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THE RHETORIC of PROBABILITY from the NEW SCIENCE to COMMON SENSE by Alex Solomon

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THE RHETORIC of PROBABILITY from the NEW SCIENCE to COMMON SENSE by Alex Solomon THE RHETORIC OF PROBABILITY FROM THE NEW SCIENCE TO COMMON SENSE by Alex Solomon A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Michael McKeon And approved by __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Rhetoric of Probability from the New Science to Common Sense By ALEX SOLOMON Dissertation Director: Michael McKeon Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, probability, hitherto primarily a quality of rhetoric, expands to become a field of mathematics, a criterion of experimental demonstration, and a guiding principle for the development of the English novel. These applications overlap but are far from coextensive. “The Rhetoric of Probability from the New Science to Common Sense” traces the role of probability, as a fluid concept, in the binding and eventual disassociation of science and fiction during this time. The species of probability generated by fictional narrative is utilized to support empirically indemonstrable hypotheses before and after the rise of experimental culture in the seventeenth century. While the early novel, especially the corpus of Daniel Defoe, has long been spoken of as a fictional imitation of experimental practice, there are significant cases in which fiction is part of the process of experimental demonstration. The exclusively fictional character of the novel later solidifies in the works of Richardson and Fielding as the forms of mathematical and experimental probability developed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are internalized for aesthetic effect. ii Acknowledgements Much of the research for this project was made possible by short term fellowships from the Rutgers English Department and the Huntington Library, and even more by graduate fellowships offered by Rutgers English and the School of Arts and Sciences. I have been fortunate enough to access the special collections of the Huntington Library, The British National Library, The Bodleian, The Royal Society Library, and the Bibliothèque Sainte- Geneviève. These opportunities would not have been possible without the help of Michael McKeon and Lynn Festa, as well as Graduate Director Rebecca Walkowitz. I will never be able to sufficiently repay Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack for their years of administrative and moral support. I am grateful to each of my committee members for offering their time, energy, and support to a project that has often lacked accessibility. Under Al Coppola’s leadership, the Columbia Eighteenth-Century European Culture seminar has bolstered my enthusiasm for this profession and way of life. Henry Turner and Lynn Festa, both as instructors and readers, have consistently helped me discover levels of sophistication I would not have otherwise considered. In their writing seminars, John Kucich and Meredith McGill taught me the pleasure of the academic genre. There is no element of this project that has not been improved by the attention and guidance of Michael McKeon, for whose patience and critical eye I am forever grateful. Finally, my perspective, my health, and my happiness I owe to my wife, Masha. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Introduction The Polysemy of Probability 1 Chapter One “I shall prove to you that I see them”: 16 Possible Knowledge, Credible Fiction, and the Uses of Empiricism Chapter Two The Invisible Laws of Empiricist Fiction: 64 A Case Study in Physic Chapter Three Projects and the Limits of Probability 113 Chapter Four Confined Narratives: 161 Probability as a Feature of the Novel Conclusion The Abuses of Abstraction 210 iv 1 Introduction: The Polysemy of Probability “All possible definitions of probability fall short of the actual practice,” warns the mathematician William Feller, and he did not even have in mind as many applications as this study addresses.1 Historians of science generally agree that the significance of probability within various epistemologies increases in the seventeenth century, while novelists of the eighteenth century explicitly identify probability as the key to their art. To some degree, these groups are using the same word to refer to different ideas, but as this study aims to explain, even when they are referring to the same idea, these developments do not trace a line of progression but a knotting and unknotting whereby literature and science become disassociated rather than contiguous disciplines. The title of this study describes a historical period, roughly from the Copernican revolution through the advent of Common Sense Philosophy or Common Sense Realism in the later eighteenth century. But more significantly, “science” and “common sense” designate dialectical positions corresponding to notions of probability’s sources and utility. This project began with the presentist assumption that the default or dominant definition of probability, its ideal form, is likelihood, either directly expressible in mathematical terms or abstractly conceivable in such terms. Probability, understood to mean the likelihood of a given thing occurring, is referred to by philosophers of science as “frequentism.” As Brandon Fitelson summarizes, “Ask a scientist what probability is, and one will typically get a frequentist answer: The probability of an event is the relative frequency of trials of a repeatable experiment on which that event occurs; sometimes the words ‘in the long run’ are added.”2 There is evidence, across the eighteenth century, of writers of fiction framing fictional events within this modern scientific mindset. The broadest form of my hypothesis, by no means original, was that the advancements 2 in the mathematics of probability achieved by Christian Huygens, the authors of the Port-Royal Logic, Abraham de Moivre, John Arbuthnot, Jacob Bernoulli, Thomas Bayes, and others between the mid-seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, combined with the flourishing culture of empirical experiment during this time, would influence if not define the idea of probability as a quality of fiction. But the relationship between mathematical, scientific, and literary probability in this period is of course more complex than any singular pattern of influence could meaningfully describe. Mathematical probability—frequentism—is put to various uses in both science and literature in this period, but it does not displace other (much less all other) iterations of probability, and neither natural philosophers nor writers of fiction assign the same value to the doctrine of likelihood as do mathematicians. Mathematical probability, as it is formalized over the course of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, necessarily describes games or other scenarios involving limited variabilities. From prescribing the distribution of outcomes in games of chance (and thus standardizing odds), mathematical probability has developed (particularly in the domain of statistics) to predict likely outcomes for events incorporating high degrees of contingency, for instance the outcome of a football game, election, or natural disaster. The epistemological impact of even simple probability calculations is not to be understated. Judgments and assessments of value that had previously been the domain of experience and memory, for instance the bettor’s knowledge that a full house beats a straight, were made objects of incontrovertible knowledge. The problem with frequentism outside of games and contests is that it becomes either difficult or impossible to define satisfactory conditions for the generation and application of a probability. There may be infinite potential outcomes, the thing in question 3 may only be understandable according to a “trial” period far exceeding the human lifespan, and it may be impossible to know what constitutes an acceptable trial. Experimental science, as it is instantiated in the seventeenth century, adopts a frequentist notion of probability in the sense that it is invested in extracting a picture of nature from a collection of observations, both inside and outside of artificially controlled settings, but this is far from the whole story. The probable in science, even where it may be defined as likelihood, is not merely that which possesses a “high probability” of occurring. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that when John Wilkins deems it “probable” that the moon is habitable, he means to say that in a high number of trial scenarios, humans thrive on the moon. More properly, he means that within a single (as yet physically unperformable) experiment, the habitability of the moon is a likely outcome. We may “put a number” on such propositions, but it would be math in rhetoric only. A founding member of the Royal Society, Wilkins, like today’s experimental science, admits thought experiments into his considerations of probability; unlike today’s experimental scientists, Wilkins includes fictions among those experiments. One overarching concern of the following chapters is how, or according to what logic, fictional narratives may serve experimental functions, especially concerning the establishment of probability. It is conceivable, but in actual practice difficult to imagine that fictions could or would perform the work of generating evidence to address questions of natural
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