The n-Category Café

I ran across another passage of MacIntyre yesterday that I’d like to share:

Let me cast the point I am trying to make about Galileo in a way which, at first sight, is perhaps paradoxical. We are apt to suppose that because Galileo was a peculiarly great scientist, therefore he has his own peculiar place in the history of science. I am suggesting instead that it is because of his peculiarly important place in the history of science that he is accounted a peculiarly great scientist. The criterion of a successful theory is that it enables us to understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way. It, at one and the same time, enables us to understand why its predecessors have to be rejected or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory could have remained credible. It introduces new standards for evaluating the past. It recasts the narrative which constitutes the continuous reconstruction of the scientific tradition. (The Tasks of Philosophy, p. 11)

I take it that MacIntyre’s saying there’s nothing beyond being a great scientist than what would be captured by a proper history of the field. Of course, we could write a bad history of the natural sciences and omit to mention Galileo. It would be bad because it was unjust, and because it would fail to serve its readers well, by omitting to tell them of an important stage on the path to the best present understanding. MacIntyre’s claim presumably also means that there can be no great scientist who makes endless discoveries in his laboratory but never shares them with the community, unless we’re allowed to write histories which say “Had X’s discoveries been known…”. This bears on the point of a practitioner’s responsibility to contribute to the ongoing dramatic narrative which their practice represents.