ONE of the most celebrated mathematical physicists, Pierre-Simon Laplace is
often remembered as the mathematician who showed that despite appearances, the
Solar System does conform to Newton’s theories. Together with distinguished
scholars Robert Fox and Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Charles Gillispie gives us a new
perspective, showing that Laplace did not merely vindicate Newton’s system, but
had a uniquely creative and independent mind. He even sometimes criticised
Newton: for example, he rejected Newton’s assumption that gravitation travelled
instantaneously, and calculated its speed.

Given that Laplace was responsible for the clearest statement of scientific
determinism—the so-called Laplacian demon, who could predict any future
state of the world using Newton’s laws, given precise initial conditions—I
was surprised to find little on this. But there are revelations for
mathematicians, including the history of the Laplace Transform up to its
classified use for waveguide design during the Second World War.

Laplace’s achievements include a theory of probability, the foundations of
statistical inference and the derivation of planetary orbits, shapes and
eccentricities. He was as adventurous in ideas as he was conservative in
politics. Asked to sign a bill for freedom of the press after the French
Revolution, Laplace declined. He always dedicated his work to the current
political authority.

He returned to probability later in life to show how it could be applied to
the assessment of the reliability of witnesses, and the statistical treatment of
meteorological data. With chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, Laplace contributed
to the success of the mathematical approach to physics. After his death, this
school disintegrated in the face of assaults by Fresnel’s work on the wave
theory of light and by Maxwell’s failed attempts to understand electricity and
magnetism in terms of a mechanical ether.

One of the authors, Grattan-Guinness, speaks at the Karl Popper Conference on
14 March.

He looks at the inextricable connection between sex, love and the subtle
embedded webs of interpersonal perceptions. Scruton asserts that romantic sex
emerges from each seeing the other through the other’s eyes, and in regarding
the other as unique and indispensable. Romance is sometimes seen as the preserve
of poets, but some scientists disagree. Various economists have tried to extend
their analysis beyond a financial context to interpersonal relations, including
romance—for example, the fascinating work of Gary Becker, Richard Posner
and Gordon Tullock. Scruton points out that if the value of each romance lies in
its uniqueness, then the economist’s presumption of the “sustainability of units
of a good” fails to apply. The same point might be made about patriotism or
loyalty to a friend.

Another major theme is the difference between human beings and the rest of
the animal kingdom. Music creates a rich and distinctive world that cannot be
understood by analogy to the phenomenology of visual perception: “this patch of
green here now”. Scruton explores the “how it seems” of music—the way in
which it creates the illusion of “space”, for example. He shows that there is a
world of difference between the nightingale’s song and Mozart’s Exultate
Jubilate.

This is a book with which a student of, or newcomer to, philosophy can have
pleasure, wrestling with its ideas and exploring and building their own.

Berlin, renowned, wide-ranging and much-loved intellectual, died last month.
He was born in Riga, Latvia, but his family moved to Russia, where at the age of
eight he witnessed the Bolshevik revolution. He came to England in 1921 and was
educated at St Paul’s School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Eventually he
became a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and
Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College.

So what is his legacy? Berlin revels in the power of abstract philosophical
ideas to shape history. He is poetic and cogent in his defence of the right to
free philosophical expression. But there is an important omission. Berlin was
admired for his breadth of knowledge, and his essays on Marxism, Romanticism and
Russian history are insightful, but surprisingly he completely overlooks a key
intellectual debate that shaped the history of Marxism, the debate on economic
calculation under socialism instigated by the Austrian economist Ludwig von
Mises in 1920.

The thinkers who elaborated this line of argument—the chemist Michael
Polanyi, Hayek, Paul Craig Roberts, David Ramsay Steele—are nowhere to be
seen, yet their arguments will do more to permanently undermine communism than a
thousand unexplained food shortages. After all, one of the points that Berlin is
making is that people need to interpret their experiences, such as shortages, in
terms of ideas for those experiences to make a difference to what they do and
therefore to history.

A YOUNG boy sits with 800 of his fellow school pupils in morning assembly. He
closes his eyes and the rest of his school disappears. He is gripped by the
thought that his only experience of the world is what presents itself to him in
the confines of his head. He feels trapped. Filled with terror, he runs
pale-faced out of the building. Such is the impact of real philosophical
problems.

Why is there anything at all? Can time itself have a beginning? Is there a
domain that is in principle beyond what we can know? Are there things we can
know, but cannot say, only show, such as beauty or love? Imagine growing up with
these problems, being frightened, perplexed and fascinated by them, but
nevertheless making them your own. This was the path that the curious boy, Bryan
Magee, is still walking. Confessions of a Philosopher is an engaging
account of philosophical problems as Magee encountered them.

Magee has been an MP, a critic of music and theatre and is widely known for
his TV series Men of Ideas. He is a fellow of Queen Mary College,
London, and fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He reckons people fall into three
categories in their response to life’s fundamental questions: the childlike
wonder of the philosopher; the flight into faith of the religious; and the
simple refusal to think about them characteristic of most people. The first
group realises that the questions, although apparently unanswerable, are
significant and that you can at least explore them. The second class realises
that there are no answers but acknowledges the questions are important, and
embraces faith as if ignorance were a licence to believe what you wish. The
third group simply fails to see the questions’ significance, crawling back into
the comfort of common sense.

Magee’s heroes are those philosophers who did not lose their childhood
wonder, but instead cultivated it and tried to answer the big questions. His
list includes Hume, Kant and Schopenhauer, and, this century, Heidegger, Popper,
Russell and Wittgenstein. The villains are the philosophers who have tried to
reduce philosophy to the linguistic analysis of questions without trying to
answer them: Austin, Ryle and Strawson.

Magee had the good fortune to have known two of this century’s greatest
philosophers, Popper and Russell. He says that Popper argued with an intensity
reminiscent of a blowtorch, thus betraying his own argument for liberal
tolerance. Popper realised that you cannot check how strong a position is if you
do not defend it with vigour. Magee remarks how excited Popper would be when he
arrived at his home, and how he would drag him straight into the white heat of
his current problem.

Magee is enthralled not only by Popper’s approach to ascertaining the truth
of knowledge, but also by Kant’s argument for the limitations to human knowledge
and understanding. Since our knowledge is limited to what we can possibly
experience, and our possible experience is limited by the structure of our
brains and sensory apparatus, our knowledge is limited by our physiology. We too
are trapped inside our heads.

But Magee does not explore the possibility that language, an example of
Popper’s World 3 objects (abstract products of the mind), has liberated us from
our physiology. The content of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a
denizen of World 3, is clearly not limited by our physiology. And the Internet
and artificial intelligence is set to extend the domain of World 3 beyond our
feeble frames. We’ll feel less claustrophobia than that small boy in
assembly.

For technologies that come to be exploited fully, this is part of a three-stage evolution: from toy to mirror or manipulator of reality; then as midwife of art – each stage including its predecessor. The PC is remarkable in that it has gone through all three stages in roughly 15 years, a rapidity of development that has made it appear inevitable.

However, the example of the Aztecs and the wheel, Levinson points out, refutes any historicist ideas about the “inevitable” evolution of computers. Instead, it should remind us that we are responsible for directing and shaping its development. I agree, but only so far: we may end up willingly sacrificing some control to the self-evolving computers and programs developed by Danny Hillis, Gerald Edelman and others.

So what have we been doing to exploit our new toy? Well, in May 1988 Gail Thomas, a businesswoman from Long Beach, California, made the journey to New York to receive her MA diploma and march in the New School for Social Research graduation procession. The trip and the procession were purely symbolic, for Thomas had completed the work for her MA entirely online. She is the first to have done so.

You’ll find her story in Learning Cyberspace. Books on the Internet crowd the bookshop shelves, but Levinson’s is a rare find. He not only explores the potential and the reality of online education, but also places it in a philosophical and historical context. To this task, he brings the experience of 10 years in online education plus 15 years as a philosopher and historian of technology.

Levinson is president of Connected Education, a company based in White Plains, New York, that offers academic courses entirely via online computer conferencing in cooperation with the New School for Social Research, the Polytechnic University of New York and other institutions. Since 1985, more than 1500 people from a list of 18 countries that includes Singapore, the Netherlands and Colombia, have taken Connected Education courses. None of the courses requires any physical meetings.

An online doctorate is under development by Connected Education with Bath College of Higher Education and several British universities. The potential market for online PhDs is likely to be staggering, because there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives do not fit in with a university schedule, and yet who yearn for a doctorate.

Levinson harks back to the invention of writing. Taking a bird’s eye view of history, he sees the underlying motive force of the extraordinary rapidity of media development and its culmination in the Internet is the emergence of abstract written language and its greater copyability. The alphabet with its 26 letters is far easier to copy than earlier pictographic systems and their idiographic and hieroglyphic offspring. The Chinese invented printing during the Sung Dynasty, but this could not lead to the mass production, transmission and manipulation of text because every idea had to have its own distinct iconic symbol. Some ideas, such as “idea”, could not be encoded. But the alphabet allowed moveable type and the construction of abstract messages, including messages about how to construct and transmit messages.

Writing was a liberating force, although even the ancient Greeks expressed contempt for its limitations. In The Phaedrus, Socrates complains: “I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting: for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence … But may we not imagine another kind of writing or speaking far better than this is, and having far greater power? … I am speaking of an intelligent writing which … can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to answer and when to be silent.”

In the development of hynertext and hypermedia, Levinson feels that we have found a partial answer to Socrates’s dream. In hypertext, the reader can click on a word in the text and have instant reference to other occurrences of the word, click again and be shown every place where the concept is explained. More sophisticated hypertext allows connections to other relevant ideas in other articles. Readers are free to establish their own connections between a word in a document and other data. Text is transformed from a simple linear fixed arrangement to a multifaceted entity that the reader can sculpt to his or her own interest.

But the closest approximation to the Socratic dream, Levinson says, is computer conferencing. Hypertext and hypermedia are preprogrammed and so necessarily lack “the attitude of life”. But the key to any computer conferencing network is that authors remain in contact with their words, making them responsive to questions in a way only a human mind can make possible. So online education through computer conferencing means that the student is no longer a mute recipient of printed text but an active consumer of text that has been shaped in response to questions and criticism.

These developments undermine old criticisms of literature such as Jacques Ellul’s classic denunciation of literature in Technological Society that it makes people more manipulatable by elites. The more recent view of Marxist philosopher Richard Ohman that literature is merely the unalterable propagandistic voice of an elite is oblivious to the open society of electronic publication on the Internet, where publication is inexpensive and the recipient of the literature can mould and publicly criticise its content.

An interesting philosophical problem that computer conferencing raises, but is only touched on by Levinson, is the possibility of having a computerised moderator. Could a computer be programmed not only to eliminate inapt expression but also inapt content? I think not, for theories, their problems and debate are not computable. Which human, let alone computer, would have thought that Axelrod’s work on the prisoner’s dilemma would have been relevant to Hamilton’s work on bacterial behaviour?

Roger Penrose, the Cambridge mathematician, points out that an understanding of even the natural numbers cannot be characterised computationally. This suggests that whether something is relevant to a problem is even less amenable to a definition in algorithms. Moreover, the logician Alonzo Church showed that the identification of counter-examples to a theory cannot be reduced to a computer routine.

But what we have is a rich resource: universal copyability will eventually enable anyone anywhere at any time to access any portion of the sum total of objective human knowledge. Enhanced copyability, of course, brings with it the danger of the enhanced copyability of error. But this is more than offset by benefits, such as greater safeguards to liberty: enhanced copyability makes a 1984-type Big Brother organisation almost impossible because a dissident document on a single PC can be transmitted to tens of millions of PCs throughout the world.

Levinson places these issues within the context of subjects, such as the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of space travel, that demonstrate how the electronic media are phenomena that have transcended earlier types of existence and, through their prodigious replicatory power, they are set to have a significant effect on the evolution of the world.

It is 60 years since the publication of the British philosopher Karl
Popper’s innovative gem, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, in which he
elaborated a new approach to the methodology of science. If you want to
promote the growth of scientific knowledge, Popper argued, you should adopt
the method of extravagant guess followed by unrestrained criticism in which
the guesses found to be false are cast from the body of science. Critical
rationalism is the generalisation of this method of conjecture and refutation
to all types of problems.

Despite Popper’s influence on many scientists and businessmen, academic
philosophy has largely ignored his breakthrough. The discipline is still,
in some respects, engaged in a futile exercise – though there are signs
that the tide is turning.

The dominant mode of appraisal in philosophy is to accept all and only
those positions that can be justified and reject all others. To anyone new
to the debate, justificationism must seem perfectly acceptable, but this
is only because we are weaned on justificationism in the West so that it
is part of the context in which we frame our ideas and arguments.

David Miller, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Warwick,
unleashes the most sustained and elegantly provocative defence of critical
rationalism available, and one that will become the focus for the continuing
debate. His book shakes us from our slumbering complacency and forces us
to look down at our presuppositions as alien objects, better to understand
them and see their defects.

What could be more rational than basing your acceptance of theories
and action on good reasons? From his refreshingly different starting position
– that good reasons are unobtainable, unnecessary and useless – Miller argues
that rationality is neither a collection of good reasons nor the capacity
to issue good reasons. Rationality, he says, has the fallible but feasible
and useful function of separately classifying true and false statements.

Miller shows that the belief in the existence of sufficient reasons
for statements (or their adoption) is a confusion of a derivation and a
proof, and that the justificationist’s demand for a sufficient reason (proof)
either initiates an infinite regress or begs the question.

Suppose I wish to prove that it will rain. If I make the derivation
‘If it is cloudy, it will rain; it is cloudy; therefore, it will rain’,
I have not proved (that is, established) that it will rain, since the truth
of the conclusion depends on the assumptions. A proof, however, depends
on no assumptions.

The justificationist is obliged then to derive the assumptions that
it is cloudy etc from other assumptions, and then the assumptions of this
derivation from other assumptions and so on, for ever. This is infinite
regress. Begging the question comes in because the conclusion (that it will
rain) is assumed all along, and might just as well have been simply asserted
at the beginning.

I am pleased to say that Miller clears away any smudging of the logical
asymmetry between falsification and verification. Popper would say that
whereas one observation of a red apple can refute the theory that all apples
are green, no number of green apples can prove the theory. Critical rationalism
depends on the possibility of our being able to refute conjectures, without
any whiff of justification emanating from the procedure. But is not refutation
just proof inverted?

Newton’s theory has implications about the movements of planets that
turned out to be false. Must critical rationalism say that the falsifying
observation reports were good reason for rejecting Newton’s theory? No –
critical rationalism says that the false implications were enough to classify
Newton’s theory as false. Not only is the logical asymmetry between verification
and falsification intact, but also whereas a chain of justifications is
an endless repetition of begging the same question, a chain of critical
debate can lead to interesting new ideas and problems.

Consider the following imaginary critical debate. You propose that coronary
heart disease is caused by increased consumption of foods high in cholesterol.
I criticise this by pointing to an observed low correlation between intake
of cholesterol and coronary heart disease but a high correlation between
consumption of sucrose and heart disease.

You say this cannot be true because of something we both agree on that
heart disease is correlated with high levels of blood cholesterol. I this
rejoinder by pointing out that cholesterol is broken down by the stomach,
while sucrose is broken down to glucose and fructose, and the fructose makes
acetate which in turn helps to make cholesterol. Here we have reached an
issue – sucrose metabolism – different from our starting point in a way
that neither begs the question nor initiates an infinite regress.

Those who do not read Miller’s book will find it hard to keep up with
the debate; those who do will find many stimulating pathways opened up for
discussion.

Ray Percival is organiser and chairman of the annual conference on the
philosophy of Karl Popper and associate editor of the Popper Newsletter.

Michael Haar, professor of contemporary philosophy at the University
of Paris, struggles in The Song of the Earth with the ancient problem of
being. Metaphysics is traditionally divided into epistemology (what and
how we know) and ontology (what sort of beings there are). Following Martin
Heidegger and Georg Hegel, Haar regards ontology as more important and defines
truth as the revelation of being. Applying this theory of truth to art,
Haar maintains that a work of art reveals aspects of the Earth that would
otherwise remain hidden, and he draws many fine examples from the poetry
of Friedrich Holderlin to illustrate this.

In Britain, Heidegger is often referred to as a horrible example of
how senseless metaphysics can become. Rudolf Carnap (one of the founders
of logical positivism) used to quote from Heidegger to illustrate this:
‘Nihilation is neither an annihilation of what-is, nor does it spring from
negation . . . nothing annihilates itself.’ To the untutored it must
seem that something has gone very wrong here. Heidegger, it has been said,
was trying to break out of stock categories, but if one feels that one understands
the text one also wonders whether, like the Rorschach ink-blot test, the
meaning comes from oneself rather than from the text. Haar’s book is sometimes
a recapitulation of this experience, but some things are clear enough.

A pervasive assumption in the book is that the Earth is somehow a place
that we humans could not do without, that we could never be at home anywhere
else in the Universe, but technology erects a barrier between us and the
Earth. The value of art is that it helps to connect us with the Earth by
making it manifest. This reveals the unfortunate reactionary and parochial
attitude behind this book.

Haar supports the natural, but he fails to see that the drives behind
technology – people’s curiosity, exploration and desire to control – could
not be more natural. They are, after all, part of our evolutionary heritage.
As Konrad Lorenz, the famous ethologist, shows in Behind the Mirror, these
characteristics become increasingly evident as we look along the phylogenetic
series leading to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Another aspect of this antitechnology stance is Haar’s assertion that
technology threatens the Earth because ‘When the world is reduced to a network
of interchangeable connections, there are truly no longer any subjects who
face objects, but only gigantic circulations of energy, products, information
and consumption.’ This is the problem of alienation. What all writers on
alienation since Marx have taken for granted was that alienation was both
bad and avoidable.

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel prizewinning economist, discusses the emergence
of the extended society of worldwide markets in his book Fatal Conceit.
He predicts that there will always be a tension between our instinctive
need for the closeness and familiarity of the tribal-like grouping, in
which each person knows every other individual and cooperates out of altruistic
concern, and the needs of the worldwide system of cooperation between millions
of individuals who neither know each other nor could know each other. Furthermore,
in Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth, William Bartley points out that
the alienation of our products – the fact that we cannot fully predict or
control what will happen to them once we have made them – is unavoidable.

The potential of any theoretically interpretable product, whether a
theory or an invention, is literally infinite and therefore cannot be completely
surveyed by the producer. Who could have seen all the developments predicated
on Einstein’s theory or the wheel? Alienation is a universal phenomenon,
not just of the so-called epoch of capitalism.

This is arguably a far more profound and informative analysis of truth
than the Heideggerian idea that truth is simply the self-disclosure of being.
One might at least think it relevant to Haar’s project. The fact is, much
truth is not only manifest, but unfathomable. But the same applies to works
of art. Paintings, sculpture, music and poems have meaning for us because
of a tradition of interpretations within which a person makes his or her
own limited and different interpretation. A composer may be pleasantly
astonished by an unforeseeable variation in the performance of his score,
for example, variations of tempo or instruments.

Ray Percival is organiser and chairman of the Annual Conference on the
Philosophy of Sir Karl Popper.