Abstract
Edgar Allan Poe’s standing as a literary figure, who drew on (and sometimes dabbled in) the scientific debates of his time, makes him an intriguing character for any exploration of the historical interrelationship between science, literature and philosophy. His sprawling ‘prose-poem’ Eureka (1848), in particular, has sometimes been scrutinized for anticipations of later scientific developments. By contrast, the present paper argues that it should be understood as a contribution to the raging debates about scientific methodology at the time. This methodological interest, which is echoed in Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, gives rise to a proposed new mode of—broadly abductive—inference, which Poe attributes to the hybrid figure of the ‘poet-mathematician’. Without creative imagination and intuition, Science would necessarily remain incomplete, even by its own standards. This concern with imaginative (abductive) inference ties in nicely with his coherentism, which grants pride of place to the twin virtues of Simplicity and Consistency, which must constrain imagination lest it degenerate into mere fancy.
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Notes
Quoted after Hovey (1995: 347).
Quoted in (Passage 1954: 191).
Ilkka Niiniluoto insists that, conversely, one must take ‘seriously Poe’s account [in his The Philosophy of Composition] of his poetic construction “with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem”’ (Niiniluoto 1999: 252).
On Poe’s assessment of the Bridgewater Treatises, see also Welsh (1991: 9).
For an in-depth discussion, see also Frank (2003), esp. Chapter 1 (‘“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie’).
Quoted after Meyers (2000: 215).
Page numbers for Eureka refer to the 2004 edition by Levine and Levine; (see Poe 2004).
Quoted after Meyers (2000: 217).
Norstedt (1930) suggests that Poe anticipated certain of Einstein’s views (see especially p. 175). For a more recent (popular) comparison of Einstein’s, Newton’s, and Poe’s views on gravitation, see van Calmthout (1995). For a comparison of Arthur Eddington’s theories and Poe’s cosmology, see Hoagland (1939). Gelfert (2008) notes the similarity between Poe’s speculations about the origin of the physical universe and contemporary Big Bang theories.
Quoted after Meyers (2000: 217).
Quoted after Wagenknecht (1963: 219).
Quoted after Levine and Levine (2004: xv).
Quoted after Link (1968: 333–334).
Quoted after Beaver (1976: 397).
See Marginalia (No. CCIV); Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 3: p. 581.
John Tresch (2002: 121) nicely characterizes Poe’s Pyrrhonism about much of our everyday knowledge as follows: ‘Poe is fundamentally a skeptic about human knowledge. What currently passes for “reality” or “the world” is an imperfect tissue of conjectures and practices patched together as a makeshift version of the wider, ungraspable cosmos.’
See Weissberg (1991: 101).
The continuity between the Dupin stories and those stories that are told by a first-person narrator, who recounts reasoning processes under conditions of psychological pressure (A Descent into a Maelstrom, The Pit and the Pendulum, etc.), is important, for it is the latter conditions that often create the impulse for abductive reasoning (on this point, see Reichertz 1990: 309). See also footnote 21.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue; Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 1: p. 178.
Never mind that the exact phrase ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ nowhere occurs in Conan Doyle’s writings.
For a dissenting voice, see Reichertz (1990), who argues that, at least in the case of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the inferences typically lack the Peircean element of guesswork and spontaneous (context-driven) hypothesis-generation that, for the later Peirce, is characteristic of abduction (as opposed to mere hypothetical reasoning); instead, Holmes always reasons from firmly established rules—even if these are only known to himself, not to others. See also footnote 18.
See Lipton (2004), esp. Chapter 4. ‘Loveliness’ and ‘likelihood’ may, of course, come apart: For example, many conspiracy theories are designed to explain irrelevant detail (making them ‘lovelier’, in the technical sense of ‘potentially explaining more facts’), but would require objectively unlikely conditions for them to be true.
Quoted after Niiniluoto (1999: 240), who also discusses historical precursors to Peirce.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue; Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 1: p. 180.
Paul Grimstad, in a lucid discussion of how Poe’s abductive preferences figure in his aesthetic choices, notes how in The Murders in the Rue Morgue ‘Poe acknowledges the novelty of this “peculiar” new generic logic in his own experimentation with the “rules” of storytelling, for his scholarly meditation [at the beginning of the story] likely disoriented those antebellum readers who expected only a murder intrigue’ (Grimstad 2005: 25).
Loc. cit., p. 193.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue; Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 1: p. 180.
The Purloined Letter; Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 1: p. 271.
Loc. cit., p. 275.
Loc. cit., p. 274.
Terry Martin (1989) claims that, when Dupin goes into a diatribe against Vidocq, he ‘impeaches himself, […] for it is, again, Dupin himself who loses sight of the matter as a whole—as an imaginative whole, that is’ (Martin 1989: 38). This accusation is unfounded, however, as is Martin’s claim that ‘Dupin’s analysis reduces the narrator to a curious machine whose inner workings are to be charted solely for the scientific interest of the activity’ (Martin 1989: 37). To be sure, Dupin is a complex character (perhaps shaped, as Martin puts it in one of his ad hominems, by ‘the unsoundness of his denial of the life of the body’; 1989: 41), but it is precisely his constitution as a ‘Bi-Part Soul’ (a ‘double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent’; Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1850: 183), which marks him out as an example of a ‘poet-mathematician’ in the making.
In line with this suggestion, Weissberg (1991: 100) classifies Maelzel’s Chess-Player as a ‘precursor’ to the ‘tales of ratiocination’.
Both citations follow Harrowitz (1988: 181).
A similar example of such an indirect affinity concerns the origins of the term ‘semiotics’, which makes its first appearance in an 1839 text by George Field (1777?–1854). While this text had almost certainly had no direct influence on Peirce, it nonetheless shows that, as John Deely puts it, ‘[t]he stuff of what is becoming the doctrine of signs was clearly part of the intellectual climate into which Peirce was born, and suffused the air he breathed’ (Deely 2003: 16). The same, I argue, may be said of Poe’s anticipation of a third (abductive) kind of inference.
Interestingly, Poe discusses this point twice, first as part of the introductory ‘letter from the future’, and shortly afterwards in his own voice. The first discussion openly mocks the reductionist proposal, imagining how a reductionist metaphysician might try to “cure” the ‘poor ignorant old man’ Kepler of his “misconception” that he, Kepler, had grasped the ‘machinery of the Universe’ by ‘mere dint of intuition’ (Eureka, p. 15): ‘How great a pity it is that some “moral philosopher” had not enlightened him about all this!’ The second discussion is more neutral, yet insists that, while we can only entertain an idea of intuition as the outcome of underlying ‘shadowy’ processes (of induction and deduction), nonetheless intuition manifests itself in ‘irresistible, although inexpressible’—and, by extension, irreducible—ways (Eureka, p. 22). I am grateful to one of the referees for pointing out this tension in Poe’s position regarding the reducibility, or irreducibility, of Intuition.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue; Griswold edition (1850), Vol. 1: p. 181.
The relationship between Poe and Coleridge’s thought has been characterized as one of ‘devious complexity’ (Kearns 2002: 10). On the one hand, as Floyd Stovall already argued, Poe and Coleridge agree on at least four points: ‘1. Imagination is the soul of poetry. 2. It harmonizes diverse matters and gives unity to variety. 3. It is analogous to the creative power of God. 4. Of two elements known and unlike it can create a third element different from either.’ (Stovall 1930: 111) On the other hand, Poe is keen to set himself apart from Coleridge, whom he faults for an overreliance on the traditional tools and methods of reason—much like the Prefect in The Purloined Letter and Vidocq in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, whose insistence on systematic observation blinds them to poetically attuned insight into the situation at large. As Christopher Kearns puts it, for Poe, ‘Coleridge’s overly profound perspective distorts the object of his investigation, blinding him to beauty or what might be called the poetic dimension of his subject’ (Kearns 2002: 11).
On this point see Schlutz (2008).
The importance of reciprocity in Poe’s account is highlighted by Matthew Taylor, who writes that, in Poe’s Universe, all things ‘are related not only in their common origin but also immediately in the present, across time and space, in the infinite interactions taking place between every atom in the universe as they fall back toward unity’ (Taylor 2007: 203).
See also Manning (1989).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th International History of Philosophy of Science conference (HOPOS 2010), held at the Central European University, Budapest, in June 2010; I am grateful to Cornelis Menke (Bielefeld), Michael Heidelberger (Tübingen), and Laura Snyder (St. Johns) for their insightful comments following my talk. Two anonymous reviewers for this journal provided exceptionally detailed and constructive comments. I would also like to thank my father, Hans-Dieter Gelfert, for pointing me to Poe’s Eureka, and Sophia Yap for bibliographic support.
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Gelfert, A. Observation, Inference, and Imagination: Elements of Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Science. Sci & Educ 23, 589–607 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9551-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-012-9551-8