Abstract
Scholarly texts usually combine a variety of elements: sentences, diagrams, tables and other specific types of inscriptions, layouts and notations. After a long period when History and Philosophy of Science mainly focused on the verbal aspect of these sources, in recent decades these disciplines have actively begun to investigate other dimensions, such as diagrams and symbolic writings. This book is an attempt to return to the verbal components of these documents and explore them from a new perspective.
The collective work that led to this book started in the fall of 2002. In the context of the seminar “History of Science, History of Text,” Karine Chemla (REHSEIS, CNRS & University Paris Diderot), a historian of science, and Jacques Virbel (IRIT, Toulouse), a linguist specialized in text linguistics, launched a series of workshops with the title “Textes de consignes et d’algorithmes. Approches historiques et linguistiques (Instructional Texts and Algorithm Texts. Historical and Linguistic Approaches).” This resulted in formation of a group that was enthusiastic about the collective work carried out in this framework. Before long it was focusing on the issues addressed in this volume. The group members included specialists of China, Europe, India and Mesopotamia. They were linguists as well as historians of mathematics, lexicography, zoology or medicine. The collective work continued for several years, during which colleagues learned about the theories and sources of each other’s disciplines, and each elaborated his or her own approach in the framework of this interdisciplinary enterprise. As a result, the book brings Linguistics and History of Science into close interrelationship, with the aim of helping the two fields to advance together. Each chapter of the book has been subjected to close scrutiny by the participants of the seminar and we are thus jointly responsible for any omissions or errors. We were able to complete the book thanks to Anthony Pamart, and to the generous hospitality of Silke Wimmer-Zagier and Don Zagier in Bonn, and Lorraine Daston and the Max Planck Institut fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin during summer 2012, as well as that of the Fondation des Treilles during summer 2013. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to all of them. Bruno Belhoste, Ramon Guardans, and Skuli Sigurdsson have carefully read this introduction whole or in part, and we are grateful for their constructive comments. We would especially like to thank Karen Margolis for her immeasurable part in completing the introduction.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This refers to the title of Austin’s posthumous book, which marked the opening of this field of inquiry: How to Do Things With Words (Austin 1962).
- 3.
Austin (1962, p. 5).
- 4.
Austin (1962, p. 32).
- 5.
(Searle 1979, p. viii). See Chap. 2 by Virbel in the present book. The validity of Searle’s classification has been questioned. See, e.g., (Vernant 2005). We shall not discuss these debates here; we only wish to call attention to a domain of research and modes of analysis that should prove fruitful for the History of Science.
- 6.
For the sake of simplicity, we only focus on one of the things these texts do: they enable users to carry out computations or manage medical treatment. As we shall see, sometimes this is not the only thing they do.
- 7.
(Austin 1962, pp. 8, 60–61). This expression seems to have an interesting history whose exploration falls outside the scope of the present book. We employ the expression “written utterances” below to refer to sentences as used in our sources.
- 8.
Austin (1962, pp. 57, 74–75).
- 9.
This sentence is a rough description of our set of sources, which is to be taken as a first approximation. We are well aware, as we show below, that some of these written sources adhere to oral activity and even sometimes record texts composed and/or practiced orally. In this respect, Sanskrit documents are always a source of warning and inspiration, since some of the written documents deliver texts that were once, and still are, practiced orally. See (Filliozat 2004), and our remarks below. This illustrates the usefulness of considering scholarly texts on a broad basis. The present book deals more generally with textual issues by relying on sources produced in many different places in the world and in different time periods. In this respect, as in many others, we are working within the framework of the options elucidated in (Chemla 2004).
- 10.
A similar comment occurs in (Vanderveken 2001) as an introduction to an attempt to describe speech acts not singly, but in the context of a conversation.
- 11.
- 12.
The example has a family resemblance with a whole class of texts —the “enumerations”— to which we devote Part II of this volume. Jacques Virbel analyses this example in Chap. 6, when he considers pragmatic features of enumerations (Sect. 6.4). In this context, he concentrates on the other dimension of the list, the enumeration. In the process he looks at the issue of how the list differs specifically from a single term.
- 13.
Searle (1979, pp. 52–75).
- 14.
Barry Smith has raised similar questions in (Smith 2010 (August 23–26); Smith 2012). As mentioned above, Vernant has suggested reshaping the classification of discourse acts used by Searle. His main reason is to introduce “quotation” as a kind of discourse act. To do this, Vernant has introduced the more general concept of “metadiscursive acts,” or acts that perform an action on the discourse itself. In performing such acts, actors also do things with texts. We shall return below to a phenomenon of that kind. In the field of science studies, Brian Rotman, in the context of attempting to understand how mathematics persuades, has noted the capacity of mathematical texts to “give commands” (Rotman 1998). Our focus in this book will be different. (Fortun 2008) also invokes Speech Act Theory to understand the part played by “promises” as speech acts in the recent “rapid rise of the science and business of genomics.” The book analyzes how promises allow actors to raise funds and find biological materials. Fortun’s analysis focuses more on the actual promises than the textual acts as such.
- 15.
Instructional texts were among the first types of texts approached as textual acts in linguistics. Results of this research work, done by Virbel and colleagues at IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse—Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research), were published in (Pascual and Péry-Woodley 1995; Pascual and Péry-Woodley 1997a; Pascual and Péry-Woodley 1997b; Grandaty et al. 2000; Virbel 2000). Their efforts and achievements convinced the historians of science who have contributed to the present book that we could draw on their expertise and the tools they had devised to tackle new problems in our discipline. This was the starting point of the present volume.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
This element of the illocutionary force was introduced later; see (Searle and Vanderveken 1985, pp. 12–20).
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
What is important about this feature is that it reflects Florence Bretelle-Establet analyzes texts rather than sentences. In the same way as for the parts of a sentence, different ordering of the sentences in a text makes different pieces of information salient and creates a hierarchy between them which correlates to the point of the texts.
- 24.
The exploration of the relationships between these two levels is an open question raised by applying Speech Act Theory to texts. Should we approach this question by looking at how “written utterances” are combined to make the “textual act,” or is there a specific textual level? We leave this question open. It has been touched upon in (Nef 1980; Smith 2010 (August 23–26), Smith 2012; Vanderveken 2001).
- 25.
This gives us the opportunity to qualify the statements made at the beginning of this introduction. In recent decades, several books have focused on a rhetorical approach to scholarly texts. See, e.g., (Loveland 2001, pp. 17–23), which provides a useful survey of recent publications on the topic; (Ceccarelli 2001; Gross 2006). These rhetorical approaches also explore a dimension of scholarly texts which is not purely assertive. A review of research paths developed in this context would exceed the scope of this book. In relation to what Bretelle-Establet explores here, we can simply note that several of these books have used rhetorical analysis as a useful tool for understanding how an author attracted readers or persuaded them of the validity of his or her arguments. However, they still focus mainly on the assertive aspects of the text. Here, Bretelle-Establet considers the author’s self-fashioning through textual shaping by means of other textual acts.
- 26.
This was discussed in (Chemla 2004).
- 27.
(McCarthy 1991) shows a similar interest in how writings can shape users’ scholarly knowledge. McCarthy examines how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980) shapes psychiatrists’ approach to illness, their gathering of information, their diagnosis, and how they communicate the acquired knowledge.
- 28.
This is a coarse presentation. The reader will find in the chapter more precise information about the corpus.
- 29.
In fact, it is the same algorithm up to details that do not matter for the questions Keller addresses.
- 30.
The real meaning of this category is beyond the scope of the present discussion, but Keller’s description of the text in the Patiganita devoted to square root extraction offers elements for discussing this issue.
- 31.
In her chapter, Keller explains in detail how the commentators make sense of these statements.
- 32.
Incidentally, the steps his sutra propounds are entirely general and constitute the kernel of the computation without specifying any instrument that could be used to execute it.
- 33.
Keller (2006, pp. I:xvii, xliii–xlviii) gives an overview of Aryabhata’s sutras and describes Bhaskara’s exegetical techniques to make sense of them. The following remarks rely on that reference.
- 34.
In fact, the expression we took as an example for designating the items in the initial phrase should be quoted more precisely as “the four parts.” Expressions of this kind may or may not assert the exhaustive character of the listed items. Virbel examines these assertives. Using examples found in classical texts, he shows that the statement of exhaustivity does not imply that the actual list of items corresponding to it conforms to it exactly. Interestingly, some lists of items differ from the information given in the initial phrase. Virbel discusses the issue of interpretation this raises.
- 35.
In his study of “quotation,” Vernant (2005) sketches the various ways “quotations” can be marked.
- 36.
This is an option that derives from the Textual Architectural Model to which Virbel subscribes and which he sketches in Chap. 6.
- 37.
With respect to Austin’s “expositives,” which can relate to all types of discourse acts, Vernant (2005) suggests a similar conclusion.
- 38.
The tablet could also be considered as an item in itself in the enumeration that the series constitutes. However, we lack the evidence about this series to develop this line of inquiry.
- 39.
In fact, Chemla focuses specifically on how these texts prescribe actions. However, texts for algorithms also occur in the context of proofs, where they do not carry out textual directives. Once the former issue is dealt with, it will be interesting to focus on the texts of algorithms that occur in the latter context.
- 40.
Again, these are broad descriptions. For more detail, we refer the reader to Chemla’s chapter.
- 41.
At the level of the reasons of the correctness of an algorithm, this way of prescribing is comparable to the previous case.
- 42.
Robadey (2006, pp. 70–82).
- 43.
Robadey (2006, pp. 53–70).
- 44.
Robadey (2006, pp. 84–91).
- 45.
Robadey (2006, pp. 91–97).
- 46.
- 47.
Robadey (2006, pp. 61–70).
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Chemla (林力娜), K., Virbel, J. (2015). Prologue: Textual Acts and the History of Science. In: Chemla, K., Virbel, J. (eds) Texts, Textual Acts and the History of Science. Archimedes, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16444-1_1
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