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Pokušaću ovdje postavljati zanimljive članke iz Philosophy Now magazina.

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super
jel zamišljeno samo kao članci iz philosophy now ili mogu i drugi zanimljivi filozofski tekstovi, eseji, radovi?

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Moze ali slucajno ovih imam na gomili

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postaviću jedan odličan rad harry frankfurta, pa ti makni ako ne paše tu..ali mislim da je vrh i da gori.
on bullshit

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Perfectionism & Hate Speech Law

Shaun O’Dwyer on reconciling free speech with protection against hate speech.

In this era of growing ethno-nationalism and xenophobia in Europe and America, and indeed, worldwide, debates over hate speech are intensifying. Decent people argue that the terrifying rhetoric of extreme right wing groups online and on the streets – and escalating confrontations – demonstrate the necessity of hate speech laws.

Supporters of freedom of speech have responded that the non-coercive speech of all should be protected – including the free speech of racists, neo-Nazis, and bigots. In diverse liberal societies, they argue, it is inconsistent for the state, or even powerful social media platforms such as Facebook, to protect some expressions of ideas while banning others merely because some groups object to it. It is also likely, they argue, that hate speech laws or bans can be weaponized against their advocates, such that polemical ideas by minority activists or leftist radicals can also be prohibited when their right-wing or authoritarian enemies turn hate speech prohibitions to their own advantage.

The stalemated debate between these two positions suggests a sort of ‘incommensurability of values’ that Isaiah Berlin once wrote about – between liberty on the one side and human dignity and civic equality on the other. They’re all prized and recognized to have tremendously beneficial consequences when realized in law and in custom. Yet an increase in free speech often involves some diminishing of dignity. Freedom for the swaggering bully takes away equality and dignity for those at the bottom of the playground pecking order. Conversely, enforcing equality and respect for dignity involves some diminishment in liberty. The would-be bully keeps his thoughts and urges to himself, but perhaps so do many others, as the vigilant headmistress casts her shadow over a quieter, seemingly more egalitarian playground.

I want to suggest that a compromise between freedom and dignity over the problem of hate speech might be possible. My approach is inspired by a philosophy called perfectionism. Perfectionists typically hold that there are objective values or goods whose promotion contributes to morally valuable ways of life, nurturing the ‘better angels’ of human nature; and also that objective moral value means some ways of life are more valuable than others. Many (but not all) moral perfectionists think that the state has a role in promoting the better ways of life by passing legislation and distributing resources to enhance different goods or promote different values, in areas such as welfare, education, the arts and sciences, employment, and civic morality. For such perfectionists, laws against hate speech make sense in terms of promoting more mutually-respectful ways of living in diverse societies.

A New Way Of Opposing Hate Speech

Perfectionism has a respectable pedigree in liberal thought extending back to John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant; but this pedigree is not enough to save it from the objections of free speech advocates whenever perfectionism is invoked to promote hate speech law. The free speech advocates will complain that hate speech law is itself unacceptably coercive and paternalistic – that it requires the state to abandon the value-neutrality that it ought to occupy in a diverse liberal society, in order to play favorites with values or ideas of the good life that are the subject of reasonable disagreement between citizens. One such point of disagreement concerns whose idea of the good life should be considered so detrimental for the overall good of society that its expression must be regulated or prohibited.

However, I have in mind a mild liberal perfectionist approach to hate speech – call it ‘perfectionism lite’ – which envisages a non-coercive role for the state in encouraging the good life of its citizens. So rather than criminalizing hate speech, doing which impinges upon another good the state also regards itself as bound to uphold – the freedom of speech – the state passes laws exhorting citizens to stand up to hate speech.

As a free speech liberal I have my own qualms about perfectionism lite, but I think it worthwhile to explore how it could both justify hate speech law whilst also opposing criminalizing hate speech.

As it turns out, there is an example of non-coercive hate speech law to hand which can help us think through this question, for in 2016 the government of Japan passed just such a law.

Two to three years ago racist demonstrations against resident ethnic Koreans (Zainichi) had become almost daily occurrences in Japan. The rage behind these demonstrations was stoked by a combination of political issues, including Japanese disagreements with South Korea over colonial and wartime history, growing diplomatic tensions with North Korea, and resentments over the perceived ‘special rights’ given to Zainichi. Ultra-right-wing organizations demonstrated outside Zainichi schools or in the Korea Towns of Tokyo and Osaka, displaying or shouting slogans such as “Exterminate all Koreans!”; “We came here to kill North Koreans!”; “Cockroaches!”; “Kick these low-life Korean maggots out of Japan!”, while similar abuse proliferated on internet forums. A former leader of one such ultra-rightist outfit stood in Tokyo’s 2016 gubernatorial election, attracting 1.74 percent of the vote – a still unnerving total of 114,000 votes – on an anti-immigration ‘Japan First’ platform.

Subsequently, debates about the criminalization of hate speech took place amongst politicians, scholars and media commentators, especially since international organizations such as the United Nations urged Japan to pass such laws. However, these debates were framed by a strong awareness of speech freedoms, since Articles 19 to 21 of Japan’s post-war constitution provide robust protections for freedom of conscience, speech, and religion. Judicial experts and politicians cited these articles to highlight the difficulties of criminalizing hate speech.

The hate speech law that was finally passed in 2016 reflected this awareness. Although this legislation admits the “tremendous pain and suffering” that “unfair discriminatory speech and behavior” inflicts upon resident foreigners and their descendants in Japan, it provides no criminal law remedies: instead it directs national and local governments to use publicity campaigns and education to “increase public awareness of the necessity of eliminating unfair, discriminatory speech.” I wonder if such legislation could provide inspiration for perfectionist-minded hate speech statutes in nations which, like Japan, have strong constitutional protections for freedom of speech?

Difficulties with Criminalizing Hate Speech

Many Japanese progressives want hate speech to be criminalized, and are not satisfied with the hate speech law as it currently stands. I’m inclined to think it should be left as it is, since the strongest arguments in favour of criminalizing hate speech do not stand up to klix, as I intend to show.

One way to define and justify hate speech law which some legal philosophers recommend, is through comparison with defamation and libel law. Defamation involves publically making untrue statements calculated to harm a person’s reputation and dignity. Hate speech, according to these legal philosophers, can be understood as a group libel or defamation – that is, as untrue, abusive, dehumanizing, threatening and insulting speech calculated to damage the social standing and dignity of people as members of a particular group, and thus stir up hatred against them. The degree of damage this inflicts upon the collective dignity of a group, and the damage such speech does to civic order through the accumulation of public statements asserting, directly or indirectly, that members of that group do not deserve equal status as citizens or as human beings, warrants a criminal law remedy, they argue.

One objection to this idea of hate speech as a ‘group libel’ is that claims about damage to collective dignity and standing can be used to criminalize many kinds of group criticism, as a means to shutting down freedom of speech. These include ‘defamation of religion’ laws to protect religious groups from insults against their faith, including satire or criticism; and Turkey’s Article 301, which proscribes ‘insults to the Turkish nation’ – such as public statements asserting the truth of the Armenian Genocide.

Defenders argue that hate speech laws are different because they are intended to protect vulnerable minorities. Such minorities have long memories of discrimination, subjugation, or even genocide, and are historically vulnerable to speech that diminishes their social standing, rendering them insecure and fearful for their survival.

This response will not satisfy critics, who may point out that such a rationale could be reverse-engineered by white nationalists and religious sectarians eager to present themselves as minorities vulnerable to persecution. This might appear to be an absurd objection, but it is unwise to consider ‘absurdity’ only from the point of view of a philosophy discussion, rather than, say, a national election campaign harnessing populist, ethno-nationalist resentments.

Another sophisticated way to define hate speech is to think of it as what linguists and philosophers of language call a ‘speech act’. Speech acts do not simply describe: they are meant to do something or have an intended effect. A classic example of a speech act is the one uttered by marriage celebrants who, in pronouncing a couple to be married, make it so. In the 1980s and 90s, some feminist philosophers argued that pornography is a speech act that subjugates and silences women; and since that time, race and gender theorists have explored how hate speech works (or fails to work) as a speech act to subordinate people of colour and sexual minorities.

Although not all of these theorists favour criminal law remedies for hate speech, there is some consensus on how hate speech works as a speech act. Imagine a white man outside a segregated swimming pool in the South of the United States in the mid-twentieth century, looking menacingly at some black people passing ‘too close’ to him and snarling “no n-----s allowed.” He is doing something in saying this: he is enforcing a legal ban against black people entering the pool. In doing this he is supposedly ‘putting them in their place’ as an inferior class of persons. Such statements also have the intended effects of intimidating people into deferential obedience and pre-emptively silencing opposition. We need not even imagine the white man there: a sign bearing the same message will do a similar job.

On this understanding hate speech is a speech act which oppresses vulnerable minorities, puts them in an inferior place, inflicts fear, humiliation, and insecurity on them, and silences them. So the argument here is that hate speech should be criminalized in recognition of the harms that it does and causes, and to prevent the subjection of minority groups.

Obviously, substantial institutional and social props need to be present for hate speech acts to work so effectively. Imagine a white man pulling that same stunt outside a public pool today. Without the backing of racist institutions, conventions and laws – and lynch mobs – such speech acts can no longer work as they were intended to. There may still be intimidation and fear; but more overwhelmingly, there will be defiance, outrage, condemnation of the incident on national and social media, public denunciations by government officials, and, possibly, arrests of the perpetrators under anti-intimidation statutes.

Although these are good and necessary developments, it makes a problem for describing hate speech as an oppressive speech act in modern liberal democracies, in that it’s difficult to prove that minority groups are so homogeneous that hate speech will uniformly work against them, forcing them into the inferior, subjugated and injured status that warrants criminal sanction against their abusers. That is, under defamation law, or criminal laws covering threat and intimidation, it is in principle relatively straightforward for individuals to go to court and present their case that they have suffered injury to their reputations, or been intimidated by prejudiced abuse and threats. Things are less straightforward for groups comprising hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people, perhaps definable as a historically vulnerable minority, but divided by opinion, values, wealth, occupation, and social status. Compare the case of a tenured African-American professor at a leading American university who is subjected to a racial slur by a white student, but is backed up by college anti-racism codes, and supported by colleagues, administrators, and the student body, with that of an impoverished working-class African-American teenager subjected to the same slur by a white policeman confronting him on a street.

Many contextual factors, beginning with differences or similarities in social and legal power between abusers and the abused, can influence how much hate speech actually works as intended, or backfires on the abusers. In light of such doubts, liberal opponents of hate speech law can mobilize the ‘harm principle’ to reject criminalization of hate speech. The harm principle says that the state is only warranted in using coercion against citizens to prevent the citizens from coercing or harming their fellow citizens. But it is often not clear how much hate speech harms on a collective scale.

Yet even if it’s hard to identify a common denominator for the harms hate speech does to internally diverse minorities, surely things will be much worse if governments do nothing to ban it. Hate speech acts may not always work as intended; but their malignant intent remains, and will be recognized as such, contributing to fear and insecurity amongst minority groups, especially when those speech acts escalate into violent physical acts.

However, in our era of renewed nationalism, there are signs that criminal hate speech laws are not working as intended. For instance, Canada’s criminal hate speech laws are stringently defined yet rarely enforced, and there have been modest increases in hate crimes there in the past three years, especially against Muslims. France has more frequently enforced criminal hate speech laws, but anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic hate crimes and xenophobic political movements have all sharply increased there in recent years. Germany has ‘incitement to hatred laws’, but it has struggled to cope with rises in violent hate crimes and hate speech in the 1990s and in more recent years, and it too has witnessed a rise in xenophobic and anti-immigration political movements.

The Japanese Way

Both free speech advocates and perfectionist promoters of non-criminal hate speech laws can agree that hate speech does not represent a clear enough case of collective harm or oppression to justify coercive state intervention, and that there are also prudential reasons for opposing such laws, because of their questionable efficacy, and because they can be abused. They will also likely agree that given its malignant, discriminatory intent, which conflicts with important values such as the dignity and equality of all citizens irrespective of creed or ethnicity, etc, hate speech is a serious moral problem for liberal societies. But they will still disagree on how to deal with it.

So I will conclude with some cautious remarks in favour of Japan’s hate speech legislation, and summarize some objections that free speech advocates like myself might still have to it. In the year since its passage, this law has proven effective in incentivizing local government and police authorities to use existing statutes against more menacing hate speech, online or on the street. Moreover, in sending a signal to wider society that hate speech is officially condemned, it is encouraging civil society activists, including from minority groups, to organize counter-protests and impose moral penalties on those who express hate. Coincidentally or not, anti-Korean demonstrations have halved in the past year, and so has the intensity of the language used in them.

Substantial objections remain, however. First there is the problem of paternalism, implicit in the sort of hate speech law that perfectionism lite supports. For instance, in declaring that the public needs to undergo education and consciousness-raising campaigns to help eliminate hate speech, Japan’s hate speech law appears to judge citizens incapable by themselves of conducting their lives in a morally upright fashion, instead assuming that they need to be educated to do the right thing. Liberal critics of perfectionism argue that such judgements are unacceptable, since they deny to citizens what Jonathan Quong has described as “their moral status as free and equal citizens.”

Second, the strong language used to denounce hate speech in the Japanese legislation – “unfair speech and action… will not be tolerated” and “tolerating (its existence) is impermissible” – may leave the door open for mission creep towards coercive measures to eliminate free speech that is argued to be hate speech, generating the sort of problems we’ve looked at.

Third, the formulation of any hate speech law puts in the hands of the state the power to define which minority groups are affected by it. In the case of Japan’s hate speech law, they are defined as “persons originating exclusively from a country or region other than Japan or their descendants” and this definition refers most obviously to Japan’s Zainichi minority. Such a definition can provoke objections over who it excludes, such as indigenous people, or religious minorities, and whether there are convincing reasons for such exclusions.

These objections may not be decisive, although they do motivate my own wariness about even perfectionist lite justifications for hate speech law. Still, I remain open-minded that these objections could be neutralized by carefully formulated, non-coercive hate speech statutes proposed wherever there is robust constitutional and social support for speech freedoms.

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https://philosophynow.org/issues/118/Moral_Certainty

Moral Certainty
Toni Vogel Carey connects the dots.
The quaint-sounding term ‘moral certainty’ dates back to c.1400. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a degree of probability so great as to admit of no reasonable doubt.” In the seventeenth century it became an important term in the law; according to a commentator in 1677 it meant “such a certainty as may warrant the judge to proceed to the sentence of death against the indicted party.” By the eighteenth century ‘moral certainty’ had become interchangeable with ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ not only in the law, but also in philosophy and polite conversation – even in religion, where it was argued into the nineteenth century that the truth of Christianity could be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” (see p.31 of Barbara Shapiro’s paper referenced at the end).

Of course, if you’re not sure whether guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt, it might not help much to ask whether it has been established to a moral certainty. Then again, it might, for the two phrases have somewhat different connotations. One goes to the idea of external, objective proof, the other to the subjective question whether one feels able in good conscience to convict and sentence a fellow human being. DNA evidence today is capable of satisfying both criteria; but of course this is a relatively recent development, and I’m getting way ahead of myself.

We speak of a scientific revolution in the seventeenth century largely because of a paradigm shift from qualitative to quantitative thinking. Aristotle had understood science as the study of qualitative causes, and this idea became set in stone for some 2,000 years until Galileo declared in 1623 – in a remark so familiar it’s in Bartlett’s – that the universe is written in the ‘language’ of mathematics, without which we cannot understand a single ‘word’ of it.

Another difference was that Aristotle and the scholastics had seen the world in terms of either-or dichotomies: true or false, hot or cold, motion or rest. By contrast, Galileo saw rest not as the opposite of motion, but as the lowest degree of slowness (a speed of zero). His idea of a scientific law was a mathematically ordered continuum leading to an ideal limit-case, something we never expect to be reached. Aristotle defined science in terms of what occurs “always” or “for the most part” (Metaphysics 1027a20); Galileo’s view was that it deals with what occurs at the ideal limit, and so never (Carey 2012). In his last work Two New Sciences (1638), he gave this account of his law of falling bodies (1974, p.76):

“If we find in fact that moveables of different weight differ less and less in speed as they are situated in more and more yielding mediums: and that finally, despite extreme differences in weight, their diversity of speed in the most tenuous medium of all (though not void) is found to be very small and almost unobservable, then it seems to me that we may believe, by a highly probable guess, that in the void all speeds would be entirely equal.”

Galileo’s methodological continuum has been called the first principle of relativity. In a thought experiment in 1632, Galileo realized that a sailor working below deck on a windowless ship traveling on a perfectly smooth sea would not be able to tell whether the ship was moving or stationary. And by similar reasoning, he suggested, it would make no difference to our experience whether the Sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth revolves around it. This in itself didn’t prove that the Earth ‘moves’, but it made the idea less counterintuitive, just as watching ships disappear over the horizon had made it less counterintuitive that the Earth might be round rather than flat.


Galileo wasn’t saved from the Inquisition by the fact that he did not introduce the idea of a heliocentric universe, but merely supported Copernicus, who did. Needless to say, however, Copernicus and Galileo prevailed; and so did the method of approximation to an ideal limit. Robert Boyle (1627-91), who studied in Italy during Galileo’s lifetime, built his ideal gas law on the concept of a methodological continuum. And another who abandoned either/or opposites for “a world of continua,” Lorraine Daston writes in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, was Jakob Bernoulli (1655-1705). He introduced the idea of degrees of probability from zero to one, “a graduated spectrum of belief… from total ignorance or uncertainty to firm conviction or ‘moral’ certainty.” Among other things, this helped to “bridge the chasm between the absolute doubt of the skeptics and the dogmatic certainty of the scholastics.”

Probabilities could be combined to increase the degree of certainty. Testimony by two or more witnesses was more convincing and provided greater certainty than the same testimony by a single witness. Boyle spoke of a “concurrence of probabilities” that “mount to a moral certainty” (Shapiro p.30). In eighteenth-century America, James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and an early Justice of the Supreme Court, spoke of a continuum of evidence rising by “insensible gradation, from possible to probable and from probable to the highest degree of moral certainty.” (Shapiro p.47)

If probability was important in the law, it was essential to the insurance industry. In 1777 Buffon set moral certainty equal to a probability of 0.9999; and reckoning from existing mortality tables, he pronounced it a moral certainty that a healthy 56-year-old man would survive the next 24 hours. Adam Smith remarked in Wealth of Nations (1776) (I.x.b.27), “Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer you approach to this certainty.” In London, however, you could buy insurance against almost anything, even “losing at the lottery.” (Daston pages 77, 164, 207, 348) Quantification had its virtues; but one effect of rendering moral certainty mathematical was to de-moralize it (Hankins p.630).

Simplicity and Moral Certainty
Philosophers and theoretical scientists alike have historically placed a high value on simplicity, or explanatory parsimony. Thales reduced everything to water, Heraclitus to fire – and flux. Duns Scotus and William of Occam codified this in the scholastic principle known as Occam’s Razor: “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity”; or, “What can be done with fewer would in vain be done with more.”

Occam’s Razor resurfaced in modern science as Newton’s first Rule of Reasoning in his Principiaof 1687:

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain the appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”

Newton was not known for generosity in crediting others (I dished the dirt on Newton in Philosophy Now Issue 88). But he cites Galileo numerous times in the Principia, understandably, since he relied heavily on the Galilean continuum in working out his laws of motion, and in uniting such diverse phenomena as the revolution of the planets, the tides, and the fall of an apple under the single principle of gravitation.

You may not have heard of Dugald Stewart, the last of the constellation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who included David Hume and Adam Smith; but few philosophers were more highly regarded in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1820 former President John Adams wrote to former President Thomas Jefferson: “I think Dugald… has searched deeper and reasoned more correctly than Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume…” (Adams-Jefferson Letters, pp.560-1). I mention Stewart here because he connected the dots from explanatory parsimony to probability to moral certainty:

“The probability of a hypothesis increases in proportion to the number of phenomena for which it accounts, and to the simplicity of the theory by which it explains them; and… in some instances, this probability may amount to a moral certainty.” (Works 1829, 2: 299-300; italics original.)

Graphing
Squared paper had been used since the seventeenth century for designing ships. But not until well into the eighteenth was it used for plotting data, and the term ‘graph’ was coined only in 1878 (Hankins pages 605 and 608). It was mainly the astronomer and polymath scientist John Herschel (son of William Herschel, who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781) who put this method on the map. And as late as 1833 squared paper was still so new that Herschel took pains to write out minute instructions how to construct it. He used it for calculating the orbits of double stars, which (unlike objects in your rear-view mirror) tend to be farther away from each other than they appear. In effect he had to find “the best approximation of the orbit from very poor data” (p.609). He solved this problem by recording the points he observed, and drawing a simplifying curve through as many points as possible. He called his method ‘graphical’ (p.608).

Herschel’s friend and fellow scientist William Whewell called it the ‘method of curves,’ and used it himself to study the tides. By correcting for errors of observation and “random fluctuations caused by wind, barometric pressure, and the like,” Whewell found that the method of curves provided a result “more true than the individual facts themselves.” Herschel pronounced it “a conviction approaching a moral certainty” that the resultant ellipse is “close to the correct orbit” – good enough to consider the risk of error “more or less infinitesimal,” something “we make up our minds to disregard” (pages 618 and 630-1).

Graphing may at first seem like a simple mechanical procedure. But two observers may plot the same dots and yet not connect them by the same curve; so graphing falls somewhere “between observation and theory.” Beyond a mere “sum of the particulars” (the dots), it involves “a subjective leap dependent on judgment.” Either you “see the law or you do not.” (Hankins pages 621-2, 625, and 633)

Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830) is said to be the first original book on scientific method to appear since Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum of 1620 had helped launch the Scientific Revolution. Among other things, Herschel refers here to “that general law which seems to pervade all nature – the law… of continuity.” Even something “generally regarded the most opaque in nature,” he says, is “possessed of some slight degree of transparency.” Thus “opacity is not a contrary or antagonist… of transparency, but only its extreme lowest degree.” (section 200; italics original.)

Herschel associated this form of continuity with the idea that “nature does not act by leaps.” And Charles Darwin, who was greatly influenced by Herschel’s book, adhered to this same gradualist principle. Thirty years later, however, Herschel saw fit to argue against Darwin that homo sapiens couldn’t have evolved gradually from the lower animals, but must have been expressly created by God. (I wrote about John Herschel, and the tortured back-and-forth between him and Darwin on this point, in Philosophy Now Issue 48.)

Not-So-Moral Certainty
As two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings (in 1984 and 1994) attest, the term ‘moral certainty’ is no longer in use, and few judges or jurors even know what it used to mean (Shapiro 51). The term went into decline after 1850, when Herschel introduced the term ‘practical certainty’ in place of ‘moral certainty’ in order “to avoid the ambiguities in the word ‘moral’.” (Hankins pp.618 and 630-1)

So it is interesting that in 1996 Philosophy Now ran an article (in Issue 15) by Peter Lloyd called ‘The Dangers of Moral Certainty’. What Lloyd meant by moral certainty, though, had little to do with probability, or graphing, or a continuum ending in an ideal limit. What he meant was certainty about morals. He drew a contrast, in fact, between this ‘dangerous’ kind of moral certainty and the ‘public certainty’ available in the sciences, which are ‘open to all comers’ with the time and resources to repeat the relevant experiments and see for themselves.

The motto of the Royal Society of London, which played a crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, was Nullius in verba, meaning, “Take no one’s word for it.” So Lloyd’s point has long been a truism. But is it true? How many will ever hear the sound of two black holes colliding, the little ‘chirp’ that recently confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity? For that matter, how many can even understand Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s general relativity theory, much less work out the laws of gravity and relativity on their own?

Nor is this the only problem with the idea that scientific certainty is available to all, or even most. As we saw with the method of graphing, different people look at the same thing and see it differently. This goes to Thomas Kuhn’s famous notion of paradigm shifts. The Aristotelians looked at a swinging body, Kuhn says in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970, p.119), and saw something “falling with difficulty;” Galileo looked at it and saw a pendulum, which led him to the laws of falling bodies and motion along an inclined plane.

Another problem with Lloyd’s thesis is that even when knowledge has been available for centuries, philosophers don’t necessarily get the message. Take the difference between Aristotle’s qualitative and Galileo’s quantitative methods. During the 1960s, in addition to Kuhn’s idea of revolutionary paradigm shifts, philosophers of science were trying to find workable analyses of such notions as law-likeness, disposition and tendency, and dealing with the intractable ceteris paribus (‘other things being equal’) clause. Nobody seemed to realize that Galileo had long ago provided a concept of lawlikeness that allows us to bypass and ignore these ‘other things’. One who did see this clearly was Kurt Lewin, the ‘father’ of social psychology. He wrote in 1931 that Galileo had replaced “dichotomous classifications [like] the distinction between lawful and chance events [with] continuous gradations,” so that “whether the event described by the law occurs rarely or often has nothing to do with the law. Indeed, in a certain sense, the law refers only to cases that are never realized, or only approximately realized, in the klix course of events.” Lewin thought the field of psychology in 1931 was facing many of the “theoretical difficulties [that had] culminated in the conquest over Aristotelian ways of thinking in physics” in the seventeenth century (1931, pp.144-6 & 152-3)

Even though the laws of ideal gases in physics, of perfect speakers and hearers in linguistics, and of perfect competition in economics, are well known to most college-educated people today, in psychology and philosophy the method of successive approximation is still seen through a glass darkly, if at all. In these two fields, not much seems to have changed since 1931, or even since the seventeenth century. Moral certainty came into use, caught on, and then went out of vogue. The method of approximation that supported it scientifically in the work of Galileo, Boyle, Bernoulli and others came and stayed, but has yet to fully catch on. I wouldn’t call that progress.