a specialistin breadth. While one often must be a little disappointed with particular points, one still can be impressed and provoked to further thought by the ensemble. S. E. Luria’s brief Introduction notes that Bronowski had intended to write a companion book to concern the nature of artistic endeavor. One can only regret that he did not live long enough to complete his mission. At the same time, and despite its emphasis on scientificinquiry, the present book has lessons for those involved in the arts. Perhaps most notably, it is eloquent *Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA 02138, U S A . testimony that scientific, like artistic, effort is a creative and wholly human endeavor. Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics. Peter Mittelstaedt. D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1976. Trans. from German by W. Reimer. 211 pp. Paper, Dfl. 33.00. Reviewed by P.T. Landsberg** Before 1900certain assumptions had been made about .cience and about physics that can be traced back to the philosopher Kant and the Greeks. Roughly, they may becharacterised by the a priori given structures of space, time, causality and so on. The physicsof this century has been forced by experimental results to focus attention on the measuring process.This has led to notions of space and time that depend on the observer and to transformation lawsofexperimental results...