Science: Paradigmatic, Pre-Paradigmatic, and Proto-Paradigmatic
Friday 14 July 2023
In last week’s newsletter I expressed some of my discontent with the 2023 Big History conference (there were many technical problems), but, as always, the effort seems worthwhile in retrospect from what I learned from the experience. I took a lot of notes, and it was definitely one of those conferences during which the conversations outside the program were more important to me than the program itself. Now with the IBHA conference behind me, my next event is the ISCSC conference in Warsaw in September. This, however, is also related to the IBHA, as I am to be on a panel discussing the relationship between big history and the study of civilization.
This is timely, as I have been spending more and more time thinking about the methodological problems inherent in both history and civilization. I wrote in newsletter 243 that I have been working on a series of talks with the tentative title “Introduction to the Study of Civilization” (I also included an outline of this project). This is intended not to be an exposition of my own conception of civilization, but a review of what has been said to date, with methodological asides on efficacy of these approaches. As I have worked on this, the methodological sections have gotten longer as I see more problems that were not previously apparent to me.
Both the study of history and the study of civilization have been repeatedly declared to be in need of scientific rigor, and repeated efforts have been launched to make them answerable to this demand. All such declarations, and all such efforts, have come to grief. Never spectacularly, of course. The study of history and civilization never end with a bang, but always and only with a whimper. In his Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Peter Godfrey-Smith, discussing Kuhnian paradigms and normal science, described how he had attended several conferences on artificial life, all of which seemed hopeful, but all of which came to little:
“All of this was impressive work, and it pointed the way forward to a consolidation of what these imaginative individuals had done. But the consolidation never happened. At each conference I went to, the larger group of people involved all seemed to want to do things from scratch, in their own way. Each had his or her own way of setting up the issues. There was not nearly enough work that built on the promising beginnings of Ray and others. The field never made a transition into anything resembling normal science. And it has now ground to a halt.” (p. 85)
This has happened in both history and civilization; indeed, it has been going on for centuries, and even for millennia if we construe our conception of the task of scientific thought broadly. History has not ground to halt (one could make the argument that the study of civilization, on the contrary, has ground to a halt), but it also has made no progress in being more scientific. The various schools of thought to which I was exposed at the IBHA conference also have their own way of setting up the issues, and each wants to start from scratch, each in their own way. There is some limited attempt to build on the work of others (though not enough). Perhaps if it would be inaccurate to say that big history is pre-paradigmatic, it might be accurate to say that it is proto-paradigmatic.
The issue that I saw time and again was methodological. No one knows how to establish a new science. This is related to the point I have made several times that there is no science of science. Once a science is successfully established, with its paradigm securely in place and it normal science proceeding in an orderly way, all is well. But getting to that point is the real difficulty. Science can be perfectly scientific from its initial maturity forward, but the origins and foundation of a science are not scientific. What happens in the natural sciences, sciences as methodologically distinct as, say, physics and biology, is that a successful method of working is found, and the results are taken to justify the methods. Sciences that produce results may be plagued by ongoing paradoxes, and there may be disagreement among practitioners of one and the same science, but as long as the results keep coming, the work of science goes on, and no one is terribly worried about the paradoxes and the foundational controversies. There is a telling passage on the first page of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic that makes this point:
“…developments, however, have shown more and more clearly that in mathematics a mere moral conviction, supported by a mass of successful applications, is not good enough. Proof is now demanded of many things that formerly passed as self-evident. Again and again the limits to the validity of a proposition have been in this way established for the first time.”
It’s not just mathematics. What I described above in physics and biology and the natural sciences generally is the attitude that a mere moral conviction supported by a mass of successful applications is good enough. And as long as no one questions it, I suppose it is good enough. But in the foundations of a novel science, there is not yet a mass of successful applications. In the further specializations of the natural sciences, where we see most of the growth of science and of scientific knowledge, successful applications follow almost as a matter of course. But with history and civilization this is not the case.
What exactly is going on here? Partly it is that we have no idea what successful applications of history and the study of civilization look like, or what they should look like. There is the generally accepted notion, famously formulated by Santayana, that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and the equally familiar notion that we study ancient history in order to derive modern moral lessons that can guide us that we may avoid the disasters of past societies. This latter aspiration has been disappointed so frequently that we would be entirely justified to call it into question. Mostly in history we find special pleading, and in the application of past lessons to present events, we find special pleading on steroids. Here we are not even close to any kind of scientific understanding of history.
I think part of what is going on here is a matter of scale. The successful applications of a theory of history or a theory of civilization would have to be derived on a scale far larger than the life of an individual, and perhaps at a larger scale than the society to which the historian belongs, and then these applications would have to be applied at a similar scale beyond the life of the historian and the society to which he belongs. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the study of civilization: its lessons must be large — they must be lessons at the scale of civilization — and their applications equally large. Even if it is possible for a human being to derive lessons at the scale of history or civilization, it is unlikely that these lessons could be applied at the scale of history and civilization. Gibbon memorably said that, “whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”
I don’t think that this problem of scale is the only problem that has, to date, prevented history and the study of civilization from being scientific, but it is one of the factors that continues to militate against efforts to formulate a truly scientific conception. Another problem, again, brought home to me by the discussions of the IBHA conference, is that of quantification. How are history and civilization to be quantified? I have discussed this many times in many contexts. Let me reframe this problem: How do we know when a science is ready for quantification? How would we know when history is ready to be quantified? How would be know when the study of civilization is ready to be quantified?
I suggest this framing partly because I have come to the belief that premature quantification probably causes more harm than good. This is like the familiar idea from the philosophy of history that a society cannot change until it has matured to the point that the change in question is a live option for that people and their society. Forcing a revolution in a society not yet ready for revolutionary change guarantees that the revolution will not bring about a new society, but will only change the names and the faces in power. Thus when the Russian Revolutionaries killed the Tsar and his family, and attempted to set up a new political order, what they created was very much like the society that they sought to destroy. Instead of the Tsar’s secret police they had communist secret police, and Stalin came to be called the “Red Tsar.” This was a society that was not ready for revolutionary change, and so the change that they got from their revolution was simply the reconstitution of the familiar social order.
Trying to quantify history or the study of civilization before it is fully ready for quantification is much the same: we don’t get a genuine new science, but only old platitudes dressed up in a scientific guise, which is arguably worse than just accepting that the conceptual framework we are using to understand history is nowhere nearly ready for quantification. This is the problem that I see with cliodynamics. Their work is interesting and suggestive. Peter Turchin gave an excellent talk during the IBHA event, but, even when suggestive, I am discomfited by the presuppositions incorporated into the formalisms employed in cliodynamics. Now, I can admit without hesitation, that if cliodynamics produced results, as discussed above, then all the infelicities of their formalisms would be forgiven, if not entirely forgotten, and the existence of a cliodynamic theory of history would be hailed for is success and welcomed as a legitimate science. But cliodynamics faces the same challenge as any other theory of history: the scale problem described above. Again, I don’t think that the scale problem is the only problem, but it is part of the problem.
Cliodynamics is, at least, trying to quantify history and trying to derive results. For that they are to be admired, and perhaps even given a generous amount of rope to explore the domain that they are in the process of creating. At worst it does no harm; at best, they may make a breakthrough and then we will all have much to learn. I don’t want to sound like I have it in for the cliodynamicists. I genuinely admire their work, though the way they go about it is not the way I would go about formalizing the background assumptions and quantifying the framework. Others in the big history community have their own approaches to quantification, some of which show promise, and others of which leave me more than a little mystified. I can see myself picking up ideas from the former that I can make use of for my own purposes, while, for the latter, since I can’t make heads or tails out of it, I can’t poach any of the ideas.
I did have a good conversation with Andrey Korotayev, who is well known in big history circles. We talked about idea diffusion (which he called the rapid diffusion of innovations), and he gave me enough of his “world systems” approach to make me appreciate certain aspects of his argument, for which I can see a use in my own work, though I am not about to adopt this framework for myself. That is to say, I can see myself poaching ideas from the world systems approach without adopting this approach as my own.
One can argue that my attitude is part of the problem. I have my own way of setting things up, and I want to pursue my way rather than adopt the framework of cliodynamics, or Korotayev, or anyone else. Of course, I was at a big history conference because I like the ideas of big history and I draw from them in my own formulations. I could point out that this interchange of ideas might, at some time, lead to the emergence of a paradigm within which a scientific research program could take root and grow. But that is not yet about to happen. In other words, big history is not yet at the paradigm stage, and in its proto-paradigmatic stage it would be premature to attempt to enforce a given framework at the expense of other frameworks that have the possibility of contributing something of value.
