Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our
intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their
visions and scan their systems in order to extract a few disembodied
“gems”—thoughts or claims still accepted as true. These disarticulated
pieces then become the entire legacy of our ancestors, and we lose the
beauty and coherence of older systems that might enlighten us by their
unfamiliarity—and their consequent challenge—in our fallible (and
complacent) modern world.
Do you have the context for that one? My immediate reaction is to suspect that Gould wants to rehabilitate some discarded old idea, and talks about consistency, beauty and coherence as a way of not talking about evidence and truth. But perhaps I am too suspicious.
I don’t have the context for that particular wording, but it’s a
recurring theme of his essays. He felt that wrong ideas could still be
instructive, and he would often write essays explaining ideas that he
clearly referred to as incorrect.
His point here seems to be that the theory is already wrong, so don’t
destroy the remaining value by cutting it up to extract the bits you
could get from current theory. I don’t think you need to worry that
he’s calling for a return to something you dislike.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
Do you have the context for that one? My immediate reaction is to suspect that Gould wants to rehabilitate some discarded old idea, and talks about consistency, beauty and coherence as a way of not talking about evidence and truth. But perhaps I am too suspicious.
I don’t have the context for that particular wording, but it’s a recurring theme of his essays. He felt that wrong ideas could still be instructive, and he would often write essays explaining ideas that he clearly referred to as incorrect.
His point here seems to be that the theory is already wrong, so don’t destroy the remaining value by cutting it up to extract the bits you could get from current theory. I don’t think you need to worry that he’s calling for a return to something you dislike.