DOUBLE
REFRACTION
Looking twice at the history of science

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Saving the symmetry principle, II: why distinctions matter

The flurry of tweets that followed my last post made it clear that there are quite a few interpretations of the sentence “people believe things just because they are true.” One question that came up was whether or not the distinction between truth and evidence is any use in understanding that sentence. I think it is. But even if it is not, I want to make the broader point that esoteric-seeming distinctions can make a big difference to the success of our interactions with the general public. Expand post.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Saving the symmetry principle, I: two fallacies

Vanessa Heggie has posted a clear, visible summary of what she rightly calls a “core principle” for historians of science, namely the “symmetry principle.” So this is a great opportunity for me to explain why I disagree with much that my fellow historians of science have written on this topic. Behind the symmetry principle there is an insight that is true, important and worth keeping. But we need to save this insight from the ideas that are often associated with it, many of which I think we should reject. Expand post.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

13 things Gopnik got right about Galileo

Since you are reading this, you have probably read Adam Gopnik's recent essay-review about Galileo Galilei in The New Yorker. You might also have seen some reactions from unimpressed historians, one of whom calls the article “extremely pernicious.” I think that some of Gopnik's errors have been exaggerated, and that most of his felicities have gone unnoticed. The moral is that us historians should be as alert to what popular writers get right as we are to what they get wrong. After all, we can hardly criticise Gopnik for imbalance in his treatment of Galileo if we are imbalanced in our treatment of Gopnik. Expand post.