Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 58.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2002 08:32:20 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <w.mccarty@btinternet.com>
Subject: seeing the sharp edges
In the first of his Sillman Foundation Lectures, The Origins of Knowledge
and Imagination, Jacob Bronowski declares that, "... in many ways you can
say about all human problems, whether in science or in literature, whether
physical or psychological, that they always center around the same problem:
How do you refine the detail with an apparatus which remains at bottom
grainy and coarse?" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978, p. 14)
Brownowski is generalizing from a discussion of how we manage to see sharp
boundaries (e.g. the edges of the pages of a book we are reading) when what
we begin with is the coarse, grainy image produced by rods and cones in the
eye, "which is rather like that of old-fashioned newspaper photographs." We
see sharp edges rather than "an extremely wavy edge of shadow", he
concludes, "because the eye is so wired up among the rods and cones that it
actually looks for straight edges" (15f).
Indeed, it would seem that we are always doing this sort of thing --
*making* sharp, categorical divisions among things that on other inspection
aren't like that at all. In other words, we simplify in order to reach a
provisional understanding. Later on, in the third lecture, Brownowski notes
(echoing the Talmud) that in experimental science one must "put a fence
around the law", i.e., decide what is relevant to one's experiment and what
is not -- despite the interconnectedness of all things. This falsifies the
experiment, makes it partial in order that some results may be obtained.
The revolutions in science happen, he notes, when the fence gets pushed
back further, by some audacious act of imagination, such as Max Planck's or
Albert Einstein's (58-60). We do the same, e.g. in literary studies,
selecting what to pay attention to, excluding other things, though we tend
not to speak in ways which suggest expanding the fenced-in domain, rather
only shifting it to another patch of ground.
When (as always?) one's instrument is crude, for example the computer,
selection is imposed by the logic of the instrument. So my question: are
not the sharp boundaries we see through computation valuable to us in
proportion to our awareness that we are making them up? This is, of course,
a very slippery slope, with the slough of desponding relativism at the
bottom. Bronowski (perhaps with the terms of the Sillman Lecture series in
mind, "to illustrate the presence and providence of God as manifested in
the natural and moral world") speaks repeatedly of his *belief* in the
reality of physical nature. A philosopher might alternatively declare him-
or herself a realist and then work out the consequences in philosophical
terms. Particularly attractive to me is, to quote the title of a chapter in
Clifford Geertz's Available Light (Princeton, 2001), "anti-
anti-relativism". But what seems to be excluded, whichever path one takes,
is dead certainty.
Comments?
Yours,
WM
Dr Willard McCarty, Senior Lecturer,
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London,
Strand, London WC2R 2LS, U.K.,
+44 (0)20 7848-2784, ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/,
willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk, w.mccarty@btinternet.com
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