The Power and the Story. Review of Nye, Andrea. Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. London: Routledge, 1990; Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990.

John Batali

Department of Cognitive Sciences
University of California-San Diego
<Batali@cogsci.ucsd.edu>

 

Nye, Andrea. Words of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic. London: Routledge. 1990.

 

Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1990.

 

Andrea Nye begins her “reading” of the history of logic by recounting how the 6th century BC philosopher Parmenides describes a poetic journey “past the towns of knowing men” in search of ultimate reality. Driven by desire and led by “maidens of the Sun,” he passes through imposing gates and down forbidding caverns and is ultimately allowed to inspect “being” which turns out to be a perfectly round and smooth sphere. But what is more important, and what Parmenides can take back to the practical world of life, is what Dike, the female keeper of being, says about it: “it is and to not be is not.” The principle of Being is what it is: eternal, simple, unchanging, true. Everything else is not.

 

In this vision of Parmenides’s lie nascent two of the most venerated products of western thought: science and logic. Science as the investigation of being, the nature of nature. Logic as the codification of truth, the articulated norms of thought. And in Parmenides vision, the two lie together. Being inheres in thoughts about it, so that

 

It is the same thing to be thought as to be a thought. For not without something of what is, in what is expressed, can there be thinking. (Nye, 16, translating Parmenides fragment 7)

 

This theme, the relation between the true and thoughts about it and paths to it, is the subject of the books under review. Andrea Nye traces the history of logic from Parmenides through the approaches of Plato and Aristotle, thence to the theo-logic of the middle ages, and finally to the modern mathematical form of logic invented by Frege. Along the way, as conceptions about logic change, and the social uses to which logic is put change, the connection between logic and the truth of being becomes weaker and weaker, to the point where modern logicians take it as a virtue that their systems are absolutely “formal” and totally disconnected from reality (but are nonetheless adequate means of representing that reality).

 

Gross, in his study of science, examines not the ideal path to truth that logic allegedly provides, but the actual workings of scientific persuasion, the “rhetoric” of science. He too begins with Aristotle, taking the “Rhetoric” as his “master theoretic text,” but putting it to a use Aristotle would not have liked. For Aristotle, science was the realm of the absolute and the unchanging, about which knowledge was available to all (all male Greek land owning citizens, at least). Rhetoric was for the law-court or the political assembly or the drinking party, where passion and prejudice prevail and could be molded to the desired shape. But Gross reminds us that passion and prejudice prevail everywhere in human activity, and even more so in the swirl of ego and power that is science.

 

In both books, the truth and validity claims of logic and science are bracketed, are put on hold–not to be denied, or even diagnosed, but simply put aside. What interests Nye is not the truth of logic but the different conceptions of logic that appear in different moments of history, the different uses for logic of different societies, with different concerns and different notions of power and truth. And for Gross it is not the nature of being that interests him in the quests of scientists, but those quests themselves. Both Nye and Gross work with the truths of history: this happened, these people said this, wrote that, about science or about logic. Whether what they said was true or not is not the issue. Instead the issue is what happened and how they felt about it.

 

For Andrea Nye, logic is not to be taken as a single thing towards which progress can be made. And, though her reading is feminist, she does not seek to show that logic is some specifically male syndrome. She presents and distances herself from a number of claims that she is not making:

 

Logic, one current argument goes, is the creation of defensive male subjects who have lost touch with their lived experience and define all being in rigid oppositional categories modeled on a primal contrast between male and female. Or another: logic articulates oppressive thought-structures that channel human behavior into restrictive gender roles. Or: logic celebrates the unity of a pathological masculine self-identity that cannot listen and recognizes only negation and not difference. (Nye, 5)

 

Instead, the word `logic’ points to the complex set of attitudes that any society has towards thought and truth and validity in argument. That such topics could form the subject matter of an academic, more or less technical domain, says a great deal about a society right away. But the specific form that logic takes in any society will depend as much on the historical and material circumstances of that society as it will depend (if it does at all) on the ultimate nature of truth.

 

Therefore logic is no more male than society is. But then, societies often are dominated by males, if not thereby characteristically “male.” Certainly some of the societies that Nye is examining, societies which by coincidence or not were the ones where logic flourished–Classical and Hellenist Greece, and the Medieval Catholic church–were rigidly male enterprises. As a set of attitudes about truth and as a set of norms of thought, a society’s logic thereby forms part of the discourse in which power is channelled. It may not be that there is anything masculine about logic; however, it is one of the many tools by which the male elite can and does maintain and extend its power.

 

“Reading” logic means that Nye is not going to treat the history of logic as a steady march of progress. She is going to take seriously the widely divergent things that its originators said about what they were doing, and the different uses to which it is put. In looking at what a society says about logic and how it makes use of its products, one gets a glimpse of what that society thinks about thinking and argument and how they are related to the exercise of power.

 

In each of the chapters of her book she examines the logic produced by particular thinkers in specific historical circumstances. She examines how the society’s “need” for a logic was met or not met by what was produced. The specifically feminist aspect of her account is developed in her view of the history of logic as an outsider. She refuses to accept the different logics as anything more than what they historically are:

 

There is no one Logic for which [a single critique] can account, but only men and logics, and the substance of these logics, as of any written or spoken language, are material and historically specific relations between men, between men and women, and between them and the objects of human concern. (Nye 5)

 

Gross begins his account of the rhetorical aspects of science by reminding us that scientists in fact spend a great deal of time persuading. They must persuade other scientists of the validity of their claims and the correctness of their theories. They must persuade granting agencies and promotion committees of the importance of their work. They must persuade the general public that their enterprise has value.

 

But I think that the general feeling is that the practice of persuasion is somehow not the real job. Certainly writing grant proposals is a pain, and many scientists probably would agree with the sentiment expressed by Galileo, that if their colleagues would just look at the results, they would see that they are correct. People have to be persuaded to see the truth only because they are unwilling or unable to see it directly.

 

Gross considers “entertaining [the possibility] . . . that the claims of science are solely the products of persuasion.” Accordingly, his method is to follow the lead of Aristotle in analyzing scientific texts, “to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion.” He looks at a wide variety of scientific texts: published papers, the correspondence of the early days of the Royal Society of London, drafts and peer-review responses of papers, newspaper editorials written during the recent debate about recombinant DNA. In all cases the procedure is to attempt to understand the rhetorical techniques that are being applied. Sometimes the arguments appeal to explicit methodological principles, such as falsification, or an appeal to the evidence. Sometimes the arguments are by analogy, or are based on elegance or simplicity of a theory or an account. Rather than take any single one of these as the ultimate foundation of scientific truth, Gross wants to understand which ones are used, and which ones work. For Gross, the Parmenidean injunction that “what is is” would be taken, were it to appear in a scientific text, as just another rhetorical technique, sometimes convincing, sometimes not.

 

Throughout his book, Gross has to deal with the claim that science is really about external reality, that there are “brute facts of nature” and all of this persuasion is just a detour on the path to it:

 

The rhetorical view of science does not deny "the brute facts of nature"; it merely affirms that these "facts," whatever they are, are not science itself, knowledge itself. Scientific knowledge consists of the current answers to three questions, answers that are the product of professional conversation: What range of "brute facts" is worth investigating? How is this range to be investigated? What do the results of these investigations mean? Whatever they are, the "brute facts" themselves mean nothing; only statements have meaning, and of the truth of statements we must be persuaded. These processes, by which problems are chosen and results interpreted, are essentially rhetorical: only through persuasion are importance and meaning established. As rhetoricians we study the world as meant by science. (Gross 4)

 

By studying the means of persuasion, especially as used in some important texts in the history of science that turned out to be persuasive, we can understand more about the process of science. Does this tell us more about its product, the supposed truths of science itself, the spherical essence about which all of this persuasive practice goes on?

 

Both Nye and Gross might be seen to be committing either or both of two well-known logical errors, the “genetic fallacy” and the “ad hominem” argument. The genetic fallacy is the claim that the origins of an idea are relevant to its truth or falsity. An ad hominem argument is one that attempts to deny a claim by attacking the maker of the claim. But to accuse either Nye or Gross of these mistakes is to misunderstand what they are trying to do. It is to suppose that they are entering into the debate about the claims of logic or of science. But that is exactly what they are not doing. They are trying to understand the workings of those claims, to see where they come from and where they go. In some sense this ought to be an interesting enterprise purely from a historical point of view.

 

But the enterprise assumes more importance when we remember how highly valued both logic and science are in this, our ultra-technological world. There is simply no reason to believe that any particular “meta-narrative” about the ultimate nature of either logic or science is right, or there is no reason to believe it without a careful look at what logic and science really are and have been. Much of the philosophy of science has defined the enterprise either in terms of its ultimate goal (e.g., to describe nature), or in terms of formal aspects of its performance (e.g., as following a hypothetico-deductive method, or as making falsifiable claims). Whether or not these characterizations made any internal sense, the question still remained as to whether they described anything, in particular whether they described what it is that people who call themselves scientists actually do. The emerging “sociological” approach to the history of science, as exemplified by Gross, illustrates that it is possible to put these a priori claims on hold, at least for a while, and look closely at the way the scientific world works.

 

As for logic, remember that logic is explicitly a prescriptive discipline. Every writer in the history of logic has had to deal with the fact that people just don’t “think logically.” At best, logics are developed such that the axioms or rules are intuitive, or at least they are with a little thought. (Or with a lot of thought, as Nye points out, as the Stoic philosophers wrestled with the right way to characterize the meaning or function of “if,” a question which has not been really solved two thousand years later.) Logics are developed as ways to organize and perhaps restrict thinking, so it would seem crucial to examine the purposes that such organization and restriction are meant to serve.

 

One of the problems that we have in assessing logic today is that in the post-Fregean world logic has attained a status not quite imagined by many of its developers. On the one hand logic has achieved a level of mathematical sophistication, yet in its technical sophistication it has become a domain of expertise. A solid grounding in logic is no longer considered part of the “well-rounded” education expected of our society. How many members of the US Senate, compared, let us imagine, with the Athenian assembly or the senate or Rome, know what modus ponens is? It is not that this is in any sense a step back, that our Senators would be more competent with a solid grounding in logic, but it is true that until the 20th century it was felt to be so.

 

In the hands of Nye and Gross, the histories of logic and science become histories of the relations between persuasion and power. Clearly if you can persuade someone of something, however you do so, you have thereby a measure of power over that person. Likewise, having power over someone is a good way to get them to agree with you. Logic was an attempt to codify the means of argument, but of course a certain amount of power needed to be vested in those doing the codification. Hence the extreme urgency of the increasingly worldly medieval church’s interest in the nature of logic.

 

And the technical, mathematical, applicable science in the 17th century brought a new kind of power over nature. With that power came the potential for wealth and fame, this coming at the same time as the rise of a mercantile class ready to plunder the new knowledge. One of Gross’s best chapters treats the events leading to the formation of the Royal Society of London, and the subsequent “invention” of the idea of priority of discovery. Isaac Newton comes off in a particularly bad light when the Royal Society formed a committee to decide whether Newton or Leibniz had discovered the calculus first. Given that the committee was formed of Englishmen, it was unlikely for Leibniz’s side to get a fair hearing, but the final “Account” condemns him in such harsh terms that, reading it, it is difficult to believe that Leibniz understood even simple arithmetic. It turns out, however, that Newton had managed to subvert the committee and had written the “Account” himself!

 

Interesting as it is for its treatment of the historical characters, the episode illustrates how the structures and concerns and methods of a society develop as the society deals with real issues and problems. The importance of priority and the precise way it would be assigned were topics of considerable debate in Europe at the time, with some believing that priority was of no consequence at all, and others offering elaborate means for securing priority without actually publishing results (e.g., writing the result in code, or posting a sealed letter to the Royal Society). But Newton’s behavior and evident concern for absolute priority helped force the issue. And, finally, established as the unquestioned discoverer of the calculus, Newton’s personal authority was enhanced even further.

 

These movements back and forth of power and argument and discovery point out that no fundamental dispute takes place entirely within a pre-existing logical framework. For one thing, one can’t prove the correctness of a specific logic or the correctness or appropriateness of logic itself, within logic. Logic only “works” within some sort of scaffolding in which its axioms are defined, its rules of inference set down. This was implicitly understood in Classical Greece. Parmenides presents being and the path to it as revealed by the goddesses, the ultimate forms of Plato, whose properties, dimly remembered, form the basis for our understanding of the world, were presented to us before we were born. For Aristotle, more empirical then these two, the ultimate logic had to be the “logic” visible in the biological world–of genus and species and essences and differentia.

 

Once this alogical basis is in place, once the members of the society are convinced that logical thinking is a worthy goal, they can then proceed. Medieval logic interestingly splits the justification for logic in two. On the one hand is the revealed truth of God, on the other the logics of classical Athens. Characteristically, this split of the form of logic and its “premises” led to the extreme nominalism of William of Occam in which logic involve relations among arbitrary “meanings,” with no necessary connection between those relations and what they were about. The Bible would do as a source of premises just as well as would the Koran or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Now of course this view was not very comforting to the established Church. The separation of the form and the meaning of logic is always a difficult one to maintain. Medieval realism attempted to connect more tightly the logical relations between predicates and the ultimate reality for which they stood, culminating perhaps in Anselm’s argument that God must exist because of logical properties of Its description.

 

In many ways Gottlob Frege is the main character of Nye’s book. He stands at the beginning of the 20th century literally scared by the changes in the intellectual world around him: imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometries, transfinite sets. Did such things make any sense? Which ones? They all seemed to make sense, the derivations and proofs that involved them seemed to have the proper rhetorical form for mathematics but this seeming wasn’t enough. Could there be a way to determine which kinds of mathematical arguments are valid and which not, and thus be more confident of which kinds of mathematical entities exist? That is: could there be a logic of mathematics?

 

I hope that at least part of the urgency of this question is clear. Before the 19th century mathematics seemed to be describing reality. The truths of mathematics seemed to be truths about the world, that ultimately one could go out and check. The formula for the volume of a sphere could be verified by immersing the sphere in water and measuring the displacement. Parallel lines could be seen never to meet (sort of). But now entities and claims were being made that it would seem could never be checked. Mathematics seemed to have slipped from being, but the new results seemed, when viewed the right way, to be relatively natural (if surprising) extensions of the old.

 

As it turned out, Frege was unable to satisfy himself with his attempt to make mathematics logical, and had to be content with making logic mathematical. Others have solved some of the technical questions that stymied Frege, but the question of the ultimate foundation of mathematics still remains open.

 

Nye then considers the attempts of the various philosophers and scientists influenced by Frege to make use of the new creation in other arenas. Perhaps the precision of the new mathematical logic could be used to separate scientific questions from meaningless “metaphysical” ones. Perhaps one could use logic to understand the form of moral or aesthetic arguments as if proving that it is wrong to kill one’s mother is the same as proving that 2+2=4.

 

Furthermore it might be possible to use the mathematical logic to understand and perhaps to make some sense of the meaning of language itself. Perhaps, under all of the flower and emotion and fuzz of language there is a pure “logical form” which expresses the basic or pure or literal meaning of a sentence. Valid combinations of sentences (valid arguments) could be understood as combinations of sentences whose logical forms were valid.

 

Now I should say that when treated as a technical tool this approach has had a great deal of success. Certain facts about language and about language use are well illustrated when sentences of mathematical logic are used to gloss certain of their semantic properties. But it is a long way from that observation to the argument that what we are doing when we use language is to dress up a crystalline logical form with tinsel and fluff.

 

Consider the steps involved here: First, language is observed to allow for specious arguments as well as valid ones. Second, certain arguments can be seen to be valid on the basis of their form. Third, a tiny subset of those arguments, about a particular domain, namely mathematics, are given a precise, formal characterization. Finally this formal characterization is claimed to hold at the center of language.

 

Gross attempts to draw more philosophical conclusions from his studies. He realizes that a focus on the rhetorical aspects of scientific practice might make it seem as if science is just rhetoric. He argues that his analyses leave room for a sort of “rhetorical realism.” However, he seems to stumble here since he has shown that the only actual role such “meta- narratives” of science play is in the rhetoric that they can support. It is not clear what rhetorical role “rhetorical realism” could play except in favor of the very relativism he professes concern about.

 

Nye accepts that one “logical” response to her history is to suggest that perhaps some different sort of logic might be developed, a “feminist” or at least a “female” logic that would perhaps alleviate some of the problems. But of course it is not logic that has kept women and “other” races and nationalities and classes subordinated, it was and is political and social interests and institutions. Logic was and is only one of the many tools toward that end. However a very important tool, since the attitudes and roles of logic in a society are very centrally tied up with the attitudes toward thought and argument. Nye argues against the idea of a feminist logic and for a society that values “reading” instead of the sort of categorical “registering” that logic involves. It seems to me that “reading” is exactly what Gross is doing in his rhetorical analysis of science, and indeed rhetoric, conceived classically, is a field whose time ought to come.

 

What is the sense in which these two books deserve to be called “postmodern”? I think that the first step in the answer has to do with the fact that neither seeks to overturn or replace the disciplines they are examining. While it may be possible to build a case for reform out of some of the authors’ charges, it is also possible that a practitioner or true-believer could be unmoved. The obvious response would be to claim that both Nye and Gross spend their time examining the scaffolding, and not returning later to see the finished building, but that in fact a good study of scaffolding is necessary and important and perhaps even quite interesting. (Consider, for example the biological community’s response to “The Double Helix.”)

 

As I mentioned above, it would seem that to take Nye’s and Gross’s points any further, to take them as actual challenges to science or to logic, would be to accept either or both of the ad hominem argument and the genetic fallacy. It is here that I think the postmodernism of the approach comes in. Nye and Gross both stand on what ought to be an unstable point. They are both working well within a tradition of careful scholarship and even an Enlightenment-style respect for the centrality of Ancient Greek thought. Both of them, but perhaps Gross more then Nye, seem to view their subjects with respect. For Gross this is explicit, in using rhetorical techniques originating with Aristotle to analyze science (a practice that, as he admits, Aristotle wouldn’t have initially approved of). Nye, as a feminist, as a woman reading logic, is less willing to adopt the tradition as beneficial, but she does adopt, in a more or less ironic way, the commitment that certain standards of argument ought to apply.

 

How far can the process be removed from the product? How much can the history of an institution or a practice be divorced from its present state? The modernist position might be that the tradition is baggage, it needs to be shed as soon as it gets in the way. For Gross and Nye, as perhaps it is for the postmodern view, we cannot free ourselves so easily from that baggage; it is not in fact baggage, it is us. The stories of logic and science are our stories, and we are still making them up as we go along. It is ironic perhaps to use the method of classical rhetoric to analyze scientific discourse; after all, what status does a rhetorical analysis have after the claims of science are shown to be rhetorical? I mean it would have seemed that science’s claims are the strongest. But now it seems not so clear.

 

It isn’t a challenge to logic or science that Nye and Gross offer, but an account of how those enterprises actually are. It is only when those accounts are viewed against the self-descriptions that they seem to be challenges. Logic is not wrong or invalid or even incomplete because it was developed for the promulgation of the faith, nor is biology wrong because it works by means of persuasion and consensus. The challenge is felt only by those who believe that in fact the process does matter to the product.

 

But–and perhaps I am finally showing myself here–the process does matter, it has to matter. Only if we somehow think that either science or logic is somehow complete or close to complete, can we take any of its products as assured. Now perhaps the method of truth-tables in propositional logic can be felt to be relatively sound and perhaps it is, perhaps it is as sound as the methods we have for predicting eclipses; but such examples are relatively sparse. We just don’t know, in a century filled with challenges to the accepted views in both science and logic and everything else, where the next challenge will arise. Our understanding of how such challenges might develop, and what we ought to expect to do about them, can only be enhanced with a better understanding of science as process. It is a process with its roots in tradition, but not its foundation. Nothing can be done without the tradition, without the history, but anything in that tradition can be overturned, probably based on a challenge supported by some other traditional view or mode of argument or example.

 

It almost seems that Parmenides’s insight remains, except that where it has been traditionally taken as the foundation of knowledge, it now serves as the fulcrum of irony.