about this world through mental processors, and that these internal mechanisms always operate imperfectly because idols gum up the works. Discovery, therefore, arises from a complex intermeshing of these inside and outside components, and not by the accumulated input of facts from the outside world, processed through centuries by the universal and unchanging machinery of internal scientific logic.
Gesner did not use the same criteria for decisions that we employ today, so our differences cannot be attributed to his tiny molehill of reliable facts compared with our mountain. Rather, the idols conspired in him (as they still do in us, but with different resulting blockages) to construct a distinct kind of processing machine. Science prospers as much by retuning, or demolishing and then rebuilding, such mental machinery, as by accumulation of new factual information. Scientists donât simply observe and classify enough fossils until, one day, the status of hysteroliths as brachiopod molds becomes clear; rather, our theories about the nature of reality, and the meaning of explanation itself, must be decomposed and reconstructed before we can build a mental mansion to accommodate such information. And fruitful reconstruction requires, above all, that we acknowledge, examine, and challenge the Baconian idols of our own interior world.
I argued at the beginning of this essay that the Baconian idols could be ordered by degree of generality. In tracing the history of this internal component to solving the problem of hysteroliths, I noted an interesting progression in the release of blockagesâfrom the most pervasive to the most particular idol, as paleontologists homed in upon a solution over two centuries. Perhaps we must first dig the right kind of mine before we can locate any particular nugget of great price.
1. Idols of the Tribe in the Sixteenth Century . Gesner and Agricola rediscover Pliny and the three dichotomies.
The hysterolith story begins as long ago as the recorded history of paleontology can venture, and as deeply as one can probe into the most pervasive and general of tribal idols: our propensity to dichotomize. Pliny the Elder, the great Roman statesman and natural historian who died with his boots on in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, wrote a compendium about the naturalworld that survived as legions of hand copies made by monks and other scholars for more than a millennium before Gutenberg, and then became one of the most widely published books in the first decades of printing. (In the trade, books printed before 1500 are called incunabulae ,or âfrom the cradle.â)
Agricola and Gesner, as Renaissance scholars committed to the recovery of ancient wisdom, sought above all to assign their specimens (and vernacular names) to forms and categories mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History .In an alphabetical list of rocks, minerals, and fossils, featured in the thirty-seventh and last book of his great treatise, Pliny included a notable one-liner under letter D: âDiphyes duplex, candida ac nigra, mas ac feminaâ âhaving the character of both sexes, white and black, male and female.
Plinyâs treatise contained no pictures, so we can hardly know what object he had meant to designate with this sparse description. But on the theme of tribal idols, I am fascinated that the first mention of a possible hysterolith features two of the most general impediments in this category: our tendency to read nature at all scales in terms of immediately familiar objects, particularly the human body, and our propensity for classification by dichotomy. Pliny, in fact, explicidy cites two of the most fundamental dichotomies in his single line: male and female, and white and black. (Later commentators assumed that Plinyâs diphyes referred to stones that looked male on one side and female on the otherâhence their identification with hysteroliths.)
Moreover, we should also note the
Gesner did not use the same criteria for decisions that we employ today, so our differences cannot be attributed to his tiny molehill of reliable facts compared with our mountain. Rather, the idols conspired in him (as they still do in us, but with different resulting blockages) to construct a distinct kind of processing machine. Science prospers as much by retuning, or demolishing and then rebuilding, such mental machinery, as by accumulation of new factual information. Scientists donât simply observe and classify enough fossils until, one day, the status of hysteroliths as brachiopod molds becomes clear; rather, our theories about the nature of reality, and the meaning of explanation itself, must be decomposed and reconstructed before we can build a mental mansion to accommodate such information. And fruitful reconstruction requires, above all, that we acknowledge, examine, and challenge the Baconian idols of our own interior world.
I argued at the beginning of this essay that the Baconian idols could be ordered by degree of generality. In tracing the history of this internal component to solving the problem of hysteroliths, I noted an interesting progression in the release of blockagesâfrom the most pervasive to the most particular idol, as paleontologists homed in upon a solution over two centuries. Perhaps we must first dig the right kind of mine before we can locate any particular nugget of great price.
1. Idols of the Tribe in the Sixteenth Century . Gesner and Agricola rediscover Pliny and the three dichotomies.
The hysterolith story begins as long ago as the recorded history of paleontology can venture, and as deeply as one can probe into the most pervasive and general of tribal idols: our propensity to dichotomize. Pliny the Elder, the great Roman statesman and natural historian who died with his boots on in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, wrote a compendium about the naturalworld that survived as legions of hand copies made by monks and other scholars for more than a millennium before Gutenberg, and then became one of the most widely published books in the first decades of printing. (In the trade, books printed before 1500 are called incunabulae ,or âfrom the cradle.â)
Agricola and Gesner, as Renaissance scholars committed to the recovery of ancient wisdom, sought above all to assign their specimens (and vernacular names) to forms and categories mentioned by Pliny in his Natural History .In an alphabetical list of rocks, minerals, and fossils, featured in the thirty-seventh and last book of his great treatise, Pliny included a notable one-liner under letter D: âDiphyes duplex, candida ac nigra, mas ac feminaâ âhaving the character of both sexes, white and black, male and female.
Plinyâs treatise contained no pictures, so we can hardly know what object he had meant to designate with this sparse description. But on the theme of tribal idols, I am fascinated that the first mention of a possible hysterolith features two of the most general impediments in this category: our tendency to read nature at all scales in terms of immediately familiar objects, particularly the human body, and our propensity for classification by dichotomy. Pliny, in fact, explicidy cites two of the most fundamental dichotomies in his single line: male and female, and white and black. (Later commentators assumed that Plinyâs diphyes referred to stones that looked male on one side and female on the otherâhence their identification with hysteroliths.)
Moreover, we should also note the
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