The year 2024 marked the hundredth anniversary of Norwood Russell Hanson’s birth; coincidently, also the birth of Paul Feyerabend. What is less of a coincidence is that in philosophy of science’s collective memory, Hanson occupies a fixed, but not well distinguished, place of honor within the Hanson–Kuhn–Feyerabend trinity (yes, that Bermuda Triangle of positivism). History and theory occupied central roles in their respective analyses of scientific inquiry, as did physics and Gestalt psychology, which Kuhn likely borrowed from Hanson (in turn, reviewer of The Structure of Scientific Revolution’s manuscript). Further examination shows strong similarities, for example, that Feyerabend also came to argue polemically that the logic of justification interfered with creative discovery or progress; and that both he and Hanson developed their views, especially early on, in interaction with Wittgenstein’s less visible philosophical field of force, one that enabled and tracked both the origin and demise of logical positivism.
Today Hanson’s name survives mainly in rhetorical and pedagogical associations with the superficial postpositivist notions of theory-ladenness and a logic of discovery. His personal mark, like Feyerabend’s, lies in philosophy’s collective imagination as a matter of personal character and anecdotal color. In the postwar Oxford culture no longer defined by the divide between athletes and aesthetes, Hanson’s figure projected a new type of philosopher. His was an image of American, dynamical, and muscular masculinity defined by his physical traits and habits of trumpet-playing, boxing, and the more daring and ultimately fatal flying. He portrayed himself as an athletic Galileo, endowed with physical, intellectual, and moral forces and duties equally of persistence and resistance. But his chief legacy remains institutional: the field of history and philosophy of science.
The posthumous collection of most of his essays adds to these dimensions insightful richness, depth, scope, originality, and connecting structure. The first edition was published in 1971, only four years after Hanson’s death and as an immediate and visible extension of his surviving corpus. The distinguished editors were Hanson’s fellow Oxbridge educator and Wittgensteinian philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin and the historian of science Harry Woolf. The historical distance offered by the 2020 edition, I suggest, helps draw attention to Toulmin as a neglected character in the story and the history. While still firmly focused on physics, Toulmin’s early 1950s lectures on philosophy of science, familiar to Hanson, introduced an unorthodox, late-Wittgensteinian perspective on the practice of physics away from the Carnapian canon. Toulmin lectured with attention to language, modeling and varieties of representation, reasoning, and argument, also graphic; and on testing and discovery alike. More generally, attention to Toulmin offers a lens to observe the Oxbridge patterns, from Whewell to Wittgenstein and Wisdom, of Hanson’s own historical and philosophical discovery. Besides much philosophy, Wittgenstein, Wisdom, and Hanson shared an interest in aeronautics.
The new editor, Matthew D. Lund, is the author of the first book-length, wide-focus look at Hanson’s works, N. R. Hanson, Observation, Discovery, and Scientific Change (Humanity Books 2010). Why publish a new edition? In the opening essay Hanson writes, “[T]omorrow’s enquiries can transform yesterday’s scientific theories into semantical structures different from what today’s philosophers pronounce them to be. (Who now reads Mach for insight into contemporary Quantum Theory? Or even Schrödinger?)” (4) So, it is our turn to ask: Who now reads, and why now read Hanson for different historical or philosophical insights? More on that in the rest of the text.
In both editions, the essays are organized into six different sections: philosophy of science, history of science (both dominated by attention to physics), general philosophy, logic, religion, and theory of flight. While the different area headings show the scope and versatility of Hanson’s writings, the headings and the essays show rich patterns of intellectual interconnection, communication, observation, and discovery within and across the marked areas.
Besides a valuable new introduction more attuned to the richness of Hanson’s work and personality, the new edition includes two new texts. Its sole and sore weakness, which it shares with the first edition, is the absence of an index and a comprehensive list of detailed references for each reprinted text (most of which can be found in the new editor’s own book on Hanson).
In the new edition, the section on philosophy of science includes the text of a posthumously published short book, Observation and Explanation: A Guide to Philosophy of Science. Within the collection, it helps identify what Hanson considered key themes informing other writings accompanying it; it also highlights the diversity of audiences and purposes of his writings, in this case drawing attention to his educational vocation. The section on history of science reproduces an even lesser-known text on Galileo’s trial, in which Hanson’s rich and nuanced discussion uses the case study beyond his notorious methodological defense of history to draw philosophical lessons. Not unlike Feyerabend’s later Galileo (or Husserl, Cassirer, and Ortega’s even earlier one), Hanson’s figure of Galileo is the Enlightened maverick hero in times of cultural crisis. Galileo epitomizes also the intellectual and moral role and responsibility of the individual scientist and philosopher to stand for truth and face and fight institutional doctrine and dogma, as Hanson perceived it still in the late 1960s.
Other texts address in sophisticated analyses a broad range of interconnected topics: theoretical meaning, role of particle theory, testing contemporary cosmology, the pattern of reasoning from Newtonian mechanics in the discovery of new planets, stability and consistency proofs, mental events, identity criteria, psychological necessity, induction, logical inference and modality, logic of discovery, relevance of history of science to philosophy of science (the famously polemical disciplinary essay), religious agnosticism, and theory of flight. The essay on theoretical meaning and the lectures on flight theory notably integrate his personal aeronautical expertise and professional history and philosophy of science.
In a substantial opening essay on the picture theory (yes, of Wittgenstein…and Peirce too) of theory meaning, Hanson offers a structural account of representation that, aeronautically illustrated, covers theories and diagrams alike. The readers will be reminded of the more familiar views of one of his successors at Indiana University, Ron Giere. Hanson argues that theorizing is an activity of patterning that structures data and perceptions and searches for comprehension, namely, intelligibility in encompassing coherence and contact with reality. Theory-ladenness ensues.
Hanson notes in another essay that in particle physics, it is abstract mathematical formalism that provides intelligibility, but such formalism makes contact with physical reality only in the laboratory. Philosophy of science inherits from physics the task of forming a proper connecting conception of physical structure. But this is in the end no eliminative physicalism: “a theory of elementary particles should help us see how we and they belong to the same world” (46). In cosmology, he warns us, much conceptual perplexity derives from concern for totalities (limits) outside properly empirical physical domains. There, competing theories simply argue at semantic cross purposes from different concepts and inferences.
From that perspective, the treatment of universes and models, cosmology and cognition, share a Gestalt-like, comprehensive, world-making perspective based on constitutive inference structures or patterns of descriptions. Laws about them fall through the cracks of the positivistic—and Wittgensteinian—distinction between analytic tautology and synthetic generalization, automatically defeasible or absolutely indefeasible. From a Cantabrigian perspective, closer to the Kantian Whewell and Wittgenstein than to Kant, Hanson’s concern with inference and intelligibility of proper representation meets unavoidably the question of modality. On the theme, running through a number of the essays, Hanson identifies relative necessity (and aprioricity) at the source of intelligible description and scientific understanding; yet it is a different sort of necessity that he identifies, in alignment with Whewell and Herschel, as a contextual sort of psychological necessity. In imagination, denial of key propositions is consistent but unintelligible.
The discussion of the question of logic and modality, touched upon in the new introduction, spans a surprising number of papers on topics ranging from metaphysics to physics, with matters of reasoning and inference at their center. They include questions in science and religion, and questions of justification and discovery. It is regarding the latter that Hanson identifies the role of Peirce’s logic of retroduction, or abduction, as the logic also of discovery (Pierce’s writings inspire considerations of both perception and reasoning). Hanson can thereby place reason and intelligibility at the core of the scientific project of representing reality.
The elephant in the collection is the paper on the mutual reliance of history and philosophy of science. The recurring themes in other papers help bring out in this one Hanson’s special attention to normative and constitutive standards of reasoning and intelligibility between logical necessity and factual contingency, as well as his use of both history of science and philosophy.
His normative and constitutive insistence on the fundamental role of patterned, reasoned descriptions does restrict what separately history and philosophy of science can be without being rendered, respectively, either blind or empty. Patterns of representation necessitate disciplinary patterns of integration. The pattern of mutual reliance is by that standpoint unavoidable, its rejection unintelligible and undesirable. But by any narrow criterion, this transcendental preestablished harmony may well be considered a narrow view of each discipline and of the intelligibility of their mutual dependence, or the possible—not necessary—aims and values of their cooperation. It is a matter of the adopted aims and criteria of inquiry and disciplinarity. Hanson’s thesis and argument may be both too narrow and too broad.
Also, his argument doesn’t do justice to his own works and arguments, informed by history of philosophy as well. This raises a broader question of possible and desirable integrations, criteria of intelligibility, and alternative aims and criteria.
Questions about use and necessity of history extend to the historical status of this collection, and, more generally, of the scope of its relevance. Why read Hanson now? Is it about him or about the topics he explored and thesis he defended? Is this a question of time or history? Considerations of time and history may differ. Moritz Schlick (Reference Schlick1932) distinguished between history for historians and history for philosophers. One concerned historical explanation; the other, truth. It is a matter of choosing and identifying one’s ends and standards and knowing when and why disciplinary distinctions matter.
Historical narrative and argument—better or worse, one kind or another—may play, has played, and still plays an important part in how philosophical problems and concepts are presented, delineated, clarified, exemplified, motivated, and supported. Moreover, philosophical, like scientific, debate relies on dialectical recognition and assessment of preceding proposals without a set chronological limit. This is the question of time. The focus on what’s recent or contemporary is often a practical choice. But the scope is vague; and as the Argentinean writer César Aira (Reference Aira2016) has noted about contemporary art, the operative “contemporary” designation is often accepted as a rejection of the judgment and selection forces of history against a permanent present of proliferation and innovation.
The value of the engagement relies on critically identifying the similarity or the difference in the concepts and assumptions at work. This collection offers the reminder and the opportunity to engage Hanson’s contributions to the history and the philosophy of science for whatever project in either of those disciplines and, indirectly, the sciences too. It also provides a source of materials that can and will enrich the history of science and the history of the philosophy of science, and thereby the philosophy of science too.
