Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention? - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 274

wants instinct to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We could
simply say, “The moon has an instinct whose strength varies inversely as the
square of the distance...”Daughter: “But this is nonsense, Daddy!”—“Yes,
surely, but it was you who mentioned instinct, not I.”—“All right, but what
does then explain gravity?”—“Nothing, my dear. Because gravity is an
explanatory principle.” “Oh,” says the daughter, “now, do you mean you
cannot use one explanatory principle to explain another principle, never?”
Father: “Hardly ever. That is what Newton meant when he said, ' hypothe-
ses non fingo '.”—“And what does that mean, please?” asks daughter. (Now
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that when the father gives
his answer, everything that he says is put in the descriptive domain. It is
always associated with saying or with pointing.) Again, daughter: “What
does that mean, please?” Father: “Well, you know what hypotheses are. Any
statement linking together two descriptive statements is a hypothesis. If you
say there was a full moon on February 1, and another on March 1, and then
you link these two descriptions together in any way, the statement which
links them is a hypothesis.”—“Yes, and I know what non means. But what
is fingo ?”—“Well, fingo is a late Latin word for 'make'. It forms a verbal
noun, fictio , from which we get the word 'fiction'.”—“Daddy, do you mean
that Sir Isaac Newton thought that all hypotheses were just made up, like
stories?” Father: “Yes, precisely that.”—“But didn't he discover gravity?
With the apple?”—“No, dear, he invented it!”
With this Batesonian dialogue I have, as it were, set the stage for what I
am going to say. My original plan was to make some historical remarks in
regard to the notion of disorder and order; however, during the develop-
ment of this conference, I realized I should indeed shift my emphasis. There
were two points which persuaded me to do this: one, I realized that we have
the tremendous pleasure of having Michel Serres here, who is one of the
eminent historians and could of course say much better anything historical
than I could ever invent; the second point is that I am not the last speaker,
and since I feel that this conference has historical significance and what I
will say today will be obliterated tomorrow, I am very happy that, in their
wisdom, the organizers of this conference have put Michel Serres as the last
speaker; moreover, I hope he will satisfy Edgar Morin's request that the
observer include himself in the observation, for he would then also be a
contributor to the history of this conference.
To what, then, am I to address myself when I am not addressing myself
to history? I shall shift from the historical to the epistemological, because
I have the feeling that many of the questions that have been raised during
this conference have an epistemological root. Nevertheless, with your per-
mission, I will make two points, where I will have osculations with histori-
cal events regarding the notions of disorder and order, and this is when our
topic touches a certain branch of poetry, namely, thermodynamics. These
points I shall discuss because I have seen that, again and again during this
symposium, notions which developed from an interaction between people
in the scientific fields, let us say, the thermodynamicists and others, a lingo ,