Erkenn (2011) 75:467482 DOI 10.

1007/s10670-011-9343-6

Causal and Symbolic Understanding in Historical Epistemology

Michael Heidelberger

Received: 27 September 2011 / Accepted: 27 September 2011 / Published online: 19 October 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract The term historical epistemology can be read in two different ways: (1) as referring to a program of historicizing epistemology, in the sense of a critique of traditional epistemologys tendency to gloss over historical context, or (2) as a manifesto of epistemologizing history, i.e. as a critique of radical historicist and relativist approaches. In this paper I will defend a position in this second sense. I show that one can account for the historical development and diversity of science without disavowing the relevance of a (normatively understood) epistemology and without denying the existence of human cognitive universals across historical and cultural differences. In support of my thesis, I draw on cognitive scientic research on causal and symbolic cognition, arguing that causal understanding constitutes a basic part of science, which, in the course of its development, becomes more and more superimposed by a culturally and historically variable symbolic superstructure.

The term historical epistemology can be read in two different ways: It can mean a program of historicizing epistemology, in the sense of a critique of traditional epistemologys tendency to gloss over historical context and to illegitimately generalize over radically different knowledge situations. It can, however, also be read as a manifesto of epistemologizing history, i.e. as a critique of radical historicist and relativist approaches, by arguing for a healthy dose of normative universality. In the following, I would like to defend a position in this second sense and try to show that one can account for the historical development and diversity of science without disavowing the relevance of a (normatively understood) epistemology and without denying the existence of human cognitive universals across

M. Heidelberger (&) t Tu bingen, Bursagasse 1, 72070 Tu bingen, Germany Universita e-mail: michael.heidelberger@uni-tuebingen.de

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historical and cultural differences.1 This position puts two types of human understanding to the fore of the scientic enterprise: on the one hand the special kinds of causal understanding in which humans differ from non-human animals, and on the other hand the special kinds of symbolic understanding in which we humans excel. The central idea is that causal understanding constitutes a basic part of science, which, in the course of its development, becomes more and more superimposed by a culturally and historically variable symbolic superstructure. The philosophical conception of science proposed here differs from others in taking results of current cognitive science on causal and symbolic understanding into account and by suggesting new ways of differentiating. My claim is thus the following: Historical change and cultural diversity can be accounted for without denying the existence of human cognitive universals, if one takes cognitive science on causal and symbolic cognition seriously. This thesis is therefore not just philosophically and historically relevant, but also for cognitive ve and like science. I am aware that for some readers my claim may sound na turning the wheel of the history of philosophy of science back to an obsolete positivist viewpoint. All I can do for the moment is to ask for some patience. I am condent that I shall be able to convince the skeptic that my position does not fall back into a period before Thomas Kuhn and others started to criticize the logical empiricist conception. My paper is divided into ve parts: In the rst section I shall review some current views of cognitive science on the development and formation of causal understanding in humans. Todays cognitive science has brought Piagets inuential theory of qualitative shifts in the cognitive development of children under pressure. Instead of supposing the succession of stages that bring about different schemas and worldviews, cognitive development seems to be a successive lling out of a basic frame of early understanding. This also applies to causal understanding in particular. In the second part, I shall try to assimilate historical and cultural diversity to this view: causal understanding in different cultures and different historical periods variesnot in the understanding of causality as such butin the empirical assumptions involved and in the way how domain-specic causal theories are applied. In the third section I will argue that scientic theories form a symbolic structure that is built on basic causal knowledge of the domain in question: Theories are symbolic systems into which special causal knowledge is embedded. The

ger (19321994) to whom this article is Such a view was also shared by my former teacher Lorenz Kru ger played a decisive role in setting up the institution by which this conference is hosted. dedicated. Kru The topic of this conference is a getting back to the central conception he had in mind for the Max ger Planck-Institute of the History of Science. Since 1996, the MPI offers an annual Lorenz Kru ger recruited me Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in his honor. Starting almost from the moment Kru for the preparation of a year-long research project on the history of probability and statistics at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Bielefeld (long before the foundation of the MPI was in sight), we were discussing, I am tempted to say: almost around-the-clock, problems of historical epistemology, although the term as such emerged only later in our discussions. The question that vexed us at the time was: How can the history of an epistemic concept like probability be written without historicizing too much, but also without putting history into a Procrustean bed of a priori philosophy. The gers original vision of the MPI. struggle to come to grips with this situation nally gave way to Kru

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symbolic dimension can become so entrenched that the causal content of the theory seems to have vanished. This view is of particular relevance to the status of scientic instruments: there are two types of instruments employed by mature theories: manipulative ones and symbolic ones. In the fourth part I shall sketch a case study from electricity theory of the nineteenth century in order to illustrate this point. Georg Simon Ohms theory of the electric circuit achieves both: an increase in causal knowledge about the use of electrical instruments and the integration of this knowledge into an extended and adapted symbolic structure. The fth part shortly deals with two approaches that have some similarity with the standpoint that is argued for in this paper.

1 Causality in Human Development I start from a distinction that is drawn in todays cognitive science between two kinds of causal cognition: arbitrary or associationist on the one hand and natural or inferential one on the other. This is also expressed as weak and strong causality respectively. Arbitrary causal understanding is acquired through associative learning of the consequences of ones own action, i.e. through learning from experienced regularities. Such understanding is present in humans and nonhuman animals alike. Inferential causal cognition, however, is an understanding that relates to events in the world independently of ones own action. This kind of understanding presupposes the ability to convey the power of an actor in producing some kind of action to the power of objects (other than the actor) in the world. This transfer is not just based on association but employs higher-order inferential reasoning processes. This is well expressed by Gopnik: Other animals [than humans] primarily understand causality in terms of the effects of their own actions on the world. In contrast, human beings combine that understanding with a view that equates the causal power of their own actions and those of objects independent of them (Gopnik 1998, p. 104). Babies possess weak causal cognition already at the age of 10 months and signs of strong causal cognition appear 8 months later. It is doubtful whether associationist understanding of regularities is really causal understanding in the true sense of the word at all, David Humes regularity theory notwithstanding. Associationists and inferentialists debate whether causal understanding is solely based on mechanisms like Pavlovian conditioning or whether it depends on higher forms of reasoning like cognitive models and hypothesis testing. And there are those who credit an inuence of both processes on o and Miller causal learning. (For an overview of the debate see Shanks 2010; Pinen 2007.) Even those who think that nonhuman causal cognition is signicantly more sophisticated than can be accounted for by traditional associationist theories agree that diagnostic, inferential reasoning abilities appear to be uniquely human. It seems secure to assume that reasoning about the unobservable causal-logical relation between one particular causal belief and another [ is] a uniquely human trait. (Penn and Povinelli 2007, p. 110f.) There are strong indications that humans have the ability to attribute unobservable states or processes not just to their conspecics but also to inanimate objects

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entities that exercise power on the world, independently of the action of the observer. Vonk and Povinelli therefore speak of the unobservability hypothesis and take the ability to refer to unobservable causal entities or processes as one of the important ways in which humans differ from other species. They claim that the ability to reason about causal forces is a unique specialization of humans, an ability that leads to profound differences between the cognitive systems of humans and all other primates (Vonk and Povinelli 2006, p. 365; cp. Povinelli 2004, esp. p. 38f.). Human causal reasoning includes the abilities to distinguish between genuine and spurious causes, to reason from an effect to a hitherto unknown cause and to elucidate ambiguous causal relations by active intervention (Penn et al. 2008, p. 118; cp. Tomasello 1999, p. 22; Schulz et al. 2007). In addition, humans are able to judge and discover novel causal relations by drawing analogical inferences from a known causal relation to an unknown one. Strong causal reasoning is of great advantage to the human species: it makes humans more creative, exible and foresightful in dealing with problems in their environment than nonhumans. In addition, humans can transmit acquired causal reasoning and insight to later generations. Some authors claim that the abilities in which humans differ from nonhumans are of social origin: Tomasello e.g. writes: Human causal understanding evolved rst in the social domain to comprehend others as intentional agents. By attributing intentions to conspecics humans are able to explain behavior in a causal way. [T]he uniquely human ability to understand external events in terms of mediating intentional/causal forces emerged rst in human evolution to allow individuals to predict and explain the behavior of conspecics and has since been transported to deal with the behavior of inert objects (Tomasello 1999, p. 24f.). In other words, the cognitive capacity to reason about causes has its origin in the theory of mind, i.e. in our ability to impute mental states like beliefs and desires to our conspecics and then to causally reason from these states to the behavior of these agents (or vice versa). It is plausible to assume that language plays an important role in conveying social understanding to the comprehension of the physical world. So Vonk and Povinelli suspect that the underlying abstractive depth that makes reasoning about unobservables possible co-evolved with natural language (Vonk and Povinelli 2006, p. 365). Besides the hypothesis that strong causality originates in social practice, there is the alternative that takes technology as the prime mover in the evolution of the human brain (Wolpert 2006, p. 69). Human understanding of cause and effect is then seen as having evolved in tandem with tool use and language and the mutual positive feedback between them. It has been technology that resulted from causal beliefs, not social interaction, that has driven human evolution (Wolpert 2003, p. 1709). What can be said now about the principles employed by humans in causal theorizing? How do these principles change in ontogenetic development? The answers to these two questions are controversial and depend on the view one holds of the exact nature of these principles. There are several alternatives possible in the debate: Causal principles are either domain-general or domain-specic, they are either acquired or innate, and they are radically transformed in the course of ontogenetic development or they get gradually supplemented and rened when the

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cognizing subject shifts from one cognitive phase to another. It seems that in recent years there is a denite move away from the rst side of each of these dichotomies to the second one. One can illustrate this change with the current criticism of Jean Piaget. Piaget assumed several successive stages in the development of causal cognition in young humans (Piaget 1930). Each stage is characterized by self-contained logical principles that profoundly determine the way how the world is represented by the child and how causality is conceived. The principles used are domain-general; they do not change in an essential way if one moves, say, from the social domain to the domain of inanimate objects during one and the same developmental phase. These domain-general principles profoundly change, according to Piaget, or are replaced by new ones, if an individual abandons one stage of development and enters a higher one. In the rst sensorimotor phase, which can last up to about the age of 24 months, according to Piaget, the child does not dispose of any causal insight because he still lacks some basic schemata, e.g. the idea of object permanency. His world still carries magic features with it. Only at about 1824 months, the infant enters the pre-operational stage mainly as a result of acquiring language, i.e. of the ability to symbolically represent reality. He holds fast to an animistic view of the world and of the way objects interact with each other, but not yet to a genuine notion of causality. With about 6 years, Piaget maintains, the child shifts to a concrete operational stage where some logic and true causality is present, but during which the subjective appearance of objects is still so overwhelming that it cannot be overridden by more abstract information like for example conservation principles. Only at the stage of adolescence, from about 12 years on, the human enters a formal operational phase where he can fully abstract from his egocentric position and develop an intentional as well as a mechanistic view of the world that nally leaves behind earlier animistic views for good and all. The transition from one stage to the next is seen by Piaget as driven by the childs active interference with the world. The child always tries to assimilate new experiences as much as possible to his present worldview, but at some point, when the assimilation gets too articial and complex, a process of accommodation sets in with the child giving up some of his dominant views in favor of new ones. The result is a qualitative change of worldview in which the old principles are abandoned and the subject shifts to a higher cognitive stage. The child is thus seen by Piaget as someone who starts in complete ignorance of the causal principles of the world and is forced to go through a series of irrational misconceptions before can gradually gure out the true workings of causality in a process of assimilation and accommodation. Todays cognitive science is rather critical of these views and sees child development in a different light. There is evidence that children are already born with some idea of causality or at least that they acquire causal notions at a much earlier stage than Piaget allowed. Children as young as 2 years old can make causal predictions, provide causal explanations, and understand counterfactual causal claims (Gopnik et al. 2004, p. 4). These early notions do not, however, apply to all domains alike. Causal understanding of children varies according to domains of intuitive physics, biology and psychology and their reasoning seems to

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be guided and constrained by causal assumptions and concepts that depend on the domain. Contrary to Piaget, children do not go through incommensurable stages of misconceived causal understanding but they gradually enrich their early conceptions of causality in order to deal with more and more cases.

2 Cultural and Historical Inuence on Causal Cognition What are the consequences of this new understanding for the cultural and historical dimension of causal cognition? If causal cognition grows and develops by enrichment, it seems highly probable that cultures and historical epochs start from a common understanding of everyday causality. If they differ they do this in the assumptions about the workings of causal powers that have resulted in different traditions of causal thought. This branching out of original causal understanding, as one could say, into different traditions does not mean, however, that different concepts of causality are employed. It is consistent with the idea that what varies are the causal assumptions, but not the concepts themselves. One must always distinguish between the concept of a causal connection and the empirical theory that says under which conditions this connection holds. Thus Boyer writes: A clear distinction must be made between the concept of cause or causal connection on the one hand, and the assumptions describing the causal propensities of various objects or entities on the other (Boyer 1995, p. 618). Take for example the magical belief of certain indigenous cultures that stealing a lock of hair from somebody and reciting some special incantations over it in special circumstances will make the person ill. This kind of causal understanding is certainly at odds with the causal outlook of Western culture. Yet it does not imply a different concept of causation, but only a strange empirical assumption about the causal power of hair and of incantations. So the difference in causal assumptions of different cultures can be an important source of diversity without that incommensurable new concepts of causality have to be introduced. If we take this to heart, we can avoid two mistakes in philosophizing about the cultural and historical diversity of causal claims prevalent in anthropology, psychology and history (cp. Boyer 1995, p. 616f.): The rst mistake is the belief that causal conceptions are wholly culture-specic and that they depend on different world-views or conceptual schemes of a culture across the physical, biological and psychological domains. This would be analogous to Piagets view that the childs conception of causality (or the lack thereof) depends on his conception of the world, or the schema of interpretation, that is allowed by the cognitive stage he goes through. Only an act of choice, due to the logical structure characteristic of the particular stage of intellectual development can account for the presence of one particular conception among the collection of possible conceptions (Piaget 1930, p. 256). The second mistake that can now be avoided is to assume that the competence and manner of causal reasoning is domain-general, i.e., that, once acquired, it depends only on the developmental stage of an individual, i.e. on the logicomathematical structure of its thought (and, maybe, on the culture and historical

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phase to which it belongs). Instead it seems that knowledge, and especially causal knowledge is acquired domain by domain and that the way how knowledge is divided into domains is partly determined on an innate basis. Individual competence varies considerably between domains and there is little transfer or generalization of knowledge across the domain boundaries. There are also domain-specic constraints that accelerate or slow down the acquisition of certain knowledge (Hatano and Inagaki 2000, esp. pp. 267269). As already pointed out, many ve physics, researchers assume core domains of human thought that include a na psychology and biology. They also assume that to each of these core domains belongs a characteristic set of causal conceptions: mechanical causality in physics, intentional causality in psychology and teleological or functional causality in biology. So in the end we can argue for the following change of perspective: Human beings do use different causal concepts (or principles of causation, as Boyer expresses it). The difference in these concepts is, however, not the result of some intrinsic cultural and/or historical diversity that makes them incommensurable with each other. What varies historically and culturally are the causal empirical assumptions. And these assumptions can be tested across different cultures and historical periods.

3 Causal and Symbolic Dimension of Scientic Theory The foregoing discussion of causal knowledge is not yet enough for a full-blown historical epistemology. The main point must be criteria of evaluating real mature scientic theories and not just everyday causal judgments. In order to sketch an epistemology that can fulll this requirement, we have to look for special features in which scientic theories differ from mere everyday causal knowledge. It is to be expected that the answers we get to this question vary with the specic causal domain of a theory. I think there are two important features of scientic theories that have not been touched upon in this article yet, but that have to be taken into account in order to bridge the gap between common folk science and a real scientic theory. First of all, we have to take into consideration that many, if not most, contemporary scientic theories, at least of physics, seem to have lost their causal content. They seem to have become instead elaborate symbolic systems in which one looks in vain for causal claims. Bertrand Russell famously held causality in physics to be a relic of a bygone age (Russell 1917, p. 180). But also Thomas Kuhn thought that the causal character of physics has dwindled down in the course of time to the causa formalis in the Aristotelian sense. The explanation of a particular phenomenon is given by an appropriate differential equation from which without grave distortion no active agent, no isolated cause temporally prior to the effect can be retrieved. This has given rise to a change of the conception of cause. Cause in physics has again become cause in the broader sense, that is explanation (Kuhn 1977, pp. 26, 28). Mature physical theories seem to have moved far away from simple causal knowledge that humans, children or adults, employ in their everyday life.

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Nevertheless I still see an important connection between a-causal theories and causal claims, although this connection is not at all obvious at rst sight and can be identied sometimes only by complicated considerations. To my mind, the most important place where abstract theory meets concrete causality is the scientic instrument. The special dependency of scientic theories on scientic instruments is the second feature of scientic theories that must be taken into account if one wants to develop a historical epistemology rich enough to deal with a mature scientic outlook. In explicating the idea of the symbolic character of mature scientic theories I want to start with discussing a proposal by the philosopher of science (and physicist) Pierre Duhem made more than a 100 years ago. He set up the following principle as essential for experimental physics: An experiment in physics is the precise observation of phenomena accompanied by an interpretation of these phenomena; this interpretation substitutes for the concrete data really gathered by observation abstract and symbolic representations which correspond to them by virtue of the theories admitted by the observer. The result of an experiment in physics is an abstract and symbolic judgment (Duhem 1991 [1906], p. 147). Duhem gives several examples of what he has in mind. It is worth dealing in some detail with his rst example, the measuring of the resistance of a coil in a physics laboratory: Go into this laboratory; draw near this table crowded with so much apparatus: an electric battery, copper wire wrapped in silk, vessels lled with mercury, coils, a small iron bar carrying a mirror. An observer plunges the metallic stem of a rod, mounted with rubber, into small holes; the iron oscillates and, by means of the mirror tied to it, sends a beam of light over to a celluloid ruler, and the observer follows the movement of the light beam on it. There, no doubt, you have an experiment; by means of the vibration of this spot of light, this physicist minutely observes the oscillations of the piece of iron. Ask him now what he is doing. Is he going to answer: I am studying the oscillations of the piece of iron carrying this mirror? No, he will tell you that he is measuring the electrical resistance of a coil. If you are astonished and ask him what meaning these words have, and what relation they have to the phenomena he has perceived and which you have at the same time perceived, he will reply that your question would require some very long explanations, and he will recommend that you take a course in electricity (145). Duhem draws again the conclusion that this experimentlike any experiment in physicsinvolves two parts: (1) the observation of certain facts in common experience which requires nothing but alert attention and a practiced eyein short, as he later put it, only common sense brought to greater attentiveness (180); (2) the interpretation of the observed facts, or, as he commented, the formulation of a judgment interrelating certain abstract and symbolic ideas which theories alone correlate with the facts really observed (147). You are unable to attach meaning to this judgment if you do not know the physical theories admitted by the author [of an experimental report in physics]. (148). In the light of the foregoing, Duhems remarks have to be corrected, however, in two respects: First, what Duhem calls observation of concrete data in common experience is really the observation of causal processes. He almost admits this but does not make anything out of it: The result of common experience [when facts are

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observed], he wrote, is the perception of a relation between diverse concrete facts. Such a fact having been articially produced some other fact has resulted from it. In sciences that are still close to their origins, like physiology or certain branches of chemistry where mathematical theory has not yet introduced its symbolic representations, the experimenter can reason directly on the facts: For instance, a frog has been decapitated, and the left leg has been pricked with a needle, the right leg has been set into motion and has tried to move away from the needle: there you have the result of an experiment in physiology. It is a recital of concrete and obvious facts, and in order to understand it, not a word of physiology need be known (147). Again, to set the poor frogs leg into motion by pricking the other leg with a needle after he has been decapitated is, of course, the vivid description of a causal process. Second: Mature theories exert their capacity to correlate and interrelate symbolic ideas with concrete facts, i.e. their ability to interpret facts, according to Duhem, always and only in virtue of the causal power of scientic instruments. This becomes especially clear in the second example which Duhem uses to illustrate his argument. The experiment in question deals with the compressibility of gases investigated by Regnault: He takes a certain quantity of gas, encloses it in a glass tube, keeps the temperature constant, and measures the pressure the gas supports and the volume it occupies. (145). After describing the exact course of the experiment, Duhem asks what volume, pressure and temperature mean: Now, what is the value of the volume occupied by the gas, what is the value of the pressure it supports, what is the degree of temperature to which it is brought? Are they three concrete objects? No, they are three abstract symbols which only physical theory connects to the facts really observed (146). How is this connection achieved? I quote the beginning of Duhems solution to the problem: In order to form the rst of these abstractions, the value of the volume of the enclosed gas, and to make it correspond with the observed fact, namely, the mercury becoming level with a certain line-mark, it was necessary to calibrate the tube, that is to say, to appeal not only to the abstract ideas of arithmetic and geometry and the abstract principles on which they rest, but also to the abstract idea of mass and the hypotheses of general mechanics as well as of celestial mechanics which justify the use of the balance for the comparison of masses [] and so on and so forth. In other words: It is auxiliary theories (as I call them) that provide the interpretation of concrete facts by transferring symbolic meaning to scientic instruments. Only as a result of this transfer is the required interpretation of observed facts achieved. This way of reading Duhem partially explicates my earlier claim that instruments serve as windows to the causal dimension of mature scientic theories. What kind of moral can we draw from these considerations? The usual consequence suggested is that one should abandon the theory-observation dichotomy decreed by logical empiricists and accept the theory-ladenness of observational terms. This move denies the existence of theory-neutral data of observation and negates an objective court of appeal between competing theories. Yet in the light of the foregoing the consequence can also be to transfer the basic empiricist role of observation to causal claims at the level of common experience. This means that a scientic theory is only adequate if it can be connected with the special way we

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human beings causally deal with the world in our common experience. Such a connection can be achieved by scientic instruments where the causal and the symbolic dimension of a theory meet. Causal judgements, however culturally variable [i.e., in my terminology: symbolically interpreted], are constrained by a series of universal intuitive principles (Boyer 1995, p. 615) that are universally valid across cultural and historical variation. At rst sight, this might seem to concede too much to logical empiricism. One should, however, remember that causality has no place in (logical) empiricism and is very much alien to it. In a way, logical empiricists do not accept a surplus meaning for inferential causality over associationist one. My view is thus a kind of compromise between a logical empiricist outlook and a post-positivist conception like that of Thomas Kuhn: In accordance with empiricism and with current cognitive science, but against Thomas Kuhn, I claim that a scientic theory is adequate only if it can be connected with some theory-neutral experience, that is, our common causal intuitions. And in accordance with Thomas Kuhn, but against logical empiricists, I maintain that causal meaning has a symbolic dimension. In both cases instruments play the mediating role. My conception is in line with others who see an analogy between cognitive development and scientic theory formation and change (Gopnik 1997). They claim accordingly that scientists and children both employ the same particularly powerful and exible set of cognitive devices (Gopnik 1997, p. 486). Besides children and scientists one should also include prehistoric humans in this list. There are three factors, however, that, from a traditional philosophy of science point of view, seem to make a stand against this analogy. The rst factor concerns the role of causal terms. The formation of mature contemporary theories, as seen by traditional philosophers of science, rarely requires the consideration of causes, and if it does, they are appropriated by theory beyond recognition: Causes certainly are connected with effects [] because our theories connect them, not because the world is held together by cosmic glue. [] The notions behind the cause x and the effect y are intelligible only against a pattern of theory, namely one which puts guarantees on inferences from x to y (Hanson 1958, p. 64). For cognitive science, however, concepts of cause and effect would not have been so important in the cognitive development of humans, if they had not stood alone, independently of theories. Thus in order to show that theory formation and cognitive development are on a par, one has to revalue causality in mature scientic theories. The second factor interfering with cognitive development as seen by todays cognitive science, but dear to philosophers of science, is the doctrine of meaning change of a theorys terms. According to this doctrine, the meanings of terms in theories are determined (partially or wholly) by the principles of the theory in which they occur. Hence changes in theory result in changes in meaning. It is this holistic character of meaning that led Thomas Kuhn to his incommensurability thesis. Yet cognitive science sees (at least) causal terms occurring in basic theories as independent from theoretical content. Although human dealings with the world are highly symbolic, change of theory does not change the meanings of basic causal terms which we use to express our causal beliefs.

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A third factor that is apt to produce tension between philosophy of science and cognitive science is the way how scientic instruments are regarded. According to philosophy of science, scientic equipment and devices do not particularly stand out against scientic theories. They are rarely treated by philosophers as something that is worthwhile to study because it does not fall into the context of justication or is seen as a piece of theory. Yet from a developmental point of view, tool use was decisive for the development of causal beliefs. Tool use, with language, has transformed human evolution and led to what we now think of as beliefs (Wolpert 2006, p. 82). It is not the other way around as philosophers are inclined to think. So it is only natural to regard scientic instruments as an advanced product in line with tool use. A key feature of hominid tools is the use of secondary tools, that is, objects used as tools in order to make another tool (Wolpert 2006, p. 73). Scientic instruments can be seen as another kind of secondary tools: tools in order to further develop causal beliefs. The conception of scientic instruments I have proposed solves the problems philosophers of science have with the priority of causality over theory and with the way how theoretical terms get their meaning. Scientic instruments are the place where the causal signicance of mature scientic theories becomes visible and where this causal role gets its symbolic meaning. If the symbolic articulation of the theory stands in the foreground, the instrument fullls a representative function. If the causal-manipulative content is especially asked for, they play a constructive and/or productive role. In both cases, however, the other function is not absent. Although a thermometer is a representative instrument because it is built in order to determine the place a particular heat state has in the order of temperatures, it fullls this function by causally mediating between the heat state and the length of the mercury column. A telescope is a productive instrument because it lets us see things that we could not see without it. It can also be used to compare the size of faraway objects although this would be produced by a representative role.

4 A Case-Study: Ohms Theory In order to reduce and mitigate the highly programmatic character of my claims and in order to specify in more detail the crucial role scientic instruments play for the symbolic content of a theory, I would like to illustrate my approach with a short case-study. I choose Georg Simon Ohms (17891854) investigations of the galvanic circuit which culminated in the discovery of what is called Ohms law. Before we are able, however, to analyze Ohms instruments in the desired way, the distinctions I have already introduced between manipulative and symbolic instruments should be extended. (For an even more ne-grained differentiation see Heidelberger 2003, 2007.) A manipulative instrument functions by exerting a desired causal inuence on a phenomenon. There are two main types of manipulative instruments that can be called productive and constructive. The goal of productive instruments is to produce phenomena that normally do not appear in the realm of direct human experience. So an electrostatic generator produces electrical effects that are not accessible to human experience without it or

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without functionally equivalent instruments. The air-pump creates a vacuum that would otherwise not exist. The aim of a constructive instrument is to produce an effect in its pure form, without any complications or additions that could spoil its appearance or that are otherwise alien to it. The goal is very often to shield an effect from disturbances. The Leyden jar is a perfect example of this. It was designed in order to ll up electricity which is otherwise too elusive. Another purpose of this type of instrument is to tame a phenomenon, so that it can be manipulated, modeled or controlled in a certain desired way. A symbolic instrument is designed to represent symbolically the place a natural phenomenon occupies in relation to phenomena of the same kind and thus to understand the ordering of the phenomena: by size or by intensity etc. Examples of instruments that fulll such a function are clocks, balances, electrometers, galvanometers, thermometers etc. One could them also call information-transforming instruments, because they transform the input information about the world `into a more useful output format while preserving the order of the phenomena vis-a vis the attributes in question. A thermometer, for example, transforms the different states of heat that are accessible to our normal heat-sense into different, visually accessible states of the instrument (different heights of the mercury column). The ordering of the heat states is or should be preserved in the order of the heights of the column. When we ask for the causal signicance of a representing instrument we can say that it is designed to avoid as much as possible an effect on the measured object or effectit should, on the contrary, be able to register causal inuences that the represented object or phenomenon exerts on it. The ideal representing instrument is non-invasive and thus neither productive nor constructive. Now, Ohm used two kinds of instruments in his investigation of electric circuits: a thermoelectric source of electric current, made of bismuth and copper, that has recently become available, and an undamped magnetic torsion balance that was modeled after Coulombs torsion balance. Coulomb had used it for measuring electrostatic force, but Ohm employed it as a precision instrument for measuring the exciting force of the current or the strength of the magnetic effect on the conductorthat is, the intensity of the current; i.e., he used it as a galvanometer. The thermoelectric apparatus played a double role, both as a productive and a constructive device: a productive role because it should produce voltaic electricity and not a chemical one. (It should be borne in mind that at the time, it was not clear yet that there is just one kind of electricity. Different electricities were classied according to their sources.) The rst constructive role it was designed to play was to produce electrical action in its pure or idealized form, as Ohm thought, without any chemical contamination, so to speak. It was also supposed to produce a stable source of electricity. All other contemporary sources of dynamic electricity were instable, vacillating highly in their electric action. The second instrument Ohm used, the galvanometer turned torsion balance, is clearly a symbolic instrument. Ohms use of the balance is modeled after the socalled fundamental experience of Hans Christian rsted who proved the effect of a current carrying wire on the behavior of a magnetic needle. When Ohm took the behavior of the torsion balance hanging over a current carrying wire as the criterion of the presence of current intensity, he also made constructive use of his

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instrumentthis time by stipulation: all other effects of the wire are either themselves caused by the current intensity or do not, by at, count as a sign of intensity. The constructive and productive usage Ohm made of his instruments takes place on a causal level that is theory-neutral (relative to Ohms own theory) and guided by the causal possibilities available with the instruments in question. The symbolic or representative level is superimposed on the manipulative one. Ohm attains for his experiments a symbolic signicance by three means: First, by introducing a symbolic generalization, as Kuhn called it, that functions as a unifying formula. Second, his approach enabled Ohm to create and dene a new theoretical concept, the concept of electric resistance or conductivity. And third, he was able to give a theory of the instruments involvedthat is, to substitute for the concrete objects composing these instruments an abstract and schematic representation, as Duhem (1991 [1906], p. 153) had formulated it. This representation was given in terms of the concept of the galvanic circuit that was his invention. As already noted, Ohm nally arrived through his measurements at the formula that is known as Ohms law and which can be written as: I = V/R. The road to this formula was very winding and tortuous, and Ohm had to make many attempts, both in a practical as well as in a theoretical respect, to obtain his result. It is highly signicant that his rst theoretical conception of electric activity in a closed circuit was guided by the Coulomb paradigm of static electricity and that he was able to describe this already with some version of his law. This implied a concept of resistance similar to the mechanical resistance in friction phenomena. Later Ohm modeled electric conduction in analogy to heat conduction as Joseph Fourier had developed it in his theory of heat. In this sense, resistance becomes a truly theoretical or theoryladen term that is not yet present at the causal level of Ohms experiments; it is reached and formulated only at the symbolic level. He could avoid direct measurements of resistance by comparing the circuit in question with a standard circuit. (For more details see Heidelberger 2003.) Ohm could also apply his new mathematical formula to the galvanometer and the electrometer as parts of a circuit and thereby predict their behavior in many new cases. Ultimately it was the practical usability of Ohms law for all kinds of measurements in the circuit and especially for technical applications, such as in electrical telegraphy, which in the end led to its acceptance. It was soon recognized that Ohms law was completely neutral with regard to the exact theory of the origin of the electromotive force of electricity; it holds irrespective of whether that force is regarded as being derived from the contact of dissimilar metals [as its founder himself believed] or as referable to chemical agency, as the Royal Society wrote when it dedicated the Copley medal to Ohm in 1841. The excursion into Ohms theory was supposed to show that a typical theory has two levels, a primary causal one, which is theory-free in relation to the new theory, and a secondary one on a supervening symbolic level when theory takes possession of the direct causal experience with scientic instruments and when the adjustment of a causal picture to a theoretical and symbolic context is called for. There are many cases where rst level experimentation is and can be pursued without taking into account the secondary level.

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5 Similar Approaches In this chapter I discuss attempts by Jed Z. Buchwald and Xiang Chen to show that Kuhns difculties with incommensurability and relativism can be overcome by considering the important role that scientic instruments have to play in the development of science (Buchwald 1992; Chen 1997). Buchwald sees scientic practice as the separation of the objects investigated by scientists into scientic kinds. These kinds typically form a taxonomic tree. There is no partial overlap between kinds, that is, nothing which is embraced by a given class within a particular group of scientic kinds can be both an a-thing and a b-thing, where a and b are group kinds, unless all a-things are b-things or vice versa (Buchwald 1992, p. 41). Two trees are commensurable, if one tree can directly be translated into the other or if it can be grafted on the other without disturbing the existing structure. Otherwise they are incommensurable. This kind of incommensurability, however, is tamed because it does not have the puzzling aspects of Kuhns original incommensurability anymore and can now fruitfully be accepted even by those historians of science who have criticized Kuhns approach. Buchwald assigns experiment the central place in the construction of taxonomies: First, experimental work divides the elements of the tree from one another: sitting at the nodes or branch-points of the tree, experimental devices assign something to this or to that category. Second, experimental work may generate new kinds that can either be assimilated by, or that may disrupt, the existing structure (Buchwald 1992, p. 44). Buchwalds scheme can be translated into my approach if we limit it to productive instruments. In this case, as we have seen, phenomena are produced that do normally not appear in the realm of direct human experience. Buchwald did not have the aim to propose a theory of scientic instruments, so he cannot be criticized for limiting himself to just one type. There is, however, more to Kuhns incommensurability than different taxonomic trees produced by one type of instrument. The symbolic character of scientic theories is lost in this approach. Buchwald neglects in addition that scientic instruments can have paradigmatic signicance for Kuhn. Chen starts from Buchwalds considerations and stresses the point that science does not only create successive classications of phenomena, as Buchwald has it, but also instruments, procedures, and skills that supply the tools for our interactions with the real world. Even if theories cannot be compared with each other in relation to their taxonomies and are thus incommensurable, we can evaluate them objectively in terms of their connections with instruments. From this he draws the conclusion that the instrumental aspect of science allows for incommensurability without relativism (Chen 1997, p. 270f.). Chens thesis is very sketchy at this point. I can very much agree with him, but again: the symbolic dimension that is present in each instrument is not discussed at all.

6 Conclusion In this paper, I tried to show that a historical epistemology is possible that searches for universal criteria of scientic development. There is a growing consensus in

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cognitive science that humans have a strong concept of causality at their disposal that is partly innate and accessible across cultures and historical variation. Yet this causal understanding is always embedded into a symbolic understanding that varies highly with culture and historical development. The place where the causal and the symbolic meet, so to say, is not the theory but the scientic instrument. Instruments typically come in two types, manipulative and symbolic, depending on whether they serve more the causal or the symbolic context of the scientic activity. I argue that my considerations amount to a historical epistemology in the true sense of the word ve that neither falls prey to relativism and bottomless historicism nor to na positivism or a procrustean a priori epistemology. The historical epistemology suggested here can achieve both aims: it can give a systematic account of the plurality of causes, as recently demanded by philosophers, but it is also able to allow for a genuine historicity of causes as it is required by an adequate historiography of science.

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