the formation of new schools

Perhaps my favorite part of Biagioli’s Galileo book is his discussion of the creation of new schools or socioprofessional identities over time.

The background to this is his exciting overview of the controversy over buoyancy between Galileo and the Aristotelians. Part of this is just basic “science studies”… Today we see Galileo is the hero of reason and the Aristotelians of his time as hair-splitting pedants. But when the experiments are considered, the Aristotelians had some points that Galileo simply couldn’t answer very well. Faced with a deadlock in their debate, both Galileo and the Aristotelians resorted to other, “non-rational” strategies to bring the debate to a close.

The new twist Biagioli adds to this sort of history is his claim that simply ignoring or dismissing one’s opponents without argument can have a genuine positive value in the creation of a new school. By definition, any new school of thought that emerges will not yet have a fully-developed paradigm, with ready answers for every counter-objection. It will be filled with anomalies and dark spots. By comparison, reigning schools of thought will always be staffed by armies of defenders with much to lose if the status quo is overthrown. In short, “debate” is almost always a stacked deck favoring the ruling discourse of the moment. Biagioli sees a positive value in Galileo saying that the Aristotelians were unintelligible and not even worth answering, though this looks bad from the usual view of knowledge as formed through transparent rational argument.

This got me thinking… Why is everyone so quick to bemoan the analytic/continental divide in philosophy? What is so bad about having a discipline fragmented into competing subfields that view one another with scarcely veiled contempt? In ecology, that’s called biodiversity. But in intellectual life, it is somehow taken to be a lamentable crisis if there is no communication across the great divide.

Don’t get me wrong… I think that hunting expeditions to the other side of the divide are very useful. But I’m not really sure that it’s a good idea to eliminate all camps in philosophy and turn us into one giant happily communicating field. Sometimes it is necessary for a few philosophers to drop on an island somewhere, out of touch with the others, in order to form a new species of thinking.

The idea is credited, by Biagioli, to Paul Feyerabend… New theories would face a terrible risk of early mortality if they had to debate their merits against the entire world form the start, just as a baby should not be expected to fight against Olympic boxers. The baby might grow up to be an even better fighter than the boxers, but it needs to be protected from the frost of critique for a little while. (The baby metaphor is mine, not Feyerabend’s.)