With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine, without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Be inspired to explore your inner creativity with Viola Davis' memoir Finding Me. Find what peaks your imagination with Audible. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. My name's Daniel. I'm joined today by Margarita. How are you doing? Hey, damn. I'm good. It's been a busy time in the office preparing for our upcoming festival, which, for those of you who don't know, is happening on the 21st and 22nd of September, by Ken Woodhouse and Mercedes. If you're as excited as we are, go check out our speaker lineup and our debate program on how the light gets in, dot org. Today, we've got an in-depth interview with a historian of science, Mina Kanales. She explores how scientists tend to get the history of discovery and can be plagued by a Madre and Steve's called demons. But before we hand over to Jimena, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on your platform of choice and visit ii.tv for hundreds more podcasts, videos, and articles from the world's leading thinkers. Hey, Mina Kanales. Welcome to how the light gets in. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. A pleasure to talk to you. So you're a historian of science and philosophy. People often study the history of philosophy because it helps them do philosophy. It helps them inform their current debates and their ways of investigating questions. When it comes to science, scientists very rarely study the history of science very closely. So if the history of science isn't useful to scientists, what is it useful for? Well, the history of science should be useful for scientists and for other people, for everybody. I mean, in one sense, you can argue that the only real natural experiment that's available to us is history. Scientists, you know, the most obvious thing too, scientists are inventing and doing new things. And if they don't know what has been done in the past, they're basically paralyzed. So it is essential. Science is based on this idea of creating novelty and progress. And you cannot do that unless you know history. There is quite a bit of scientists who don't know history and are reinventing the wheel. And as a historian of science, sometimes it's the sad chore of saying like, well, actually, you know, Helmholtz already, discovered that. And so that's one aspect. Another aspect that I think is very important is the history of the categories used by scientists. So they have their own vocabulary, they've got their concepts, they've got their ontological objects. And they don't realize that there's a reason why they're using those tools and not others, why people in different time periods, different cultures are working with a completely different set of tools from language to the actual ontology of what makes up the world. So one of the things you mentioned there is studying the history of science helps you sort of figure out what science is, how it progresses, what the methodologies of science are. In a piece that you wrote for the Institute of Art and Ideas recently, you said science is much more than this mere procedure of testing hypothesis. It is also a process that permits new things to enter into our world. What do you mean by that? Thank you. So one of the things that I've come to this moment in my career, and I, you know, when that happens, you kind of regret, you're like, why didn't I start with this? This is really the most interesting aspect of science. And that's the process of discovery. And it's the open-ended part of science which leads to creating new technologies that are completely unpredictable, that scientists themselves did not know about it. And it's the process of the research bench laboratory scientist that he, she, they don't really know what they're going to find. And there is a reason, as a historian, I obviously went back to the reasons why don't we focus on this. And they're very important philosophers of science who have told us, you know, you can't analyze the process of discovery. It is too difficult, too tight to the unconscious. It happens in a moment, the stereotypical Eureka moment. And we haven't moved as intellectuals past that stereotype. First of all, Eureka moments don't exist. They're part of the scientific lore of discovery. And we really have missed out by not studying the process of discovery, the traditions behind discovery, the language that is used in order to analyze what I think is the most important or the most exciting part of science, which is the open-ended aspect. And in this sort of process of discovery, there are two sort of different schools of thought about how you might think of what scientists are doing there. One says, scientists are just discovering structures and ontologies and things that are already there. They're out in the world waiting for us to kind of, you know, find them and discover them. So it's a kind of archaeological dig of the future. And on the other hand, there are those who say, well, really science comes up with concepts, constructs new ideas. They're not necessarily discovered in the world. They're invented. So how do you see the two pictures and how they play a role in scientific discovery? I think a question of the relation between discovery and invention is one of the most interesting aspects. Again, a black hole that hasn't been investigated that much. Heinz von Forster, a scientist, important person in cybernetics, was one of the people to talk about it. Einstein also, he was asked about the difference between discovery and invention. And he said, you know, somebody else was going to discover the loss of thermodynamics. That's discovery. But nobody was going to do the Beethoven's Eroica symphony. So there is a difference, but would be hard pressed to say that the difference is not political, social, economic, and situated in particular historical moments. It is threatening, in one sense, to think of scientists as inventors. You know, that's a category that goes more towards the engineer, the artist, the creative professions, and that it points to this aspect that I talked about, the open-ended search that scientists are there. Because discovery assumes, as you point out, that there's something already there that just needs to be uncovered. And that is an important difference between both. But we have, in terms of the history and philosophy of science and science in the cultural sphere, we generally just focus on those parts of science that is, you know, this is the stereotype of how the scientific method works. You know, there's hypotheses, there's an experiment, and you do tests to determine the truth. Carl Sagan was one of the important people to portray science in this way. He called it the Bologna Detection Kit. So if you want to figure out if something's true or false, real or not real, you do an experiment, and then you determine that. But that's just one aspect of science. There's another one that has to do with invention, that has to do with creating new things. And we need to focus on both. So in your book, Bedeviled, A Shadow History of Demons and Science, you make the case in some way for this more creative imaginary side of science. So you argue that these imaginary entities, demons, have had a pivotal role in the development of science. And someone might say, well, if science is about our efforts to uncover the real, what's there already, how can something that's just made up an imaginary entity like a demon have anything to do with science? That's the challenge that I took on in the book. And I started because I learned that scientists very frequently use the word demon in their own vernacular. It's in the laboratory language informally. And they are thinking about something that doesn't fit into their current scientific paradigm when they're thinking about what might break the law of nature that they are investigating. And they have a tradition of using the word demon. They frequently give the demon the last name of the scientist who first came up with those ideas. So if one opens a dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, you find that there's an entry under the word demon that refers to science, demons and scientific demons. And it starts generally with Descartes demon. And Maxwell's demon is the most well known. So in my book, I go progressively through the history of these demons in order to try to figure out what motivates science into creating certain research programs and going into certain research directions and not others. But going back to the second part of your question, when I talk to scientists, they're like, you know, he may not, but these demons are imaginary. They're not real. So we just use them as heuristics. And I'm like, exactly. That's what's more important. In fact, when demons were not deemed imaginary, I think they were less powerful than when they are understood as imaginary creatures that might exist. And nobody has ruled out their existence forever and for all periods of times. But they're definitely not found. They motivate search. They motivate new experiments to be created. And that leads to discovery. You mentioned that demons can act as this kind of like heuristic device. It's useful. It's useful to have this concept help scientists do their work. What if someone were to say, well, aren't all scientific entities in some ways imaginary heuristic? You know, our electrons and quarks and neutrinos and all these kind of things that we think are physical things, real things, somewhere out there, kind of heuristic devices, imaginary concepts that scientists come up with, because they're useful, because they help them predict what will happen. Yes. I mean, there's obviously a difference between things that are determined socially as real, such as such as electrons, which at one point were sort of sought for. And philosophers of science have wondered about what type of existence these entities have. So that takes us to the question of what exists in the world. And what is interesting is that we don't ask that question a lot. Ontology is a very niche area in the philosophy of science. But I think that it is very important to start to look at this strange, prohibited question of how non-existence become real and how new things come to exist and why we haven't done this. And there is something that threatens to take away the certainty and that aspect of science of determining what is real and what works in the world. If we go down that other alternative route, but I think we need to go there. When it comes to demons, can you give us what you think is the most compelling example of its use in science that sort of help with a theoretical change or a technological advancement? Well, you know, let me start with the first one. The first one that appears in the dictionary entries, the card's demon. He called it in the discourse of method. He called it malignum gennium, using the Latin. And then the name demon was given to it subsequently. And this happens frequently with demons. Laplace's demon was at some point called an intelligence, a guys, the ghost. And before they entered the tradition of demons. So the card's demon was a very curious creature. And the card was a very curious thinker. And he starts, you know, his book by saying, you know, I have always been very interested in distinguishing what is real and what is not, right? But he, he took it, he took that, that question, that interest to a level that most people, people didn't. And one of the things he asked was, you know, what, what would happen if there's a creature, this malignum gennium, that would install an alternative reality in front of my, my eyes, my, my sensations. How could I then know what's real and not really says, you know, here, we, you know, there's some things that I can still know, even if this demon is operating, I will still know that a circle is made of a circumference going around a point, I will still still know that a triangle is made of three angles and three sides. I will still know that two plus three equals five. So he developed the loss of logic. And this is, you know, Cartesian logic. This is the, you know, this is why Descartes called, you know, the father of philosophy, sometimes the father of mathematics. And we forget that the origin of that was really the sphere of this demon. So now what technologies are connected to that virtual reality, all theater at the time that Descartes was thinking about this, this demon he was reading El Quixote from Cervantes. And he was very worried about how incredible the new illusions and theaters were. And the power of theaters and novels, you know, it's no accident that inside the novel of El Quixote is also about illusions and what is real and what is sanity and what is the difference between new media novels and reality. And we have only in looking for Descartes' demon in trying to find them, we have only taken these technologies into a more extreme radical and interesting place. So a lot of people I think tend to think of sciences as, you know, the the paradigmatic, rational human activity, right? One that is guided by empirical evidence, mathematical rigor, experiment, is your project basically trying to show that that's that's maybe a mistaken conception of science and that science is also a shape but maybe by the irrational and the imaginary and not just the kind of experimental, the mathematical, the rigorous. Well, I like the focus on not not just, it is that, it is a very important role of science, you know, and it is why scientific instruments are useful for us, why we want to know the temperature and we look, you know, have a thermometer and and why we want to be healthy and we take a vaccine. All those aspects are incredibly important and valuable and, you know, admiring but then there's another aspect of science and this is the one that I think has been neglected in the history and philosophy of science and that has to do with the creation of new, including the creation of new instruments. So we we use all the instruments, we use them to determine what exists, what doesn't, we use all experiments but we also completely change experimental systems and we look and we create new instruments that then reveal new aspects of nature and what leads us to create these new instruments, what motivates us to then to then find something else in nature, discover but discover through invention and that aspect of science I think we need to think think about it more and it is as valuable as the other one so they're complementary. Do you think one of the reasons why historians of science and maybe philosopher of science haven't focused so much on this part of science that you are looking at is a worry that if we make science to be too much about imagination and creativity it will trickle down into the popular imagination as something that isn't really all that rigorous and isn't really all that, you know, different to fiction and, you know, you end up then with people disbelieving in in scientific results because they say well it's you know it's just someone's creative theory you know they just imagine this and why should I take it seriously? Absolutely I think that's the worry but my hope then is that if we go down this route we will not only make a contribution for how we think about science we will make a contribution to how we think about the humanities and to also understand those aspects of the humanities that are not all you know about creative but they're also about determining the truths we can we can go back to an area that I find incredibly interesting the the loss of fiction and this was common in ancient times you have the Aristotelian concept of the unity of faction you know what makes a good story work what makes a good story credible there is a lot about the supposed humanities and the arts that is very similar to how we think about science and how we think about experiments, plots, narratives so my hope is that or what we need in order to to counter that worry that you have that if we go down and study those creative imaginary aspects of science will end up with suitable leaves and and lose all sort of certainty and credibility is that we also make make a contribution to the humanities and say well there's a lot of rigor here and there's a lot of here too that is doesn't permit us to do anything with us with a story with a narrative. As a historian of science if you could travel back into the past is there a scientific era of discovery that you would have liked to witness up close. Oh my god that's that is a difficult question as somebody who who has studied time travel. Yeah because you also work on Einstein's theory of time. No yes um well uh maybe that time maybe the the 20th century golden era of physics quantum mechanics coming into the picture, relativity coming into the picture. You know I think I would go back to the the romantic scientists and uh and that I think that's that's connected to my current interest and the sort of more open-ended um uh were in the age of discovery you know that the age of discovery was a moment in which you know the search for the open ended the travel the the looking for something something new was part of the of the scientific process we we couldn't think of any of the discoveries during the scientific revolution all the way to Darwin without an humble you know without picturing them on a boat and going to interesting places and and finding that out so maybe that's the place of uh of science that I would I wouldn't go to the 1930s in Germany. Yeah yeah fair enough um to man a canalist thank you very much. Thank you Alex it's a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for listening to philosophy for our times.
