Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
18 - Cassirer's thesis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
Leipzig, 14 August 1872 A mind which knew for a given very small period of time the position, direction and velocity of all the atoms in the universe, would be able … by an appropriate treatment of its world-formula, to tell us who was the Iron Mask, or how the ‘President’ came to grief. As the astronomer predicts the day on which, after many years, a comet again appears in the vault of heaven from the depths of space, so this ‘mind’ would read in its equations the day when the Greek cross will glitter from the mosque of Sofia, or when England will burn her last lump of coal.
In the light of so trenchant a statement of the doctrine of necessity can we seriously speak of the erosion of determinism by 1872? Ernst Cassirer raised a more unexpected question. He took the above passage as evidence of the invention of determinism! He acknowledged the all-too wellknown deterministic aphorisms of Laplace but said that in their day such words were ‘hardly more than an ingenious metaphor’:
The idea that the metaphor should be endowed with a wider meaning and validity, that it should be the expression of a general epistemological principle, occurred in a much later period, and its date can be established quite definitely.
Namely 1872, the occasion of the speech by Du Bois-Reymond. Why should Cassirer say that is when determinism began? A feeble answer: there are many kinds of determinism, and Cassirer was drawing attention to some novelty added to the idea of determinism around 1870. That is plausible enough. I respect a jibe attributed to the late J.L. Austin.
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- The Taming of Chance , pp. 150 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
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