SIMULTANEOUS SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY:

A HISTORIOGRAPHIC CRITIQUE

by

Bernard O. Williams

B.A., Kansas State University, 1970

CHAPTER TWO

GREAT MEN VS. ENVIRONMENT: TOWARD A FORMULATION

OF THE PSYCHO-SOCIAL MATRIX OF SCIENCE

But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin.^{1  -}- William James

The dichotomy between great men and historical inevitability found restatement in many forms toward the end of the nineteenth century. One of the more developed instances is found in the disagreement within the emerging discipline of psychology between William James and the followers of Herbert Spencer. This particular statement of the issue serves our interests because James turned to the creation of scientific knowledge for evidence in his case. This debate therefore provides an introduction into our attempt to overcome this dichotomy in a view of scientific knowledge.

For William James, ardent believer in the efficacy of the human Will, culture was the product of individual initiative, the decisions and example of individual flesh and blood men. He saw it as his task to defend this view against the environmental determinism of Herbert Spencer. As James characterized the view of Spencer and his followers, cultural change was independent of individual initiative, the product of the environment, the circumstances, the physical geography, the ancestral conditions, "the increasing experience of outer relation, . . . everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarks, the Joneses and the Smiths."² Through adherence to the psychological theory of Associationism, the Spencerians claimed that the causes and the objects of men's thoughts were one and the same. This view was unacceptable to William James because it made men into "mere offshoots and creatures of our environments," ³ and it was in the production of the abstract theories of science that James found one of his strongest arguments against this materialist associationism.

Rejecting the Spencerians' proposal that all mental processes were generated according to the rule: "that the degree of cohesion of our inner relations is proportionate to the degree of cohesion of the outer relations," James argued that rules of association applied only to man's lower mental processes, those which he shared with the brutes. For all man's higher mental processes., these simple rules of juxtaposition of perceptions did not apply:

Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the latter have been met, more egregiously break down than in the case of scientific conceptions. The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which it comes before us. Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis exclusively .... The reality exists as a plenum .... But we can neither experience nor think this plenum. What we experience, what comes before us, is a chaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each others;* what we think is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws.

The most persistent outer relations which science believes in are never matters of experience at all, but have to be disengaged from under experience by a process of elimination, that is by ignoring conditions which are always present.⁴

The theoretic and law-like postulates of science were hardly the result of an impression of experience upon the human mind, but were of a different order altogether. The laws of mechanics, chemistry, physics, indeed the very principle of uniformity of nature must be "sought under and in spite of the most rebellious appearances," and partook more of the conviction of religious faith that of "assent to a demonstration."⁵

Simple associative generation applied only to such empirical truths as "that heat melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of water and the like." While such associative truths must be admitted to form a large part of "human wisdom" and while "'scientific' truths have to harmonize with these truths, or be given up as useless," still, science did not arise in the mind in the passive associative way as did the simpler truths. In fact those experiences which prove a scientific theory have been for the most part artificial experiences produced in the laboratory "after the truth itself has been conjectured." "Instead of experiences engendering the 'inner relations,' the inner relations are what engendered the experiences here."⁶

James did not have an explanation for the manner in which the "truth itself" is "conjectured." While he assured his reader that the process by which a hypothesis arises is more like the setting of mortar than like the manipulation by which these physical aggregates came to be compounded," he had no suggestion as to the manner of this "free mental play" and thought of it as a process of "random irradiations and resettlements" of ideas, the nature of which remained "entirely obscure."⁷ This lack of any mechanism or model was only a minor problem in his opposition to the Spencerians however, for he had an excellent precedent. Over against the deterministic evolution of Spencer, James invoked the exalted name of Darwin. Arguing that Spencer's doctrine was actually a reversion to pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinking (and a reversion to metaphysics in the fact),⁸ James asserted that he need not posit a mechanism for the genesis of scientific hypothesis. These hypotheses were spontaneous variations, "'accidental' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of causation inaccessible to the present order of research."⁹ Just as Darwin had taken variations as given, in order to argue for natural selection, so also James posited "random images, fancies, accidental outbirths of spontaneous variation in the functional activity of the excessively unstable human brain, which the outer environment simply confirms or refutes, adopts or rejects, preserves or destroys, --selects, in short, just as it selects morphological and social variations due to molecular accidents of an analogous sort."¹⁰

By adopting a direct analogy to Darwinian natural selection for the process of change in scientific knowledge, William James was able to use what could be considered a shortcoming of the Darwinian theory to his own advantage. Just as Darwin's formulation restricted the environment to a role of choosing from the profusion of organisms whose genesis was obscured from view, so also James restricted the environment to a role of sorting out the appropriate ideas from the profusion of hypotheses which the mind of the scientist would produce:

To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically pointed out how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the number of these random motions and guesses which visit the investigators mind. To be fertile in hypotheses is the first requisite, and to be willing to throw them away the moment experience contradicts them is the next. The Baconian method of collating tables of instances may be a useful aid at certain times. But one might as well expect a chemists note-book to write down the name of the body analyzed, or a weather table to sum itself up into a prediction of probabilities, of its own accord, as to hope that the mere fact of mental confrontation with a certain series of facts will be sufficient to make any brain conceive their law. The conception of the law is a spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes out of one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain is such as to tip and upset [themselves] in just that particular direction. But the important thing to notice is that the good flashes and the bad flashes, the triumphant hypotheses and the absurd conceits, are on an exact equality in respect of their origin.¹¹

The strict analogy to Darwinian mechanism, spontaneous variation and selection only after the fact of variation, allowed James to reject Spencer's determinate role for the environment. The ideas must first be generated and only then selected by a comparison to nature, the environment in James' view was not responsible for the generation of the ideas. In this manner James defended the notion that culture is the product of the actions of great men.

As so often in the previous chapter, the question of the genesis of the change in scientific ideas is here again dominated by the dichotomy of determinism vs. individual action. This dichotomy has necessarily confused the question. By creating a false need to deprecate one aspect or the other it has obscured the reality that science is the product of individuals, but individuals who are engaged in a common enterprise. James' statement, "It flashes out of one brain, and no other," does not sufficiently describe scientific change, for often it is not "one brain" but two or three or even more which "tip and upset [themselves] in just that particular direction." The fact of multiple scientific discovery requires that we seriously modify the view of scientific change which was propounded by William James. As we have seen amply demonstrated, approaching the question from only one perspective is self-defeating.

Scientific change, and multiple discovery as a feature of it, is far too complex to be understood from a single viewpoint, and it is the purpose of this chapter to propose a synthesis of a number of different approaches. By drawing upon the work of four particular scholars, Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn, Arthur Koestler, and Edwin Boring, it is possible to cast their varied perspectives into a complementary light and thus remedy some of the shortcomings of each when taken separately.

Merton's work, drawing most directly of the four upon the phenomenon of multiple discovery, addresses the value structure of science and provides for a new definition of "Great man" which is compatible with the prevalence of shared discovery. Kuhn, most directly concerned with substantive change within science, provides a most useful insight in his notion of paradigm, with his emphasis upon the shared assumptions which underlie the content of a science. Koestler, most directly addressing the question left open by William James, directs us to the individual psychological act of discovery. Boring, taking creativity within the individuals engaged in science as a given, reminds us that social consent is the means by which knowledge is validated in science and that if an idea is to survive within the "psycho-social matrix" of science, it often requires an appropriate method of advertising, aside from the question of its correctness or "truth." By contrasting these four different approaches to the question we can begin to build up a more complete understanding of the ways in which science develops and the function of the individual within that development.

Robert Merton first proposed his explanation for the historic fact of frequent contests as to credit for particular scientific discoveries in a presidential address before the American Sociological Society.¹² Rejecting any suggestion that the large number of heated priority disputes found in the history of science could be accounted for by the egotism of individual scientists, Merton pointed to the fact that it was often not the principals in a contest but their friends or associates who prosecuted the disagreement, men who would not personally gain even if the dispute were decided in favor of their champion.¹³ The motivation to fight over priority came not from solely personal desires, but rather from a larger, institutional source, from what Merton identified as a very powerful social norm: the public recognition of originality.¹⁴

Merton had begun, several years before this discussion, to define what he called the ethos of science. Examining science as a social institution from a functionalist's perspective, Merton identified four values which he believed serve as the normative social structure that governs the behavior of scientists:

1. Universalism--The acceptance or rejection of claims entering the lists of science is not to depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist; his race, nationality, religion, class, and personal qualities are as such irrelevant.
   
   
2. Communism--The substantive findings of science are a product of social collaboration and are assigned to the community. Property rights in science are whittled down to a bare minimum by the rationale of the scientific ethic. The scientist's claim to "his" intellectual "property" is limited to that of recognition and esteem which, if the institution functions with a modicum of efficiency, is roughly commensurate with the significance of the increments brought to the common fund of knowledge.
   
   
3. Disinterestedness--A passion for knowledge, idle curiosity, altruistic concern with the benefit to humanity, and a host of other special motives have been attributed to the scientist. The quest for distinctive motives appears to have been misdirected. It is rather a distinctive pattern of institutional control of a wide range of motives which characterizes the behavior of scientists. The demand for disinterestedness has a firm basis in the public and testable character of science.
   
   
4. Organized skepticism--The temporary suspension of judgment and the detached scrutiny of beliefs in terms of empirical and logical criteria have periodically involved science in conflict with other institutions.... The scientific investigator does not preserve the cleavage between the sacred and the profane, between that which requires uncritical respect and that which can be objectively analyzed.¹⁵

Merton viewed these values as the social norms which served to guide the enterprise of science.¹⁶ Within these values, however, lay the potential for what he termed social disfunction. Knowledge is expanded under these values by original contributions, thus the value of communism, which denies any property right to the individual scientist other than the honor and esteem attached to his having increased the communal knowledge by his original contribution, serves to emphasize the question of priority. Merton finally came to propose that priority disputes were an indication of the potential within this communal value to disrupt the system. When the strong emphasis upon priority is added to the prevalence for more than one person to make a discovery at about the same time, disputes are a latent potential of the structure of science itself. The emphasis on originality on the institutional plane finds its counterpart on the psychological plane in the desire for recognition. "It is not necessary that individual scientists begin with a lust for fame; it is enough that science, with its abiding and often functional emphasis on originality and its assigning of large rewards for originality makes recognition of priority uppermost."¹⁷

Merton provided by this analysis an illumination of priority disputes, the explanation of which is predicated on a prevalence for multiple discovery. It was not long before he turned his attention to the multiple discoveries themselves and made the bold assertion that "all scientific discoveries are in principle multiples, including those that on the surface appear to be singletons."¹⁸ He turned for support of this view to the fact that not only is the actual occurrence of a multiple discovery common, but so also is the occurrence of "forestalled" discoveries, the abandonment of a line of research by a scientist who became aware that the goal toward which he was working had already been reached by another.¹⁹ In fact, sociological field work subsequent to this conjecture by Merton found that forestalled discoveries were far more common than were duplications.²⁰ Merton also noted that scientists have always been aware of the potential for multiples and have acted in anticipation of that likelihood with the many mechanisms which have been used during different historical periods to assure claims of priority.²¹

Merton also reported at this same time that an analysis of 264 incidents of multiple discovery from the seventeenth century to the twentieth indicated that the tendency for disputes over priority decreases as one approaches the present. Of the 36 multiples that Merton found before 1700, 92% were strenuously contested, while only 72% of those in the eighteenth century, 74% in the first half of the nineteenth century, 59% in the second half of the nineteenth century, and only 33% of those in the first half of the twentieth century led to priority disputes.²²

While Merton argued that all scientific discovery is multiple or potentially multiple, he also posited a sociological definition of genius which reconciled the long standing dichotomy between environmental determinism and the contributions of great men. Quite simply, the scientific genius is the man who will be involved in not one but many multiples. Thus, while from one view his contribution would have been produced even without him, from another view his greatness is confirmed by the number of individuals that it would take to replace him. Merton here provided the example of Lord Kelvin. After examining only 400 of the 661 scientific communications which Kelvin published during his life, he had already been found to have participated in 32 multiple discoveries:

These 32 multiples involved an aggregate of 30 other scientists, some like Stokes, Green, Helmholtz, Cavendish, Clausius, Poincare, Rayleigh, themselves men of undeniable genius, others, like Hankel, Pfaff, Homer, Lane, Varley and Lamé being men of talent., no doubt, but still not of the highest order. The great majority of these multiples of Kelvin were doublets, but some were triplets and a few, quadruplets. For the hypothesis that each of these discoveries was destined to find expression, even if the genius of Kelvin had not obtained, there is the best of traditional proof: each was in fact made by others. Yet Kelvin's stature as a scientist remains undiminished. For it required a considerable number of others to duplicate these thirty-two discoveries which Kelvin himself made.²³

By recognizing the fact that "the individual man of scientific genius is the functional equivalent of a considerable array of other scientists of varying degrees of talent," Merton proposed a means of resolving the false disjunction between "a heroic theory of science, that ascribes all basic advances to genius, and an environmental theory, that holds these geniuses to have been altogether dispensable, since if they had not lived, things would have turned out pretty much as they did."²⁴ After his analysis it is easier to see that the two poles of this dichotomy are not mutually exclusive, but only appear so when pushed to the extremes.

Just as he cautioned against the extreme view that multiple discoveries obviated the role of genius, Merton also cautioned against the view that holds all instances of a discovery but one to be superfluous. This view is based upon the fallacious assumption that "a discovery has only to be made in order for it to enter the public domain of science. But the history of science is checkered with cases that show this is not so. Often a new idea or a new empirical finding has been achieved and published, only to go unnoticed by others, until it is later uncovered or independently rediscovered and only then incorporated into the science." Thus multiple discoveries are seen to fill the social function within science not only of providing confirmation for a discovery but also of increasing "the likelihood that the discovery will be promptly incorporated into the current scientific knowledge and will so facilitate the further advancement of knowledge."²⁵

The central goal of Merton's work has been to identify in functionalist terms the social system of science which allows for the advancement of knowledge. His insights apply only obliquely to the substantive content of the sciences, concerned as they are with the ethical strictures of behavior, the reward system, and the function of communication and evaluation among scientists. In fact his view contains a component of positivism toward the product of the scientific endeavor. His earliest contributions to the sociology of science, notably his dissertation Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England²⁶ and his work with Pitirim Sorokin,²⁷ more directly approached the relations between the knowledge produced within science and the social structure, not only of science but also the larger culture. He drew back from this position, toward his later functionalism, as he began to criticize the past work that had been done in the sociology of knowledge. While he was quite free with his critique, not only of "Wissensoziologie," but also of Marxism, his positivistic attitude toward scientific knowledge is most evident in his criticism of the relativist consequences of the views of Durkheim and one of his own early teachers, Sorokin.²⁸

In light of this attitude, it is not surprising that Merton's purview takes multiple discovery as empirically established and builds from there. His interest and perspective do not call for delving into the genesis of multiples but only for "revealing" their "significance" and "describing" their "function." Thus his understanding of the cause of multiples remains quite general:

A great variety of evidence testifies, then, to the hypothesis that, once science has become institutionalized, and significant numbers are at work on scientific investigation, the same discoveries will be made independently more than once and that singletons can be conceived of as forestalled multiples.²⁹

And again:

Such occurrences suggest that discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate in man's cultural store and when the attention of an appreciable number of investigators becomes focused on a problem, by emerging social needs, by developments internal to the science, or by both.³⁰

If we are to explore the meaning of "developments internal to science" we must widen our perspective beyond that provided by Robert Merton.

When we turn to the work of Thomas Kuhn, the first instructive suggestion he can provide is that we should critically reconsider the very notion of discovery. In its usual connotation, and as we have seen it used time and again, discovery has been taken to be a unitary event, one which, like seeing something, happens to an individual at a specifiable time and place. Kuhn notes that this view is deeply embedded in the nature of the scientific community. As an example, the textbooks from which the prospective scientist learns his trade contain a particularly narrow version of Whig history, in which the accumulation of knowledge is eponymously depicted as the successive discoveries, by particular men, at particular times, of the natural phenomena which the student will learn to identify by these men's names. In contrast to this view, Kuhn depicts discovery as a complex development often extended both in space and time. In fact, he distinguishes between two different classes of discoveries.

The first class are those which can be more or less expected and in fact predicted, e.g., the discovery of additional elements to fill in the gaps in the periodic table, once that table had been established. It is this class of discovery which comes closest to meeting the usual picture of discoveries as additions or increments to the growing stockpile of scientific knowledge.³¹ These developments are the product of what Kuhn calls "normal" science, an endeavor which he characterizes as "puzzle-solving." In his view most of science is of this sort, working within a well defined tradition toward the solution to problems which have been equally well defined. In this analysis it is the function of "normal" science to identify these well defined puzzles and to set the means by which solutions to the puzzles are to be recognized.³²

The second class of discoveries are those which are not expected, and it is this class which Kuhn cautions does not fit the usual assumptions about discovery. He introduces the use of a special term to denote the special character of these discoveries: anomaly. There are actually two requisites for this type of discovery, the recognition that something has been discovered, and the identification of what it is that has been discovered. Anomaly marks the beginning of the recognition process and denotes the first appearance of the awareness that nature has failed to conform to expectation. Thus in Kuhn's conception, "normal" science will usually provide an acceptable puzzle solution; but occasionally will lead the investigator into a situation that fails to conform to expectation--the puzzle for some reason fails to work out. It is at this juncture that Kuhn sees the role of scientific genius coming into play. When faced with an anomaly, not every scientist has displayed the skill, wit, or insight to detect that this unexpected result may be consequential.³³

It is this class of unexpected discoveries, ones which begin with a recognition that nature has not conformed to the expectations which the scientist has derived from his previous training and experience, that Kuhn associates with scientific revolutions. His thesis on revolutions in science has been widely debated in the decade and a half since it first appeared; we need not reiterate much of it here. Suffice it to say that even his harshest critics would have to allow that the following is an adequate description of the reaction to discoveries which were not fully within current doctrine at their advent:

Though awareness of anomaly marks the beginning of a discovery, it marks only the beginning. What necessarily follows, if anything at all is to be discovered, is a more or less extended period during which the individual and often many members of his group struggle to make the anomaly lawlike. Invariably that period demands additional observation or experimentation as well as repeated cogitation. While it continues scientists repeatedly revise their expectations, usually their instrumental standards, and sometimes their most fundamental theories as well.... Often, when several individuals are involved, it is even impossible unequivocally to identify any one of them as the discoverer.³⁴

This class of discoveries, in contrast to merely being incremental additions to the accumulating knowledge of the science, "also react back upon what has previously been known, providing a new view of some previously familiar objects and simultaneously changing the way in which even some traditional parts of science are practiced."³⁵

Before drawing out the relationship of this distinction between "normal" and "anomalous" discovery to the genesis of multiple discovery, it is necessary to examine Kuhn's conception of the mechanism which governs the scientific enterprise. After the idea of "revolutions," Kuhn's second most hotly contested³⁶ (and most widely embraced) concept is that of Paradigm. In his controversial and influential work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he uses the notion of paradigm in two major senses. First, to denote the "entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community." Second, to denote "one sort of element in that constellation, the concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles of normal science."³⁷ He proposes, and wisely so, that the second of these senses be transferred to the term "exemplar." He also wants to substitute "disciplinary matrix" for the term in the first sense, but as it has been widely picked up and applied in this sense, paradigm will probably persist to denote the broad meaning.

Kuhn conceives paradigms as communicated to the initiates of a scientific community largely through their experience with concrete puzzle-solutions. Thus the scientist learns that which philosophers usually denote as "theory and the rules of its application" by experiencing exemplars. Kuhn believes that the philosophers (they have been his main critics) erroneously see this as a case of "learning to apply theory." In actuality, for the scientist the "theory and rules" are embedded gestaltically in the exemplars. Kuhn, in the postscript to his controversial work, is at some pains to point out that this sort of learning is not acquired by exclusively verbal means:

Rather it comes as one is given words together with concrete examples of how they function in use; nature and words are learned together. To borrow once more Michael Polyani's useful phrase, what results from this process is "tacit knowledge" which is learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it.³⁸

Kuhn is here preparing grounds on which to defend his view that a scientific revolution, the sort of reordering of the science which follows an "anomalous" discovery, involves a basic change in perspective, one which is analogous to a gestalt shift in perception. He is basing this argument upon the premise that the substantive content and practice of a science is not restricted to a set of sentences or to a body of rules combined with facts:

One of the fundamental techniques by which the members of a group, whether an entire culture or a specialists' sub-community within it, learn to see the same things when confronted with the same stimuli is by being shown examples of situations that their predecessors in the group have already learned to see as like each other and as different from other sorts of situations . . . .

. . . much neural processing takes place between the receipt of a stimulus and the awareness of a sensation. Among the few things that we know about it with assurance are: that very different stimuli can produce the same sensations; that the same stimulus can produce very different sensations; and, finally, that the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education. Individuals raised in different societies behave on some occasions as though they saw different things. If we were not tempted to identify stimuli one-to-one with sensations, we might recognize that they actually do so.^38a

In Kuhn's view of scientific change, a particular paradigm defines the world in which the scientific practitioner plies his art. In this sense paradigm possesses much the same connotation as Weltanschauung. "Normal" science is a process of deriving puzzles from this world view, solving them successfully and thus extending its domain. Kuhn uses the phrase "articulating the paradigm," to refer to this elaboration and expansion. This "articulation" continues until sufficient anomaly is encountered to induce a crisis. The practitioners are then forced to give up the old and insufficient paradigm and adopt a new one which can provide sufficient explanation for the anomaly which had been encountered, and a new phase of "normal" science proceeds. It is this shift to a new world view which Kuhn argues is analogous to a perceptual gestalt shift.³⁹

For "normal" science, with its domain of identifiable puzzles and group of practitioners within its boundaries, it would appear that we can expect some individuals to pick the same puzzles to pursue. Thus we should find a certain amount of duplication and subsequent multiple discovery. The theoretical calculations leading to the discovery of Neptune, which we shall consider in the next chapter, are of this order.

For revolutionary science, paradigm shifts, or anomalous discoveries, we must take a closer analysis. Here we find that multiple discoveries appear largely from our difficulty with defining exactly of what the discovery consists. Paradigms do not fall easily. As Kuhn pointed out, discoveries which begin with a recognition of an anomaly are usually effected over "an extended period during which the individual and often many members of his group struggle to make the anomaly lawlike." In Kuhn's analysis, it is only after the new paradigm begins to be established that we can even fully identify what it was that was discovered. It is these situations that we should expect to see result in priority disputes, exacerbated by the fact that there will probably not be sufficient agreement upon criteria by which to define the discovery and thus to settle priority (due to the state of flux allowed by the weakened or destroyed paradigm). Thus we should expect to find a number of multiple discoveries in which the fact of multiple claimants to the discovery results from a difficulty in rigorously defining the discovery. We shall find this to be the case when we examine the conservation of energy.

We have now moved via the concepts suggested by Thomas Kuhn from the strictly exterior social structure provided by Robert Merton to the interior workings of science as a social enterprise. Kuhn depicts science as governed by what appears to be essentially socialization into a particular Weltanschauung. As he responded to the charge that his conception made to base science upon intuition:

If I am talking at all about intuitions, they are not individual. Rather they are the tested and shared possessions of the members of a successful group, and the novice acquires them through training as a part of his preparation for group membership.⁴⁰

But Kuhn really offers little particular insight as to why some individuals should be able to see beyond their paradigm, when confronted with novelty, and lead the community into a new view. It is this action which requires the role of the individuals of genius, and this returns us to the realm of psychology and the question left us by William James.

James' version of the creative act depicted the brain as constantly tripping into new ideas. At the end of the nineteenth century it was possible to claim ignorance of the function by which this tripping, this spontaneous bubbling forth of novelty comes about. However, just as genetic theory has come forth to assert its claim to the government of biological form, with changes subsumed under the rubric of mutation, so have there also been developments within psychology which have advanced understanding of the generation of the "hypotheses and conceits" which James was in need of calling "accidents."

While the historian approaches the product of psychology with some trepidation, slowed by the uncertainty of his own grasp upon the esoteric tenets of that science, such an approach cannot be avoided in the present case. It is in our favor that the way has been smoothed by the work of Arthur Koestler. He has drawn upon his extensive reading in psychology to address the question of originality in science and in art. His conclusions nicely complement the conceptions of Kuhn.

As Koestler describes it, the act of creation lies at the essence of man's ability to modify his usual ways of thinking. Our predominant thought patterns, our mental habits are the frames of reference in which we couch meaning, or in Koestler's terms, meaning is couched with matrices of thought. Matrix in this usage includes abilities, habits, skills, "any pattern of ordered behavior governed by a 'code' of fixed rules." Code in this sense includes such simple sets of rules as "name opposites" in a word association test, multiplication or addition in mathematical processes, or the rules of chess. Koestler here elaborates upon the notion of a "frame of reference," a "universe of discourse" or an "associative context," all of which he uses as synonymous with "matrices of thought."⁴¹

Koestler refers to the gestalt school for their elucidation of insight, but also argues from the work of Coghill, Needham, and Pribram that we can conceive of the mind as arranged in a system of hierarchies of these thought matrices.⁴² Each level is both a whole and a subpart of some higher matrix, while being at the same time a supra-matrix to some lower level. This entire arrangement exists in a dynamic four dimensional space, just as does the organism which this collection inhabits. Usually these hierarchies will be independent of each other, will exist as parallel but unrelated frames of reference.

Insight, or the creative act (James' production of hypotheses or conceits) occurs when a connection is made between two of these hierarchies of meaning, this is what Koestler calls a "bisociative act." Insight is the result of finding that something, let us say some symbol, which has meaning in a certain context or frame of reference (has meaning within one level of a mental hierarchy), also has meaning within another context or frame of reference (also has meaning within another level of a mental hierarchy). This shared symbol then acts as a link which bisociates, connects two previously independent frames of reference, one consequence of which is to modify the understanding of the contents of both levels or frames of reference.

Humor, science, and art are dependent upon the functions of these mental frames of reference, but whereas most thinking and behavior occurs within a single frame or matrix, humor, science, and art are the result of a relation created between different matrices. "When two independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact with each other the result . . . is either a collision ending in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their confrontation in an aesthetic experience."⁴³

Koestler calls the connection between two different frames of references bisociation in order to distinguish it from the notion of association. He conceives of association as a process which occurs within a particular matrix or "universe of discourse," and thus coined the special term bisociation to denote the linking between two different universes of discourse.

In order to illuminate his concept, let us consider humor. Among Koestler's illustrations is included the following story:

In the happy days of La Ronde, a dashing but penniless young Austrian officer tried to obtain the favours of a fashionable courtesan. To shake off this unwanted suitor, she explained to him that her heart was , alas, no longer free. He replied politely: "Mademoiselle, I never aimed as high as that."⁴⁴

Here the joke has been created by the tension in the fact that "high" has meaning within two separate contexts, one metaphorical and the other anatomical. The pun and the double entendre manifest this characteristic most directly, although Koestler extends the mechanism to include humor in the broadest sense, from the tragicomic to parody, from the sublime to the trivial.

He argues that humor, science, and art are all created in an analogous manner, by the juxtaposition of two different systems of habit. "Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behavior, they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables [man] to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation--the defeat of habit by originality."⁴⁵

There is a striking resemblance between Kuhn's notion of paradigm and Koestler's concept of frame of reference. Koestler, in his discussions of science, in fact restricts the scientific creation to just such acts as Kuhn would identify as paradigm breaking. Koestler thus has only a specialized and dramatic sense of scientific creation, not considering the great bulk of scientific work which could go on within a frame of reference as being creative. He does, however, just as Kuhn, believe that extended exercise within a frame of reference is necessary in order to prepare for the potential creative insight:

. . . the statistical probability for a relevant discovery to be made is the greater the more firmly established and well exercised each of the still separate skills, or thought-matrices, are. This explains a puzzling but recurrent phenomenon in the history of science: that the same discovery is made, more or less at the same time, by two or more people; and it may also help to explain the independent development of the same technique and similar styles of art in different cultures.⁴⁶

Koestler's emphasis is upon individuals separately exercising their own thought-matrices; Kuhn's emphasis is upon the communal articulation of a paradigm. The two views complement each other well.

Edwin Boring, citing both Merton's work on multiples and Kuhn's work on "revolutions," summarized his own four decades of work on the problem of originality and scientific validation before the Seventeenth International Congress of Psychology in 1963. Coming almost as Koestler was finalizing his theory on creation, Boring's address affords an excellent point of synthesis:

One must learn, I think, to see science going on causally in this psychosocial matrix. Every event in it is cause or effect and is usually both. Determinism reigns. The interactions are between man and man--social. Between man and the printed page--also social with a vicarious intermediary. Between the thinker and his memories--psychological. Between his habits of thought--psychological. What is the Zeitgeist, social or psychological? Certainly it is not truly a Geist.... The scene of scientific action is the psychosocial matrix. What goes on there is the important business of the psychologist, the sociologist, the historian, as well as of many other wise men.⁴⁷

In Boring's opinion, scientific change should be considered in the long view, in order to get a sense of its slow development, with individual contributions providing but slight modifications.

Boring had argued in 1927 that when a period of rapid change occurred, it was seldom due to the unusual originality of a single individual, but more likely "the result of previous converging tendencies," coming together in the fruitful "discovery:"

Many synchronous independent discoveries are thus to be explained.

It seems to me that scientific thought is thus like the personal thinking of the scientist. The scientist has his brilliant intuitions, but the originality of the moment of insight is little more than the unexpected seeing of a relationship....

The essence of originality seems then to lie, not so much in sheer novelty, as in the systematic aspects of a discovery or a theory, that is to say, in the selection of data or conditions, their collocation, and the establishment or exhibition of the resultant relationships.⁴⁸

We shall find this confluence of separate developments in the instance of the discovery of the conservation of energy.

Whether it is to be "revolutionary" in Thomas Kuhn's sense, or is to lead to significant and rapid change in the manner meant by Edwin Boring, any "discovery" must be grounded in the body of science. In a very real sense that corpus exists in the minds of the practitioners of science, in their matrices of thought" as Arthur Koestler expressed it. It is to the extent that these "matrices of thought" are similar from one practitioner to the next that science possesses a coherent corpus, to the extent that these "frames of reference" are shared, in the communal manner emphasized by Robert Merton. Discovery is the coming into being of new relationships between these matrices of thought. If it is to be communicated, if it is to be understood and accepted by other practitioners, they must also be in possession of thought habits quite similar to those between which the discoverer has made the new connection. Thus from the communal aspect of the enterprise, it is understandable that these new relationships are likely to become evident to more than one practitioner, in individual experience, before they are publicly introduced.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

1. William James, "Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment," Atlantic Monthly , Vol- 46, no. 276 (October, 1880), p. 456. (back to text)

2. Ibid., p. 442. (back to text)

3. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), Vol. II, p. 632. (back to text)

4. Ibid., pp. 634, 636. (back to text)

5. Ibid. (back to text)

6. Ibid., pp. 637-638. (back to text)

7. Ibid., pp. 636-639. It should be noted that James' resettlements is in the tradition of John Locke (perhaps influenced by Lucretius) with his notion of "recombination." (back to text)

8. James, "Great Men, etc.," p. 456. (back to text)

9. James, Principles, p. 618. (back to text)

10. James, "Great Men, etc." p. 456. (back to text)

11. Ibid. Reference is to Williams Stanley Jevons, Principles of Science. (back to text)

12. Robert Merton, "Priorities in Scientific Discovery." American Sociological Review , Vol. 22, no. 6 (December, 1957), pp. 635-659; reprinted in Robert Merton, The Sociology of Science, ed. and intro. by Norman Storer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press ), pp. 286-324. (back to text)

13. Ibid., pp. 290-293. (back to text)

14. Bernhard J. Stern had earlier considered the possibility that social praise was a necessary stimulus for discovery, when he analyzed "Multiple Discoveries and Inventions in the History of Medicine." He believed that it was doubtful in the large majority of instances that it was primarily expectation of fame and recognition which motivated man to engage in the studies which resulted in their discoveries. Bernhard J. Stern, Social Factors in Medical Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), p. 108. (back to text)

15. Merton, "Science and Technology in a Democratic Order," Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, Vol. I (1942), pp. 115-126; later published as "Science and Democratic Social Structure," in Merton. Social Theory and Social Structure; and again reprinted as "The Normative Structure of Science," in Merton, Sociology of Science, pp. 267-278. (back to text)

16. Merton's definition of the scientific ethos has been both expanded upon and criticized. For an apt discussion and extensive bibliography for these expansions and critiques see Norman Storer's introduction, prefatory remarks to each section, and the bibliography in Merton., Sociology of Science. (back to text)

17. Merton, "Priorities in Scientific Discovery," pp. 294-296. (back to text)

18. Merton, "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 105, no. 5 (October1971), pp. 470-486; reprinted in Merton, Sociology of Science, pp. 343-370; quotation, p. 356. (back to text)

19. Ibid., pp. 357-363. (back to text)

20. Following this lead suggested by Merton, Warren 0. Hagstrom found that 61% of the scientists he interviewed for his study, The Scientific Community, had been anticipated. This included an amazing 70% of the physicists. Warren 0. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community (New York, London: Basic Books, Inc., 1965), pp. 71, 75. (back to text)

21. Merton, "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery," p. 364. (back to text)

22. Ibid., p. 365. (back to text)

23. Ibid., p. 367. (back to text)

24. Merton, "Multiple Discoveries as Strategic Research Sight," Sociology of Science, p. 381. This chapter was first published as part of "Resistance to the Systematic Study of Multiple Discoveries in Science," European Journal of Sociology Vol. 4 (1963), pp. 237-249 (back to text)

25. Ibid., p. 380. (back to text)

26. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, in Osiris: Studies on the History and Philosophy of Science (Bruges, Belgium: Saint Catherine Press, Ltd., 1938). Separately, with a new preface (New York: Howard Fertig, Inc., 1970; paperback edition, New York: Harper & Row, 1970). (back to text)

27. Merton and P. A. Sorokin, "The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700-1300 A. D.," Isis, Vol. 22 (February, 1935)., pp. 516-524; "Sociological Aspects of Invention, Discovery and Scientific Theories," in P. A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (New York: American Book Company, 1937). (back to text)

28. Merton, "Paradigm for the Sociology of Knowledge," Sociology of Science, pp. 7-40; originally published as "Sociology of Knowledge," in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore, eds. Twentieth-Century Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945). pp. 366-405; and Merton and Bernard Barber, "Sorokin's Formulations in the Sociology of Science," Sociology of Science , pp. 142-172, originally published in Philip J. Allen, ed., Pitirim A. Sorokin in Review (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963), pp. 332-368. (back to text)

29. Merton, "Singletons and Multiples in Science," p. 364. (back to text)

30. Merton, "Multiple Discoveries as Strategic Research Site," p. 371. (back to text)

31. Thomas Kuhn, "Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery," Science, Vol. 136 (June l, 1962), pp. 760-764. (back to text)

32. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. enlarged, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 2, no. 2, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970), Chapters III, IV, pp. 23-42. (back to text)

33. Kuhn, "Historical Structure of Scientific Discovery," p. 763. (back to text)

34. Ibid. (back to text)

35. Ibid. (back to text)

36. See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge , proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, Bedford College, London, 1965 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970). (back to text)

37. Kuhn, Revolutions, p. 175. (back to text)

38. Ibid., p. 191. (back to text)

38a. Ibid., pp. 193-194. (back to text)

39. Ibid., Chapter X, pp. 111-135. (back to text)

40. Ibid., p. 191. (back to text)

41. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: The Macmillan Company; paperback, New York: Dell Publishing Co... Inc., 1964), pp. 38-42. (back to text)

42. Ibid., pp. 430-446. (back to text)

43. Ibid. p. 45. (back to text)

44. Ibid., p. 44. (back to text)

45. Ibid., p. 96. (back to text)

46. Ibid., pp. 108-109. (back to text)

47. Edwin G. Boring, "Eponym as Placebo" an expansion of the address of the Honorary President of the Seventeenth International Congress of Psychology at Washington, D. C., on August 20, 1963, reprinted in E. G. Boring, History, Psychology and Science: Selected Papers, ed. by Robert I. Watson and Donald T. Campbell (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1963), p. 14. (back to text)

48. Boring, "The Problem of Originality in Science," The American Journal of Psychology , Vol. XXXIX (December, 1927), pp. 88-89. (back to text)

* quotes J. S. Mill on analyzing consequence from chaos. (back to text)