In the course of a LLog post about an xkcd comic, Mark Liberman has some interesting things to say about the history of chemical nomenclature:
As background for these jokes, it’s worth considering that modern chemical nomenclature was linguistically inspired:
Lavoisier, together with Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau, Claude-Louis Berthollet, and Antoine François de Fourcroy, submitted a new program for the reforms of chemical nomenclature to the academy in 1787, for there was virtually no rational system of chemical nomenclature at this time. […]
The total effect of the new nomenclature can be gauged by comparing the new name “copper sulfate” with the old term “vitriol of Venus.” Lavoisier’s new nomenclature spread throughout Europe and to the United States and became common use in the field of chemistry.
Or the new names “ethanoic acid” or”acetic acid” (or CH3COOH) for the old name “vinegar”…
The full proposal was published in 1787 as Méthode de nomenclature chimique (facsimile on Gallica here, on Google here). It starts with Le Mémoire sur la nécessité de réformer et de perfectionner la nomenclature de la chimie, which was written and read to the Académie by Lavoisier on April 18, 1787, and argues that the chemical nomenclature inherited from the alchemists should be methodically revised to make the names reflect the (recently discovered) components of the named substances.
Lavoisier’s argument is explicitly founded on an argument from Condillac’s Logique about the role of language in developing ideas about the nature of the world.
More details, quotes, and links at the Log post; it’s always interesting to see the history behind terms that we take for granted.
This seems reminiscent of Wilkins’ “Real Character”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_Towards_a_Real_Character,_and_a_Philosophical_Language
Evidently ideas like this were Out There. Linnaeus seems like a more obvious immediate influence, though.
I was struck by this bit from Lavoisier’s WP article:
Reminds me of Mendel’s statistically impossible results, and Newton’s impossible description of recombining the spectrum produced by one prism with a second prism. Sobering to think that great pioneers whose work has been abundantly validated by subsequent research were so convinced (quite rightly, as it turned out) of the correctness of their conclusions that they happily made up fraudulent data in support of them. Why can’t life be simple?
Out There
Yes. One thinks of Leibniz with his characteristica universalis, and Linnaeus as you say.
Why can’t life be simple?
How much time have you got?
@David Eddyshaw: Newton’s experiment with two prisms was hard, and people like the midget Hooke lambasted Newton when he first published it in the Philosophical Transactions because Hooke and others were unable to duplicate the result. However, with good prisms it’s easy; our undergraduates build their own apparatus to do it in the advanced lab. Presumably in Newton’s time, most everyday prisms were not up to the task, but there is no reason to think the Newton didn’t hunt around until he found two good enough pyramids of glass to make it work.
Lavoisier, by the way, considered light and heat to be elements. Before Joule and Mendeleev, this was not so unreasonable; they, like the chemical elements, seemed to be nondecomposable contributors to reactions (except that the two are quite obviously interconvertible). He even tried to give heat a systematic name: caloric
I’ll just have to go and read Against Method until I feel better.
I’ll just have to go and read Against Method until I feel better.
That apparently standard translation of the title suggests that Feyerabend is a hippie. The name of the book is Wider den Methodenzwang. It’s about OCD in science.
One thinks of Leibniz with his characteristica universalis
TIL Leibniz -> Trendelenburg (lingua characterica universalis) -> Frege: Begriffschrift !
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There is no logical relation between sign and intuition, but science has provided the opportunity to “bring the composition of the signs into immediate contact with contents of the concept” (Trendelenburg 1857, 3). The composition of the sign presents the characteristic marks distinguished and comprehended in the concept (ibid.). Trendelenburg called such a script “Begriffsschrift” … Trendelenburg’s paper on Leibniz’s program of a general characteristic became a point of reference for logical pioneers such as Gottlob Frege and Ernst Schröder (on their controversy cf. Peckhaus 1997, 287–296).
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Also see:
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Es ist zu vermuten, dass die Bezeichnung Begriffsschrift aus einer Abhandlung Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburgs[13] über Leibniz’ Entwurf dieser Universalsprache entlehnt ist, die Frege im Vorwort zitiert.[14] Im Übrigen war das Wort „Begriffsschrift“ um die Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert als Eindeutschung von „Ideographie“ allgemein gebräuchlich.[15]
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When I google Methodenzwang all I get is Feyerabend. (Google tells me “The central thesis of the book is that science should become an anarchic enterprise.”)
That apparently standard translation of the title suggests that Feyerabend is a hippie
Feyerabend pretty much was a hippie.
He was good friends with Imre Lakatos. From the preface to Against Method:
It was originally planned as a dialogue, with Lakatos contributing For Method, but that came to nothing because of Lakatos’ early death in 1974.
Feyerabend pretty much was a hippie.
True. Everybody was, 50 years ago. That all has vanished in a rustle of black wings, bellbottoms and clove cigarettes. But Feyerabend is still worth reading, so he can’t still be a hippie.
Why don’t you write them down?’
Feyerabend talking about that in a 1993 interview. I happened on this just now while looking for another interview of him by Safranski that I saw years ago.
That other interview.
Thanks, Stu!
I had not previously encountered Feyerabend’s rather fetching Dr Strangelove accent …
I hadn’t known about Newton’s divine-intervention solution to the Jupiter-Saturn “Great Inequality”; it’s briefly referenced here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace
Feyerabend’s argument at that point is actually very Lakatosian. They weren’t so different in the way they looked at these things. A great pity we never got that joint work from them.
Interesting point (if not an altogether convincing one) about empiricists trusting in a fundamentally benign and accessible God who has made a potentially human-comprehensible universe, as opposed to theory-driven types believing in a remote (if any) God, implying that we have no reason to think that human senses and cognition might be able to grasp fundamental realities at all. Michael Faraday would fit nicely into the scheme, though.
David Eddyshaw said:
Reminds me of Mendel’s statistically impossible results,
Careful, now! Though that story usefully complicates some myths about scientific logic, it’s not beyond being itself made complicated. I remember a geneticist colleague making some remarks there (which of course should be understood as me being backed into the angle of a corner and Enlightened on the question at length). Though I’m afraid I forget the precise details, it matters both what precisely Mendel thought he and his assistants were measuring, and that the story was an exhibit in Ronald Fisher’s campaign for statistical significance testing.
There’s another example of that particular problematisation, though, in Millikan’s oil-drop experiment. This experiment is famously fiddly (and was the bane of the lab careers of undergraduate physicists of my generation at least), and one can ask lots of useful questions about the processes by which Millikan selected observations for inclusion in, or exclusion from, the dataset, and whether the selection process counts as pochling or not. The story that there is a page of Millikan’s logbook with ‘publish this one!’ scribbled on it has been a source of solace to many a lab-pair who see five o’clock ticking up.
Separately,
and Newton’s impossible description of recombining the
spectrum produced by one prism with a second prism.
Again, I wouldn’t jump to conclusions here. It’s possibly characteristic of physics, in contrast to chemistry or the life sciences, that there exist some beautiful experiments, which jump up close to fundamental mechanisms, which can be massively more precise than they have any right to be.
Newton routinely measured time in ‘thirds’ of an hour — that being the third member of the sequence of divisions of the hour into 60 minutes (a ‘minute’ division), each of which was divided into 60 seconds, each of which divided into 60 thirds. That’s at heart a routine six-decimal place calculation.
Incidentally (and possibly more on-topic for this forum), I _think_ the place where I read something about this was a review of Chandrasekhar’s translation of the Principia (see note 30 for a mention, though I can’t check the context because my library seems not to currently subscribe to this one). Trying to re-find that, I found , which is an intriguing set of thoughts about the difficulties of translating the Principia, where a faithful translation would be less faithful than an interpretive one.
Thanks, NG. Interesting.
“Fraudulent”, in hindsight, significantly misrepresents the case. I think the individuals in question had a more flexible approach to the interaction between theory and supporting data than would (one hopes) pass muster nowadays, but it’s unfair and anhistorical to try to judge them by such criteria. A “rhetorical” element (as Feyerabend calls it in that English interview) to scientific publication was much more acceptable in those days. “This is how things really are, and by God, I mean to convince you of it!”
Charles Lyell was a lawyer by trade and education, and I’m told his big book of geology – famous quote: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” – reads like an argumentation in court.
a missing link, I guess.
@DE & others
For Newton and his prisms, and many other science-history puzzles I recommend:
“Leaps In The Dark – The Making of Scientific Reputations” by John Waller
The chapter on Newton goes in the direction set out by Brett above.
The name of the book is Wider den Methodenzwang.
Oops. The original English version of the book (1975) was called Against Method. I read, and knew of, only the 1976 German version, as Wider den Methodenzwang. Well, at least the translator understood the book well enough to fix the title. It follows from everything F says in that English interview.
David E: the interviewer (who is heard only about halfway through) has a peculiar English accent that sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. What do you think is his native language ?
“no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”
Irrelevant to the main point, but that’s Hutton – reputedly unreadable – not Lyell.
the interviewer (who is heard only about halfway through) has a peculiar English accent
Yes, it’s weird. I thought I saw a Czech-looking name in the credits, but I can’t find it now. Maybe I hallucinated it.(And the only Czech I know well to talk to doesn’t sound like that at all.)
I thought it sounded sort of approximately Italian, especially in some of the stress patterns, although not quite like any Italian person I actually know.
This website suggests the interviewers were Renato Parascandolo and Vittorio Hösle
Jen: yeah, I also had an impression of Italian, but the way this clearly learnèd person speaks English is, on the whole, a disaster. He must have read more English than he has heard it spoken. Or maybe he just had a bad brain day.
Hösle was born in Milano, sez the Wipe, but I know he does normal academic German. No idea about his English. Years ago I heard a discussion between him and Groys (whose German hides behind a meter-thick Russian accent). I had absolutely no sympathy with the views expressed by Hösle, and internally wrote him off as a Vatican professor.
Luhmann’s English is quite good, as I recently heard. Jes’ sayin’.
@Jen:
Yes. That’s the same interview; so you must be right.
Vittorio Hösle
“The Boris Becker of philosophy”, says WP. Harsh …
“Hösle personally estimates that he, conservatively, can communicate in at least seventeen different languages.”
Evidently he goes for quantity over quality.
“He establishes his positive position largely through reflexive or transcendental reasoning—that is, reflections upon the necessary presuppositions of all reason and speech.”
What a Kant.
@Norman Gray: The Millikan experiment is much, much harder than Newton’s prisms. I don’t recall any group who did it at MIT (with an apparatus they certainly could not have built for themselves) that didn’t have at least one data point that was thrown out because it looked like it represented an oil drop with a fractional number of electrons. But perhaps that kind of irregulariry is to be expected in any experiment that relies heavily of frictional forces. Lack of precise information about the oil-air viscosity was the practical limiting factor governing Millikan’s experimental accuracy; and, thanks to Einstein and Nyquist, we know that any channel of dissipation is also a source of thermal noise.
More interesting, I think, than Mendel’s unrealistically precise 3:1 ratios is what data he chose never to publish. As to the former, I suspect the most likely explanation is that of Norman Weeden, that “unconscious bias, [either by Mendel himself or possibly an assistant] did influence the segregation values reported by Mendel.” When you are dividing peas into wrinkled versus round, or small versus large, there are edge cases that require judgement calls.
Mendel’s reported results showed that several pairs chosen from his list of pea traits were independent. However, if he did all twenty-one comparisons, he would have found that some pairs were actually not independent, since they involved genes on the same chromosome. Did he perform these comparisons and throw them out, because they were neither perfectly correlated nor uncorrelated? We will never know. Sadly, Mendel’s work in the last fifteen years of his life, after he became abbot, was not scientific. St. Thomas’s Abbey was mired in a dispute about taxes, as the newly divided Austro-Hungarian monarchy tried to shore up its finances. Hoping to start afresh, Mendel’s successor as abbot burned all Mendel’s personal papers.
Seperately: Lakatos seems to be the only really famous twentieth-century philosopher of science who truly understood how working scientists operate. (I have known, on the other hand, a number of other philosophers who also definitely understood science as an on-the-ground intellectual and social project, but they were sadly much less renowned.) Proofs and Refutations is a book seemingly universally esteemed by mathematicians (and for good reasons; I suppose it is difficult to earn a doctorate in math without at least once getting into a careful discussion of the precise meaning of the Euler characteristic).
Proofs and Refutations is wonderful; the Euler stuff is really just the MacGuffin, rather than the actual point of it all, and you don’t need to be a Proper Mathematician to appreciate the work. (I never got beyond A-Level maths myself.)
It’s also surprisingly funny.
Indeed.