Reply

Abstract

In Grammar of Assent (1870), which I treat in Victorian Relativity as a signal text of modernistic relativistic skepticism (despite its determined assertion of the reality of "objective truth" and "absolute and unconditional" certitude [293, 47]), John Henry Newman illustrates his thesis about the inefficacy of logical reasoning and the indeterminacy of factual evidence with reference to nineteenth-century scholarly controversies about the historicity of the Trojan War and the interpretation of notorious textual cruxes in Shakespeare. It is an illusion to suppose that learned disputes like these, not to mention more momentous ones, are resolvable by means of scholarly examination of evidence, declares Newman. This is because "each of us looks at the world in his own way" (291), a principle that the creed of analytic logic seeks but fails to transcend. Thus in any significant scholarly matter, experts are bound to come to conflicting conclusions no matter how rigorously and fair-mindedly they study the evidence; "the conclusions vary with the particular writer, for each writes from his own point of view and with his own principles, and these admit of no common measure" (287). "Hence the categorical contradictions between one writer and another, which abound" (288). This early exposition of what T. S. Kuhn was later to speak of as the incommensurability of "paradigms" in science finds its most recent illustration in the reviews of my book by Bernard Lightman and Suzy Anger.