Here Is One..
Rorty, Richard
Here is one way to look at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But, of course, it never is, any more than the true meaning of Coriolanus or the Dunciad or the Phenomenology of the Spirit or the Philosophical Investigations. What makes them physicists is that their writing are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature, not that they all are somehow “talking about the same thing”. . .
New Literary History
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing (p. 141)
Volume X, Number 1, Autumn 1978
Here is one way to look at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they announce that the true meaning of the Book has been discovered. But, of course, it never is, any more than the true meaning of Coriolanus or the Dunciad or the Phenomenology of the Spirit or the Philosophical Investigations. What makes them physicists is that their writing are commentaries on the writings of earlier interpreters of Nature, not that they all are somehow “talking about the same thing”. . .
New Literary History
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing (p. 141)
Volume X, Number 1, Autumn 1978
Comments