What Happened? Are We Asking or Telling?
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | What Happened? Are We Asking or Telling? |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Marvin Eli Kirsh |
| Keywords | scientific cultural social political economic evolution, abstraction, representation of nature, marxism, capitolism, relativity, model of volume, aceticism, religion and science, space and volume |
| Published | 2009 |
| No. of pages | 15 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
A conceptual parallel is created between studies in anthropology and natural science. A space occupied by "the conceptualization" is argued to not only parallel symbolically the scientifically conceived value of volume as space, but to have an equal meaning- the spaces of the conceptual ordering of nature as manifestations of energy are held to be paralleling manifestations of the same energies that mold the environment. A growing historical asceticism attributed to the individual in struggles with nature and himself becomes destructive universally as the consequence of scientific activities that are focused from raw curiosities that are distant from real symbolic meaning.
Overview
This is a philosophical and anthropological essay rather than a physics paper, written by an anthropologist at California State University Los Angeles. Its subject is the act of scientific description itself: the paper asks whether, when the physicist reports "what is", he is asking a question of nature or telling nature what it must be. Kirsh's title carries that double sense deliberately — "What's happening", he writes in the conclusion, "is more of a self willed acceleration to what happened."
The claim is that modern physical science has quietly converted its measuring instruments into products of its own abstractions, so that the abstraction now certifies the ruler rather than the ruler the abstraction. Kirsh's example is the definition of the metre in terms of a fixed speed of light, as recorded in the NIST edition of The International System of Units (Taylor and Thompson, 2008). The concept of relative distance, he grants, "is not an insignificant evolution", but he holds that it is misapplied when the "tangible footing" of the original ruler is "supplanted by the abstractions and hence mental processes as a new ruler ... to measure the universe". Where the mainstream reads the redefinition as a gain in precision, Kirsh reads it as a circularity with cultural consequences: an inquiry that began as "a wish to understand" has produced a body of theory in which the wishing agent has no place, its inclusion "circumstantially shrugged for future discovery".
The argument
Anthropology and natural science as parallel practices
Kirsh opens from the anthropologist's characteristic anxiety — "what prints his own hands might leave on his subject of study". He argues that the natural sciences, which believe themselves exempt from that anxiety, are not. Both disciplines divide their material into universals and symbols; both are practised through a discipline of self-exclusion. His central structural claim is that "the practice of science entails the practice of an asceticism in the name of objectivity that is identical to the one that operates in capitalism" — objectivity being achieved by excluding "the needs and individual specific symbols of the researcher".
Marx as the worked example
The long opening case is Karl Marx, read through The Marx-Engels Reader (Tucker, 1978). Kirsh's interest is not in Marxist economics but in Marx as a specimen of the same move: a writer who sealed his descriptions with historical example so as to make them "as round and comprehendible in truth as one might impose upon the elements of descriptions of nature". The result, on Kirsh's reading, was that "men came to understand themselves as agents naturally licensed to employ impulse to effect change". He then observes that Western and communist societies did not in fact differ significantly "with respect to the free willed application of impulse to elements of nature" — the difference being largely a function of "the existing elemental conditions of nature peculiar to specific geographical regions". Citing Durkheim (1997), he denies that any homeostatic "balance" is guaranteed in social evolution; there is only "a disappointing 'being as it is'".
The abstracted ruler
The methodological core is short. Science, Kirsh writes, proceeds "as if armed with a ruler and an electrically powered flashlight", discerning structure and function through lines of cause and effect. Having amassed its abstractions, it has acquired "sufficient confidence to redefine the ruler it initially set off with in terms of the abstracted theory that proceeded from it". He notes, against the tendency to treat these as directly given, that "one cannot weigh a proton, a photon, hardly contemplate a mass but as weight, light but in contrast to its absence". The absolute vacuum, darkness, emptiness — these "might only be related to be strictly beyond the senses". He offers a psychological gloss that is the paper's most exposed claim: "the current mathematical study of relativity reduces to a study of identity-less-ness that might in common psychology reduce to the study of fear of not having an identity".
The abstract's key equation of "conceptualization" with "volume" is developed here. Mathematical volumes rendered as "squares and cube figures with coordinates on graphing paper" are not, for Kirsh, neutral containers: if concepts emerge in synchrony with the physical volumes of the elements, then volumes represented to the psyche are also represented from within it. The concept itself then appears as "an entity of space ... an unwitnessible difference between witnessible or symbolically conceived witnessible volumes". His complaint is one of double counting: the environment "has been ordered incorrectly, multiplied in an unsorted manner many fold" to include multiple volumes of objects that, properly sorted with respect to the self, are present only once.
Michelson–Morley and the witness pair
Kirsh's one direct engagement with an experiment is the Michelson–Morley experiment (he cites both the 1886 and 1887 papers). His point is not about the null result. It is that "a meaning for results must involve the witness pair man and light", and that the relation man–light cannot simply be extended to dog–light or grass–light, since "its metabolism, the tissues and surfaces, the entities involved are different in each set". If light is the funding energy of living volumes, then the volume light occupies might bear "a lifetime value in relation to the life time" of the perceiving organism — a ratio rather than an absolute. "Yet the physics of light is lended an entirely different conceptual space."
Conclusion: symbolism and the older societies
Drawing on Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940), Kirsh contrasts modern abstraction with societies whose symbolisms "never become redefined by abstractions to cause and effect". Modern man, he suggests, is equally engaged in living out an inherited impulse, but has filled the universe with "a null emptiness symbolized from his own fears of non-being" where older orders filled it with animate being. Both belief and science become victims "in the absence of real knowledge or sound questioning of their content and origins".
Assessment
What is genuinely distinctive here is the target. Most critical writing on relativity in this literature attacks the physics; Kirsh attacks the epistemic posture, and does so from outside physics, with anthropological training as his leverage. The observation on which he builds — that the speed of light has become a defined constant, so that the metre is now derived from a theory the metre was once used to test — is factually correct and is exactly the sort of reflexivity a working physicist rarely has occasion to notice. The "witness pair" point about Michelson–Morley is likewise a real philosophical question about what an experimental result means as opposed to what it measures, and the parallel he draws between scientific objectivity and ascetic self-denial is a recognisable and defensible thesis in the sociology of knowledge.
The difficulties are serious. The first is that the essay's central identification — conceptual space with physical volume, "an equal meaning" — is asserted, never argued. Nothing in the text establishes why the symbolic space a concept occupies should be the same kind of thing as a cubic metre rather than merely analogous to one, and without that step the paper's structural claim about "multiplied" volumes has no purchase. The second is that the psychological readings are diagnoses rather than findings: that relativity's mathematics "reduces to" a fear of non-being is offered without evidence of any kind, and would be equally assertable about any abstract formalism. The third is the prose. Sentences routinely run past a hundred words with unresolved subordinate clauses, and key terms — "impulse", "proximity", "emergence", "null" — shift sense between paragraphs without definition. This is not a stylistic quibble: an argument whose conclusions depend on the identity of two senses of "space" is precisely the argument that cannot afford ambiguous vocabulary.
Finally, the metrological complaint is weaker than it looks. The redefinition of the metre is not circular in the way the paper implies: it fixes a unit conversion, and the empirical content — the constancy and isotropy of c — remains independently testable by comparisons that do not presuppose it, as modern optical-cavity and Michelson–Morley successor experiments do. The paper does not engage with that reply, and by its own methodological standard it should. Read as a physics critique, then, the essay under-delivers; read as a cultural anthropology of the physicist's habits of mind — which is what its author is trained to write and what its Marx and Evans-Pritchard material actually supports — it is a more interesting and more defensible piece.