Why would science need play?
The kneejerk answer won’t wash. One might say “because play is integral part of the human condition and spirit,” and quote for instance Rabelais “pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme” (which may be translated as “since laughter is characteristic of mankind.”) This is quite true. However, the humanist answer is insufficient, from being too general.
We may consider next the trivial, the psychological answer: play is the response to an overdose, scientists tend to play because science presents them with a surfeit of seriousness. An occasional smile, a good laugh sometimes less than adequate compensation for the grim, hard work which has to be done most of the time.
Again, such an assertion is unsatisfactory. Many other professions have their dull and their anxious moments too. Such a motivation for a cheerful and a whimsical attitude to one’s work suffers from its exclusive psychological tenor, when it ought to be colored also with the epistemological. I’ll return to this point.
There is another answer to the question, likewise unacceptable for being too superficial. It is historical and sociological both. Scientists like to play, it goes, because they are close to being children themselves (and children love to play). There is a strong youthful component to the recruitment of scientists. Some disciplines, mathematics especially, enjoy a reputation for the narrow window of creativity, in one’s youth exclusively. Moreover, much of science has academic settings. And the ivy-covered walls of academia serve as a marketplace for young people to receive education from professors. Thus, as this particular answer proposes, a youthful spirit comes to permeate science.
But let me return to the epistemic color of the playful element in science. It stems from the role of imagination in science, notably in coming-up with hypotheses. Ian Hacking, in his book on Representing and Intervening, thus terms speculation:
“the intellectual representation of something of interest, a playing
with and restructuring of ideas to give at least a qualitative
understanding of some general feature of the world.” (emphasis
added)
The “playing with ideas” is what science is about, ultimately. It can be solitary play. The scientist doodles on the back of an envelope, maybe handles a molecular model, visualizes a vague diagrammatic shape in the mind, writes down and scrutinizes some numerical data, a mathematical equation,… It can be collective play, as when scientists gather in front of a blackboard, formally or informally; and forge ahead in this way, trying out new ideas for their usefulness to the problem at hand.
There is definitely an epistemic component to play in science. Furthermore, the realist and the pragmatist both agree to its presence and importance since, as the oxymoron goes, play works.
The next category of answers is the theistic, the demiurgic, where the playful component of science stems from a Promethean intent. Mankind sets about to emulate and rival the Gods, when it engages into scientific inquiry. The underlying notion is that God (or the Gods) had fun creating the world!
Let me set down three quotes at this juncture. Pride of place goes to Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice.” My second quotation, nearly as well known, is from the late André Weil: “God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the devil exists since we cannot prove it.” My third quotation is from Daniel Kivelson, a physical chemist at Caltech, who thus opened a recent seminar at Cornell (March 16 2000): “God gave us science for our amusement.” Thus, science is connoted with a playful mood mirroring God’s mirth when creating the world.
I should like to complement and extend this mirror with an echo chamber hypothesis: I submit that play in science resonates with wordplay. Wordplay? Words in ordinary language have several meanings. Take, for instance, the word “legs.” There are the anatomical meaning, as in the sentence “the lady has beautiful legs;” the sartorial, “the legs of the trousers;” the anthropomorphic, “the legs of the table;” the topographic, “the legs in a journey;” (and one could probably list quite a few others). Such extensions and displacements of the meaning of a word are termed by linguists “catachresis.” According to the linguist Arsène Darmesteter (1846-1888), writing in 1887,
“catachresis is the emancipating act for the word (…) the forgetting of
the etymological meaning is the basic condition for any
transformation of meaning.”
Which led his colleague Michel Bréal (1832-1915), just a few years later, to create a science of semantics, which quite a few linguists compare in its importance to the copernican revolution in cosmology. Indeed, one might say that natural languages and technical languages (or jargons) differ because, where the first can be equivocal, the latter have to be univocal. The former have to be equivocal, they have to leave room for play, to make social interaction possible. Human communication needs the meanings of words to be neither rigidly fixed nor flexible at will. Rigid fixation would get in the way of any speaker being creative and expressing ideas which had not been uttered before. Total volatility of meaning would render understanding and thus communication impossible. A balance has to be struck. And this is a powerful component of wordplay as in puns. I see it as no accident that Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), who was a professional mathematician and a logician, a contemporary of Darmesteter and Bréal, relished word play. Quite a few scientists are fond of his writings for that reason. The human brain, thus molded by speech into affection for wordplay, transfers it to the scientific endeavor as well — this is my contention. There is a cognitive connection, and it is perhaps wired-in as a brain feature, encouraging us to seek extensions of meanings and to tinker with words.
This section about catachresis connects with the earlier part in my talk, when I was dealing with problem-solving and used as an example one of the riddles from the Exeter Book. Truly, such riddles take lexical polysemy as their subject matter!
Shakespeare’s plays are best understood taking into account his punning habit. Richard Grant White in his 1858 edition thus explained the title Much Ado About Nothing. In Elizabethan speech, “noting” and “nothing” sounded alike. The play’s plot, White argued, hinges on “noting” as watching or observing. Overhearing the talk from other characters and misunderstanding it is a central, recurring device. The main incidents that come under “ado” occur from “noting” but ultimately amount to “nothing.”
In like vein, Tony Tanner offers an illuminating analysis of Macbeth’s speech explaining his killing Duncan’s servants (II.iii.113-18). Tanner points out that “the gashed stabs, “a breach in nature” evokes the “gross suggestion of breeches.” As writes Tanner, “when things start to go wrong, begin to turn and swerve, Shakespeare likes to use apparently very different, even opposite words which are very close in spelling and almost homophones.”