Closing the Circle: How Harvey and His Contemporaries Played the Game of Truth,Part 2

Part 1 appeared in History of science, xxxvi (1998), 213–32. I wish again to acknowledge Dr Jerome Bylebyl's kind permission to read a preliminary draft of his forthcoming book, “William Harvey: From heartbeat to circulation”, and his agreement to my citation of the points indicated below (hereafter cited as Bylebyl, forthcoming). I have done so according to the chapters and page numbers of the copy at my disposal. Beyond this, he is not responsible for any conclusions reached here.

Coherence theories of truth are nothing new, but this will not be a coherence theory of truth. See, for example, Davidson D. , “A coherence theory of truth and knowledge”, in Malachowski A. R. , (ed.), Reading Rorty (Oxford, 1990), 120–38. For a critique of his argument, and of coherentist epistemology generally, see Haack S. , Evidence and inquiry: Towards reconstruction in epistemology (Oxford, 1993), esp. chap. 3, “Coherentism discomposed”, 52–72. I have long been influenced by the writings of Mary Hesse. See in particular The structure of scientific inference (Berkeley, 1974). For a constructivist application of her network model of reasoning, see Law J. Lodge P. , Science for social scientists (London, 1984).

Bylebyl , forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 6. See also French R. K. , “When is a valve not a valve? The importance of an idea in the history of the study of blood flow”, Medical Sciences Historical Society, v (1986), 16–33; and Cunningham A. , “Fabricius and the ‘Aristotle project’ in anatomical teaching and research at Padua”, in Wear A. French R. K. Lonie I. M. , (eds), The medical renaissance of the sixteenth century (Cambridge, 1985), 195–222, pp. 206–9.

Gassendi P. , “De septo cordis pervio observatio”, in Pinaeus S. , De virginitatis notis, graviditate & partu…. Accedunt alia (Leyden, 1641), 261–3. See also Debus A. , “Harvey and Fludd: The irrational factor in the rational science of the seventeenth century”, Journal of the history of biology, iii (1970), 81–105, pp. 95–97; French R. , William Harvey's natural philosophy (Cambridge, 1994), 329, and, for other believers, pp. 152–4, 164, and 166. For the history of attitudes towards the pores in the century before Harvey, see Bylebyl J. J. , “Cardiovascular physiology in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries”, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1969, 205–402, et passim.

To me, heuristic relativism (or, more commonly, “methodological relativism”) risks smuggling normativity in the back door, just as much as “methodological realism” would. Take, for example, the ambiguous, if not exaggerated, claim that “[a]s we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know” ( Shapin S. Schaffer S. , Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton, 1985), 344). An heuristic agnostic would say “it is ourselves, and sometimes, presumably (exactly when, we do not know) the world out there, that is (or are) responsible (to what degrees, respectively, we also do not know) for what we know”. In other words, for the purposes of epistemological analysis, we need to remain heuristically agnostic as to where nature's causal responsibility ends and our moral, as well as causal responsibility begins.

Popper K. , The logic of scientific discovery (New York, 1968; first pub. 1934), 94f.

On “interpretive anthropology”, see Marcus G. E. Fischer M. , Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences (Chicago, 1986), chap. 2.

This account is greatly oversimplified. By the later sixteenth century, many subtle differences of explanation were being offered under the category of “attraction” with regard to bloodletting. See Bylebyl , forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 4, “Ligatures, bloodletting and tonic motion”; also, chap. 7, 45f.

“Harvey had a feel for the concrete”, French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 350. See Bylebyl J. J. , “The medical side of Harvey's discovery: The normal and the abnormal”, in Bylebyl J. J. , (ed.), William Harvey and his age (Baltimore, 1979), 28–102, pp. 68f. Much has been written about Harvey's analogy of the heart as a pump but this will all be superseded by Bylebyl, forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 12, “Clacks and water bellows: The circulation in the prelectiones”. On occult qualities, see Henry J. , “Occult qualities and the experimental philosophy: Active principles in pre-Newtonian matter theory”, History of science, xxiv (1986), 335–81.

Bylebyl , forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 3, section entitled “The primacy of the blood”, pp. 10–30, esp. pp. 10f. In general, Harvey accepted the Galenic “natural faculties” and even “attraction”, ibid., chap. 4, esp. pp. 38–44.

Such as De motu cordis (Frankfurt, 1628), 23 or 24. See Bylebyl , forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 3, pp. 32, 42–44; chap. 8, p. 36; chap. 10, pp. 26f. For a discussion on the spurting of arterial blood before Harvey, see chap. 2, pp. 51–53.

Walaeus J. , “Epistolae duae: De motu chyli et sanguinis”, in Recentiorum disceptationes de motu cordis, sanguinis, et chyli, in animalibus (Leyden, 1647), 59. See French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 160, also Schouten J. , “Johannes Walaeus (1604–1649) and his experiments on the circulation of the blood”, Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences, xxix (1974), 259–79.

For examples, see French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 160, 166f. and 200. On the other hand, for examples of those who were less than enthusiastic see ibid., 92, 93 (and n. 43), 117f., 144f., 256, 265, and 294f.

The pulse too was a thoroughly conventionalized phenomenon. Indeed the clinical importance of the pulse was a very basic reason for investigating its nature in the first place. For evolving ideas about the pulse in the century before Harvey see Bylebyl J. J. , “Disputation and description in the renaissance pulse controversy”, in Wear (ed.), op. cit. (ref. 1), 223–45. See also Bylebyl , forthcoming (ref. 1), chap. 2, “The pulse controversy”. To appreciate just how conventionalized even the “raw” sense of touch can be, see Kuriyama S. , “Pulse diagnosis in the Greek and Chinese traditions”, in Yawakita Y. , (ed.), History of diagnosis (Tokyo, 1987), 43–67.

Probably by now my own coherencing strategy will have been noticed. It is simply that of reinterpretation. I have reworked a lot of mostly well-known historical “facts” in order to argue that Harvey's presentation and defence of the circulation can be plausibly described as a process of constructed coherencing.

For a survey of their objections, see French , op. cit. (ref. 4). As to why they make the ensuing consensus puzzling, see my review of French in Physis, xxxiii (1996), 357–62.

I hope it is also clear by now that what I have been calling the UBK was not uniformly unproblematic among the circulation discussants. The phrase points to a background consensus, sometimes as assumed by an individual engaging in coherencing; sometimes as inferred by us from the participants' behaviour, as was argued for at some length in Part 1. Moreover, folk physics, an important part of that UBK, was just as subject to variations in belief from person to person (and from time to time within one person) as anything else. Therefore, an actor's assumption, or our inference, of some UBK has to be established on a case-by-case basis.

Plemp V. F. , Fundamenta medicinae ad scholae Acribologiam aptata. Editio altera … (Louvain, 1644). 1 have not had access to the first edn of 1638, but have relied on a quotation by Lindeboom G. A. in “The reception in Holland of Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood”, Janus, xlvi (1957), 183–200, p. 195. However, essentially the same passage appears in a letter from Plemp to Descartes [January 1638], Descartes R. , Oeuvres de Descartes , ed. by Adam C. Tannery P. (Paris, 1884–1913), i, 499. For more about Plemp, see French , op. cit. (ref. 4), passim, but esp. pp. 193–202.

Plemp, Fundamenta (ref. 18), 115.

Lindeboom , op. cit. (ref. 18), 195.

Plemp , Fundamenta (ref. 18), 115.

For example, Walaeus did a series of experiments on leg veins and arteries in the groin of a living dog. See Schouten , op. cit. (ref. 12), 262–4; and French , op. cit. (ref. 4), passim, but esp. pp. 155–62.

In the passage in 1638, at least in the two sources I have used, Plemp does not say that he actually did the experiment he describes, while, in 1644, he is very emphatic about having personally done the experiments that he cites in support of the circulation, including those just mentioned. Were those contradictory “results” of 1638 the product, perhaps, of a “thought” experiment?.

In Part 1, we saw that Primrose committed himself to the rationality of “if x, therefore y, therefore z” but, unlike Plemp, never felt compelled to accept the premise that would have driven him to accept as real what he did accept as rational.

See Part 1 where I have argued at length that the apparently “logical” entailments of x therefore y, and y therefore z, were constructed.

The very term ‘conventional’ embodies the notion of constraint, its strength depending only on the manner and degree of the convention's enforcement.

Constraint, of course, has been a big issue in social constructivism. Compare, for example, Galison P. , How experiments end (Chicago, 1987), chap. 5, “Theoretical and experimental cultures”, pp. 243–62, with Pickering A. , “Beyond constraint: The temporality of practice and the historicity of knowledge”, in Buchwald J. Z. , (ed.), Scientific practice: Theories and stories of doing physics (Chicago, 1995), 42–55. Unlike Pickering, I do not see how consensus could have been reached, at least in the Harvey story, without a serious element of constraint coming from somewhere. However, I hope that the concept of coherencing avoids Galison's thinly disguised appeals to realism, on the one hand, and yet does not suffer the unconvincing regimentation of Ludwig Fleek's classic “thought collective” on the other (Genesis and development of a scientific fact (Chicago, 1979; originally in German, 1935)).

See, for example, Descartes R. , “La description de la corps humain”, written in 1648, in Oeuvres (ref. 18), xi, 243f. For a discussion of the connection between Descartes's philosophy and his physiology, see Sloan P. , “Descartes, the sceptics and the rejection of vitalism in seventeenth-century physiology”, Studies in history and philosophy of science, viii (1977), 1–28.

Descartes R. , Discourse de la méthode (originally published anonymously in 1637), in Oeuvres (ref. 18), vi, 48f.

Letter from Plemp to Descartes [January 1638], in Descartes, Oeuvres (ref. 18), i, 496–9, p. 497.

Letter to Plemp, 15 February 1638 ( ibid. , 521–36, pp. 523 and 530f.). See also Plemp's remarks, printed in his 1638 edn and reproduced by Adam and Tannery as notes at the end of this letter, p. 535; as well as Plemp to Descartes [March, 1638], ii, 52–54, p. 54; and then Descartes to Plemp, 23 March 1638, ibid. , 62–69, pp. 66–69. Harvey had already written about how individual pieces of the heart keep beating in his De motu cordis (p. 27).

Indeed, Plemp saw Descartes's response as being “so painstaking and intricate” (“ita operosa et contortuplicate”) as to suggest that Descartes was a man under pressure, p. 536.

Letter to Descartes [March 1638], in Descartes, Oeuvres (ref. 18), ii, 52–54, p. 53. Descartes had raised the issue in his previous letter (i, 523), and, when Plemp responded this way, Descartes then raised new objections, built upon new potentials for incoherence that Plemp unavoidably imported with this latest dodge (ii, 65).

Ibid., ii, 64f. and 54, respectively.

I have taken the term “coherence conditions” from Hesse (op. cit. (ref. 2), 51–54), whose work stimulated me to think along these lines in the first place. However, I alone am responsible for the ways in which I am employing that phrase here.

The “speculative models that Descartes used to explain various phenomena serve as exemplars of mechanical explanations rather than actual explanations that have survived the rigors of experimental test”, Osler M. J. , Divine will and the mechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and necessity in the created world (Cambridge, 1994), 146.

I have used the text as printed in Whitteridge G. , William Harvey and the circulation of the blood (London, 1971), 238 and 240. See also French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 92f., 256f. and 372f. Although the Hofmann text was first published posthumously in J. Riolan, fils, Opuscula anatomica, varia & noua. Imprimis de motu sanguinis, eiusque circulatione vera, ex doctrina Hippocratis (Paris, 1652), and entitled “Digressio, in circulationem sanguinis, nuper in Anglia natam”, 357–64, a draft of it had probably been given to Harvey when he visited Hofmann in 1636. Contrary to Whitteridge's label on her English translation, however, it was clearly not a letter to Harvey.

The following page numbers in parentheses refer to examples mentioned in French, op. cit. (ref. 4).

One is reminded of Nelson Goodman's riddle of “grue”, except that the issue here is one of projecting predicates across supposed domains of nature, rather than across time. Under the objection that vivisection produces unnatural conditions in principle, none of the predicates (i.e., associations) so generated is projectible within the domain of the natural. Even Quine's answer to Goodman — Grue things are not natural kinds — Faintly echoes this seventeenth-century move ( Goodman N. , “The new riddle of induction”, in Fact, fiction & forecast (London, 1954), 63–83; Quine W. V. , “Natural kinds”, in Ontological relativity and other essays (New York, 1969), 114–38). For a discussion of Quine's answer to Goodman see Haack , op. cit. (ref. 2), 130–5.

An issue recently reopened in science studies.

Obviously, it is particularly within the domain of coherence conditions that larger-scale social and cultural values and forces will influence the constitution of scientific knowledge. Nevertheless, as I hope will become clearer in the sequel, there is every reason to suspect that a set of associations, as powerfully coherenced as in the idea of the circulation, can also help to reshape coherence conditions.

See Wear Andrew , “William Harvey and the way of the anatomists”, History of science, xxi (1983), 223–49.

The “U” in UBK might be thought of as standing for “unexamined” and “unspoken”, as well as (and because) “unproblematic”.

Cook C. J. , “Text and context: The philosophical structure of the writings of William Harvey illuminated by disputes in Renaissance philosophy”, Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 1995. Indeed, Cook even suggests (p. 254) that what he sees as a very carefully coherent epistemology and methodology, spelt out in Harvey's later work, preceded rather than resulted from the concept of the circulation.

See, for example, Bylebyl's article on Harvey in the Dictionary of scientific biography, vi (1972), 150–61. Various publications over the intervening years will now be superseded by idem, forthcoming (ref. 1), where the theme comes up repeatedly; see esp. chap. 2, 65f. as well as chaps. 11 and 12.

For example, see Bylebyl , op. cit. (ref. 4, 1969); (with Pagel W. ), “The chequered career of Galen's doctrine on the pulmonary veins”, Medical history, xv (1971), 211–29; “Nutrition, quantification and circulation”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, li (1977), 369–85; op. cit. (ref. 9, 1979); op. cit. (ref. 14, 1985); and forthcoming (ref. 1), esp. chap. 2, “The pulse controversy”.

An important exception was the cause of the heart's movement. See, for example, French R. , “Sauvages, Whytt and the motion of the heart: Aspects of eighteenth-century animism”, Clio medica, vii (1972), 35–54.

For some, this might be grounds for dismissing the story as too atypical. I take the opposite view: Its special characteristics help us to uncover things about how people go about scientific knowledge production that are obscured by the greater complexities of other examples. Perhaps I and such critics can at least agree that we are just using different coherence conditions.

“Animals are capable of incredibly fine discriminations among objects in their environment without the benefits of social conventions … the fact of widespread agreement does not require social explanation. The explanations of evolutionary biology and physiology are sufficient” ( Giere R. , Explaining science: A cognitive approach (Chicago, 1988), 109, as quoted in Rosenberg A. , “A field guide to recent species of naturalism”, The British journal for the philosophy of science, xlvii (1996), 1–29, p. 12, emphasis added).

Frank R. G. Jr , Harvey and the Oxford physiologists (Berkeley, 1980). See the final chapter, “Harvey and experimental philosophy”, in French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 310–86. French is surely right that Harvey's successful use of experiments must have played a far more important role than has been generally recognized, in stimulating the explosion of renewed interest (by Boyle, among others) in this ancient form of life.

In other words, my “coherencing” is Hacking's “consilience” among people, things and marks (“The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences”, in Pickering A. , (ed.), Science as practice and culture (Chicago, 1992), 29–64). My complaint in Part 1 was only that, if applied to the Harvey story at least, Hacking's “consilience” would not give enough prominence to the role of people to allow us to come to any plausible conclusion as to how consensus came about.

Although probably not relevant in this case, the pertinent community of Harvey's day could well have shared gender biases, for example. Yet, had any such existed, these too might have been eliminated eventually, especially if the community came to include, say, women who had the resources and motivation to look for and to demonstrate the incoherences of such biases to the satisfaction of the community as a whole. The point is, of course, that coherences can (though do not necessarily) outlive the historical contingencies of their birth, and can continue to be “improved”, not only through strengthening from additional coherences but also by the elimination of others that do not pass the (now changed) community tests of coherence. It is no doubt this that contributes to our feeling both of the “growth” of scientific knowledge and its increasing approximation to the “truth”.

The reader will no doubt understand why, just by consulting his or her own folk physics.

Descartes , Oeuvres (ref. 18), xi, 232 and 241–5. In his second letter to Riolan, Harvey explicitly disagrees with Descartes on precisely this point (Exercitatio anatomica de circulatione sanguinis (Cambridge, 1649), 119–22).

Bylebyl, forthcoming (ref. 1), offers overwhelming evidence of that coherencing in Harvey's work.

Analyses of scientific knowledge production tend to focus either on cognitive processes in the individual mind, or on large-scale forces in society. I share with authors like Popper and Newton-Smith W. H. (see his “Popper, science and rationality”, in O'Hear A. , (ed.), Karl Popper: Philosophy and problems (Cambridge, 1995), 13–30, pp. 23f. and 28), the view that something in between is also needed, a sort of social cognition. Unfortunately, the Harvey story, like those of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and others, too easily lends itself to an idiocentric explanation. I'd like to think that, besides offering an account of social cognition, the notion of coherencing also makes understandable our tendency at times to overemphasize either the idiocentric or the macrosocial.

Harvey W. , Exercitationes de generatione animalium (London, 1651).

Sharafi M. , “Egg and sperm in Restoration England”, unpublished manuscript, 1995.

Colombo, for example, described the pulmonary transit of the blood, but, by 1628, no consensus had developed around this idea, despite a great deal of discussion and some further experimentation in connection with it. See Bylebyl , op. cit. (ref. 4), chap. 7, “The reception of the pulmonary circuit: 1559–1628”, pp. 349–402.

Aselli G. , De lactibus sive lacteis venis (Milan, 1627). See French , op. cit. (ref. 4), 151 and 266f.

Elkana Y. Goodfield J. , “Harvey and the problem of the ‘capillaries’”, Isis, lix (1968), 61–73.

Pecquet J. , Experimenta nova anatomica, quibus incognitum hactenus chyli receptaculum et ab eo per thoracem in ramos usque subclavios vasa lactea deteguntur (Paris, 1651).

A century after Harvey's death, William Hunter felt that the phenomena of anatomy and surgery “so evidently proclaim the circulation, that there seems to have been nothing more required for the making the discovery, than laying aside gross prejudices, and considering fairly some obvious truths” (Two introductory lectures (London, 1784), 43). According to Dr Helen Brock, who very kindly brought this passage to my attention, the lecture was actually given in 1767.

Quine W. V. Ullian J. S. , The web of belief, 2nd edn (New York, 1978).

Kuhn T. S. , The structure of scientific revolutions, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1970), 187.