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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
“What I wish to make clear … is … that from all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics.” Thus the founder of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schroedinger, expounds in a recent book “the obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for … events” which occur in a living organism.
1. Erwin Schroedinger, What Is Life? (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1945), p. 76 and p. 2.
2. Diogène (French edition), No. 11, p. 4 of cover.
3. Pierre Vendryès, De la probabilité en histoire. L'exemple de l'expédition d'Egypte (Paris, Albin Michel, 1952), p. 9.
4. J. Fourastié, Note sur la philosophie des sciences (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).
5. Pierre Vendryès, Vie et Probabilité (Paris, Albin Michel, 1942).
6. Pierre Auger, L'Homme microscopique (Paris, Flammarion, 1952).
7. Vendryès, Vie et Probabilité, p. 20. In the author's terminology, "autokinetic" thus means "having its own movement.'
8. A variable is random when its values depend on chance: the mathematical theory of random variables is designated by the name "Calculus of Probabilities."
Vendryès applies the name "counter-random function" to a function which is contrary to chance. A counter-random effect thus tends to make non-random a variable which, without that effect, would be random.
To have counter-random effects, a function must necessarily have a random intensity, since this intensity must at every instant counterbalance chance.
9. Vendryès, Vie et Probabilité, p. 352.
10. If the first of these books seems to have disappointed no reader, the second, even in the opinion of men favorable to the author's ideas, opens but a skeptical and therefore sterile con ception of history. It may be that Pierre Vendryès will reconsider this part of his work. In any case, this last book is cited here only in a few points of detail.
11. Pierre Auger presents his entire thought as a hypothesis of rational character; the sub title "Essai de Monadologie" further underscores the abstract atmosphere of the book.
12. Pierre Auger's thought may be supported here by that of Erwin Schroedinger who sees in "the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance" the point of resemblance "between a clockwork and an organism." (What Is Life? p. 85.)
13. Stimulating as these views may be, we will not explore them further here, since the present article is limited to the economic and social sciences. Therefore we shall be content to enumerate those aspects of Pierre Auger's hypothesis that concern our field. The reader need remember only that Pierre Auger's thought, like that of Pierre Vendryès, covers a considerably wider field than appears here.
14. This will be comprehensible only to those who have read Pierre Auger and especially the chapter "Homo Sapiens." We shall speak of it here only incidentally. Besides, unless we are mistaken, Auger does not write that ideas are "incomplete acts"; the hypothesis is ours.
15. It should be quite clear to every reader, whatever his national and educational back ground may be, that I mean by this the type of reasoning of classical mathematics, such as is employed in classical geometry, differential and integral calculus, rational mechanics, macro-physics, etc. May I point out that Pierre Vendryès uses on this point a different terminology, which I find ambiguous, which has certainly been prejudicial to a wider diffusion of his thought, and which may trouble the reader: he calls "rational" that which I here call "de terminist." Thus Vendryès mistakenly restricts the meaning of the word "rational," since in present-day language the calculus of probabilities is no less "rational" than Euclidean geome try. To me as to the average Frenchman the word rationnel, like the word raisonnement, is applicable to every process of thought that is capable of serving as a support for knowledge.
16. In France, for example, the calculus of probabilities figures neither in the programs of elementary mathematics nor in those of specialized mathematics. A twenty-year-old student can have attended 1,000 hours of mathematics courses without having heard probability men tioned.
17. Vendryès, Vie et Probabilité, p. 333.
18. Cf. Vendryès, De la Probabilité en Histoire, p. 297.
19. As, for example, in the interpretation of the experiment on tadpoles, De la Probabilité en Histoire, pp. 278 ff.
20. J. Fourastié, "Predicting Economic Changes in Our Time," Diogenes, No. 5.
21. Communication to the Statistical Society of Paris: Bulletin de la Société de Statistique de Paris, October, 1954.
22. Cf. Jean Fourastié, Le Grand Espoir du XXe Siècle (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), Chapters II and VI.
23. Cf. especially André Varagnac, Civilisation traditionelle et genre de vie (Paris, Albin Michel, 1948), which shows in a striking way how heavily the most ancient traditions still weigh upon social life, even in a relatively advanced country like France.
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