Andrew Reynolds : Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, and Evolution,Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, and Evolution by Andrew ReynoldsReview by: rev. by Oscar R. MartíIsis, Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 2003), pp. 787-788Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/386509 .

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BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 94 : 4 (2003) 787

pact we’ve had on the world,” and, even moreto the point, “We are suffering from innovation”(pp. 12, 13). How can that be? Issues of how tointegrate “hardware” innovations into societyought to be amenable to the MIT genius. Indeed,that was precisely what MIT claimed for the“Systems Approach”—a method of managingscientific and technological change that, al-though conceived elsewhere, was perfected andtouted with great fanfare at MIT. For an exam-ple, see the symposium proceedings edited byAgatha C. Hughes and Thomas Parke Hughes,Systems, Experts, and Computers (MIT, 2000).That book arose from a conference held on thecampus to celebrate the success of the SystemsApproach. Williams points out, all too well, thatthis approach has its limitations. Other symposiaheld on the MIT campus a few years before thatone project the feeling of a lost Golden Age,from about 1935 through 1975, when innova-tions coming from the institute were frequentand world changing, and when giants like HaroldEdgerton, Charles Stark Draper, Norbert Wiener,and others walked on the Earth. That age is gone,and MIT is suffering not only from the pace ofinnovation that it helped produce but also froma nostalgia for that time.

The second observation is related to the first.It is that one particular innovation—namely, thedevelopment of digital computing theory andtechniques—is swallowing up the whole ofmodern technology, and the institute with it.Williams uses the word “dissolve,” as if the Dig-ital Approach is so potent that it dissolves eventhe container it is to be carried in. The result isthat every engineering department at MIT nowseems to be an adjunct of the dreaded “IT” (adepressing term that unfortunately is now com-mon; Williams uses it on p. 61). To the extentthat this is taking place, a lot of credit should goto MIT’s Project Whirlwind and Project MAC,in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, for bringingit about. Harold Edgerton was legendary for sel-dom being seen without a wrench or solderingiron in his hand; today’s MIT professors and stu-dents, regardless of what department they are in,all stare at the same computer screens, runningthe same computer models of some corner of the“real” world they are supposed to be manipulat-ing. Clearly a lot has changed, and it is no won-der that the faculty are anxious.

Should those of us who are not connected withMIT be concerned with this state of affairs? Ithink so, and therefore I recommend this bookto readers who otherwise might have little to dowith MIT or even with engineering education.The issues mentioned here are found throughout

the industrialized world today, and other authorshave written at length about them and how toaddress them. But few have brought them to lifeas much as Williams, through whom we seethese issues at a personal level.

PAUL E. CERUZZI

� Sociology & Philosophy of Science

Andrew Reynolds. Peirce’s Scientific Meta-physics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, andEvolution. (Vanderbilt Library of American Phi-losophy.) xii�228 pp., bibl., index. Nashville,Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. $45(cloth).

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was a pro-lific American intellectual who, in spite of manypersonal setbacks, made important contributionsto geography, physics, mathematics, symboliclogic, the theory of signs, and the methodologyof science. He is best remembered as the fatherof that distinctly American philosophy, prag-matism. Pragmatism—or “pragmaticism,” asPeirce distinguished it from William James’slater version—is a methodology for clarifyingideas and for grounding a corpus of classicalphilosophical problems in experience: the mean-ing of a concept is the sum total of all the prac-tical consequences the object of that concept has.A precursor of logical positivism’s verifiabilitycriterion, the pragmatic maxim was also meantto rid science of ontological excesses and of su-perfluous, if not confusing, concepts and hy-potheses about the nature of things. Peirce is notas well remembered for his efforts to formulatea scientific metaphysics—metaphysics in theKantian sense of concepts and principles presup-posed by, but not derived from, experience; andscientific in that these concepts can be tested byexperience and can provide a systematic accountof cosmic change coherent with available sci-entific knowledge. Peirce’s metaphysics stemsfrom three fundamental commitments: synech-ism, or the methodological principle that no factsshould be exempt from investigation; tychism,or the hypothesis that the world is run by chance;and agapism, or the belief that asserts the realityof final causes. These doctrines not only falsifythe metaphysical assumptions of nineteenth-century agnosticism, necessitarianism, and me-chanicism but also suggest an answer to the rid-dle of the sphinx—how a lawful universe canemerge from its chaotic origins. Wedded to thepragmatic maxim, these doctrines result in a sci-entific metaphysics Peirce called evolutionarycosmology.

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788 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 94 : 4 (2003)

While Peirce’s pragmatism has been thor-oughly studied, his evolutionary cosmology hasbeen devalued as an aberrant speculation di-rected toward constructing a system of thoughtthat pragmaticism sought ever so carefully toprevent. Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics is an ef-fort to correct this view by examining the ideasthat motivated Peirce’s metaphysical speculationand showing that they were consequences of aprofound knowledge of the science of his day.Andrew Reynolds’s main thesis is that Peirce’sevolutionary cosmology was an attempt to givean adequate scientific account of the presence, inphysics, psychology (or psychics, as he calledit), physiology, and non-Darwinian evolution, ofirreversible processes such as birth, growth, con-duction of heat, lightning, and “substantially ev-erything that ordinary experience reveals”(p. 41)—processes that classical mechanics, as-suming reversibility as a rule, was unable to ex-plain adequately.

The book begins with a clear, lucid expositionof the influence on Peirce of the nineteenth-century developments of evolutionism and sta-tistics, as well as the influence of Kant, Hegel,and Schelling’s speculative Naturphilosophie. Itthen proceeds to a more detailed examination ofhow the development of a satisfactory unifiedaccount of irreversibility in terms of nineteenth-century mechanics, probability, and the theoryof large numbers shaped Peirce’s cosmology.The conclusion, a fine chapter, briefly points outsome of the implications of Peirce’s pragmati-cism and cosmology, put in the broader perspec-tive of the philosopher’s intention and of ourmodern positivistic prejudices.

Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics has many vir-tues: it is insightful, well written, and well ar-gued; the scholarship is excellent; the languageis clear and jargon free; and the evaluations aresound. The endnotes, bibliography, and indexare thorough without being overwhelming. Anintelligent reader would likely profit from thebook’s persuasive argumentation, clear exposi-tion, careful repetition, and chapter summaries.However, the book will best serve the Peircescholar and those readers well versed in the his-tory of nineteenth-century physical science, ofthe foundations of statistics, and of evolutionarytheory.

OSCAR R. MARTI

Edgar Zilsel. The Social Origins of Modern Sci-ence. Edited by Diederick Raven, WolfgangKrohn, and Robert S. Cohen. Foreword by Jo-seph Needham. (Boston Studies in the Philoso-phy of Science, 200.) lxii�267 pp., illus., apps.,

bibls., indexes. Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Aca-demic Publishers, 2000. $143, NLG 270, £89.

All involved deserve kudos for bringing out thiscollection of Edgar Zilsel’s essays on the historyand philosophy of science. The Social Origins ofModern Science belongs on the shelf of everyhistorian of science interested in the history ofthe field.

Zilsel (1891–1944) is famous for his thesisthat, coincident with the rise of capitalism, ex-perimental science emerged in Europe when thesocial barriers between scholars and “superiorcraftsmen” began to break down. His 1942 arti-cle on William Gilbert is best known for artic-ulating this thesis, but it alone hardly does justiceto the wide-ranging intellectual program thatdrove Zilsel.

As the editors recount in their substantial in-troduction, Zilsel sought to use historical re-search in the pursuit of philosophical analysis,and this approach, unfortunately, led to the re-jection of his Habilitationschrift at the Univer-sity of Vienna and foreclosed a university careerthat might have produced a more complete andaccessible body of work. As it was, Zilsel taughtat a normal school and at socialist adult educa-tion centers in Vienna. He fled Austria in 1939and ended up holding a string of part-time po-sitions in the United States. He committed sui-cide in 1944.

Zilsel never completed his two large projects,a historical one concerning the social roots ofmodern science and a philosophical one con-cerning physical and sociohistorical law. Thepresent collection presents fourteen essays onthese topics from the period 1939–1944, threeof which are published here for the first time.Outlines of two book projects are also includedas appendixes. A complete bibliography of workby and about Zilsel is a valuable complement.

Zilsel was a Marxist, and a generally Marxistperspective frames these writings. However, theutter lack of dogmatism and, for that matter, thesingle reference to Marx in these essays testifyto Zilsel’s remarkable intellectual sophistication.He took it as given that the root causes of his-torical change were socioeconomic; but ratherthan projecting ideology onto history, he soughta “scientific” method to discover rules and lawsgoverning sociocultural change. For Zilsel, thelaws of history were to be found only empiricallythrough historical research, but because historyis not an experimental science, the only avenueopen to him was comparative cultural studies.Thus the history of science outside of Europeprovided the touchstone in his quest after his-

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