9 - The mechanistic legacy: Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives

Summary

Mechanistic science is concerned above all with order. Despite changing conceptions of the domain and scope of scientific investigation, one constant for scientists throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was their common ambition to articulate the laws (preferably expressed as mathematical equations) behind various material phenomena. A corollary assumption – perhaps the most distinctively nineteenth-century contribution to the mechanistic tradition – is the belief that all phenomena possess such regularities. The “matter, motion, and laws” approach which allowed Newton to explain the movements of celestial bodies led nineteenth-century scientists to insights about atomic structure, energy transference, and speciation, among other things; it continues to produce spectacular results today (in microchip technology, for instance) even though current views on the structure of matter and the nature of force diverge considerably from those held in Newton's day. In a 1980 lecture on the future of physics, Stephen Hawking proclaimed: “We already know the physical laws that govern everything we experience in everyday life.” Implicit in Hawking's confident assertion is a cognitive ploy central to the mechanistic tradition: the gesture of looking beneath or beyond sensory experience for patterns to organize these experiences. This generalizing or reductionist element in modern science has long been singled out for criticism. Alfred North Whitehead called it the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” a tendency to confuse scientific abstractions with reality as it is seen and felt.