Frank-Landes Debate, Page 8
Andre Gunder Frank: Go ahead and think, go ahead and think your whole...
David Landes: That's right, yes. This thing about contingency, that's a very interesting point, and I call your attention to it. Economists have been fascinated by chaos theory and some of them are very interested in contingency and sudden changes. In particular, some of them have talked about past dependency. A very small change, persisting and growing over time and dictating an entirely new path for, say, an economy or civilization and the like. Now, I have to tell you, and I told them at Chicago, I don't buy that. I mean, I can see why mathematically, you can produce a model in which a small change grows and grows and grows and grows with enormous divergence from an original position, it's possible, but I do thing, you see, that the process of social and economic change, is complex, that there are processes that are found in societies to respond to and correct what are deemed unfortunate directions and that, therefore, over time, I don't know of any case where there is a major change in the character of the society that can be accounted for by a very small event. It reminds me of the time when I used to read “Amazing Stories” and “Astounding Stories” and you had these people, you know? I remember one story that people are led to go backward in time, which I think is impossible, and they're led to go backward in time... I mean, scientifically impossible. To go backward in time and then they can see a world, you see, but they're told that they must stand on this platform and not, in any way, enter or interfere with what they're seeing. And what happens in this story is that someone reaches out and catches a butterfly or something and then when he comes back home, the elections have gone to the republicans instead of the democrats and so on... All because of this butterfly. Well, it's a cute story, but I don't see that sort of thing happening. And, there, I did disagree with the economists at Chicago. Alright. You want to say something?
William Fowler: Professor Frank, you still have your seven minutes.
Andre Gunder Frank: Let me use `em on the next question.
David Landes: I'm flabbergasted.
Andre Gunder Frank: Well, I've gotten a bit flabbergasted, also, you know?
William Fowler: The next question, then, is from Professor Landes to Professor Frank. And I will read it now.
“Lament re: Eurocentrism of treatments of science reject early 17th century European scientific advance. Even more, argues that European science made little or no difference to economy before the second half of the 19th century. Simply not true.” Professor Frank.
Andre Gunder Frank: I hesitate to appeal to authority, but, I will. Even if authority can also be wrong sometimes, even most of the time. To be sure the scientists of the 18th century could not have explained why and how a steam engine worked. Do you recognize that?
David Landes: Yes.
Andre Gunder Frank: David Landes.
David Landes: Right.
Andre Gunder Frank: One authority. Okay. There are other authorities. Francis Bacon lived long time ago, long before the industrial revolution, but he already observed that there was no connection between science and technology at his time. Everybody from Francis Bacon to Thomas Kuhn has observed the same thing. Steve Chapin just wrote a book, University of Chicago press, about, and this is a quotation from his first sentence: “there was no 17th century scientific revolution and this book is about it.” And he also goes through the whole kit and kaboodle and says there's no direct effect of the 17th or 18th century science on technology. Bob Adams, the most eminent, I would say, archaeologist the United States has produced, then, secretary, meaning director, of the Smithsonian Institution, now retired, wrote a book called The Path of Fire, on the development of technology. Curiously, although he's an archaeologist who studied the, both, West Asia and Central America, one of the few who have, and who, into archaeology, brought the importance of trade and so forth. None the less, he does a book which is totally Eurocentric in the sense that it's also a tunnel of history from Meso, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Orient Express on the Westward track through Western Europe and the United States. While he examines the relation between science and technology in at least a dozen sectors and case studies and he finds that there is no relation in any of them. Rosenberg and Birdzell, who are entirely in Landes camp on why it is that the West grew, none the less, agree and say, if you like, I'll find their quotation. Cohen in his 1994 book, The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographic Inquiry, which, at the time, I wrote, was the latest cat's meow on this question, is very clear on the same thing. He even goes so far as to say scientific revolution, the 17th century scientific revolution has already done its useful service and it's time to discard it. Except for David Landes. For you, the scientists, scientific revolution is still doing a useful service, because you're still basing, using it as a crutch for your analysis. So you haven't found time to discard it. Everybody else who has looked at this has found that what you say is simply not true, is true. What you say simply is not true, now I don't know what to ask of the audience, here. That I say this is a myth and he says what Gunder Frank says is a myth. I, at least, look at the evidence and I look at others who have looked at the evidence and all of the evidence is crystal clear that before 1870 there was 0.0 impact of science on technology. And, since, one of your heroes is Isaac Newton in the 17th century, recall that Isaac Newton was an alchemist. That's what he believed in. So, science need not and did not have the slightest impact on the industrial revolution, which, incidentally, happened two centuries after. One and two centuries after the alleged 17th century scientific revolution. The trouble is that David has a vested interest in this, of course, because he's written books on clocks and spectacles and has been trying to, on the basis of his Clockwork Orange, which was a myth, if you remember that movie. On the basis of this mythical Clockwork Orange, to build this huge, enormous theory about the rise of the West and it simply falls by the wayside. Sir.
David Landes: Well, you know, when you talk about Tom Kuhn and Floris Cohen, you're talking about old friends. And I'll have to check on the Kuhn thing. Floris Cohen I don't agree with you about. You know, just because Tom Kuhn, who was my colleague at Berkeley and whom I knew from way back when says something about science not effecting technology, that is not finding application, it just means that Kunh doesn't know what he's talking about, that's all.
Andre Gunder Frank: I said Francis Bacon to Kuhn. Everybody.
David Landes: Yeah, everybody, not at all. If you want to find out about the role of science, let's take your steam engine. It's true, and until the mid 19th century, really, no one could really understand why the steam engine did what it did. But they had benefited from all manner of scientific investigations of vacuums, of pressure, of the role of pressure on vessels, going back to the 17th century, which told them all kinds of things and provided the basis for the sort of thing that brought about a steam engine in the early 18th century. The first decade of the 18th century. Maybe if you count the, it was some earlier work already in 1698, but I'll take it with Newcomen and about 1708. This is a hundred years before they could explain why it happened, but all that previous science made all the difference to these people. You take navigation, you're shaking your head. You'll talk later.
Andre Gunder Frank: If the scientist doesn't understand it, then how can what the scientists are saying contribute to it? I don't understand.
Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 / Page 6 / Page 7 / Page 8 / Page 9 / Page 10 / Page 11 / Page 12
Photo 1 / Photo 2 / Photo 3 / Photo 4 / Photo 5 / Photo 6 / Photo 7 / Photo 8 / Photo
