University of Virginia Library

Bibliography and Science
by
G. Thomas Tanselle

A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, commenting in 1972 on two bibliographical annuals, remarked, "To argue about the scientific nature of bibliography now is surely to pursue a red herring."[1] I could not agree more. When I observed a few years ago, "All that 'scientific' can mean when applied to bibliographical analysis and textual study is 'systematic,' 'methodical,' and 'scholarly,'"[2] I was only repeating what a number of others have said and what many more must believe. It seems obvious that the word "scientific," when used to describe bibliography—as it has been off and on for more than a century—does not mean the same thing as when it is applied to physics, say, or chemistry. Apparently the issue cannot be dismissed so easily, however, for there have been several recent essays—notably those by D. F. McKenzie, James Thorpe, Peter Davison, and Morse Peckham[3] —which take up fundamental questions regarding the connections between science and bibliography. In a sense one must agree with the TLS that "it is perhaps a pity that he [McKenzie] revived the old argument about the scientific nature of bibliography"; at the same time, the existence of this group of essays suggests that the issue is not a dead one, and the TLS admits that the matter is "currently very much in the air."

Actually, of course, what is in the air is an attempt to clarify the nature of bibliography as a discipline, and what is a pity is that the focus on science may only serve to confuse the central question. Both "science" and "bibliography" have many different meanings, and, when

the two words are joined, the possibilities for confusion are multiplied. It is in this sense that the issue may be regarded as nonexistent, for "scientific bibliography" can mean almost anything, and arguments about it may amount to no more than knocking down straw men. Self-examination, though, is presumably a healthy thing, and bibliography will no doubt profit, as it has in the past, from soul-searching. It may be that bibliographers, at one stage, needed to overemphasize the scientific aspect of their work as a means of calling attention to, and insisting upon, its rigorous and scholarly nature, and that they have now reached a stage where they feel an urge to redress the balance. Bibliography—like many of the so-called "social sciences" (and I am not at this point claiming that it is a social science)—has been somewhat uneasy about its own identity, and it would not be surprising to find that attempts to define it have followed a pendulum-like course. Current discussion which questions in various ways the notion that bibliography is "scientific" may eventually lead—if a debate about "science" itself does not get in the way—to more fruitful analysis of the relations between one kind of bibliographical inquiry and another and of the procedures appropriate to each. In supposing that there is little to be gained by further discussion of how "scientific" bibliography is, I am not complaining about the general direction in which these recent articles are moving but about their circuitous path.

It is easy to understand why bibliographers have had a tendency to proclaim the scientific nature of what they were doing. For one thing, they have wanted, especially during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to demonstrate that bibliography is a scholarly pursuit, to be distinguished from a merely dilettante concern for book collecting. In their zeal to show the respectability of their relatively new discipline, bibliographers were naturally tempted to play up the aspects of their work that could be compared to science, for the spectacular accomplishments of the physical sciences made "science" glamorous and gave particular advertising value to the word. This temptation has been intensified by the fact that bibliography has been associated most closely with the study of literature and that bibliographers are frequently members of English departments who assume that, since much of their work seems more objective than literary criticism, it is somehow scientific. The misunderstanding which occasionally exists between bibliographers and other members of English departments seems to turn on the matter of "science": the bibliographer often makes extravagant claims for the definiteness of his conclusions and may feel flattered to think that he is a scientist of sorts;

certain literary scholars, on the other hand, believe that imagination and insight are unnecessary in the search for scientific facts and assume that bibliographical work is on a lower intellectual plane than literary criticism. Both are wrong in their understanding of science;[4] but the fact remains that it has become a cliché, in the context of literary studies, to regard bibliography as scientific in some way.

Any such tradition has a grain of truth at its center: obviously there is something more "factual" about bibliography than about literary criticism. But the usefulness of science as an analogy has led some people to take the claims for the scientific status of bibliography more literally or in a more precisely detailed sense than was originally intended. I think that a glance at the ways in which science has been linked with bibliography ("the scientific analogy")[5] over the years will reveal the shifting meanings of the two terms, the repetitiveness of the discussions, and the growing tendency to be critical of the comparison itself. And perhaps this kind of survey can provide a perspective from which to view the current situation.[6]

I

During much of the nineteenth century "bibliography" was understood to mean what we would now regard as "reference bibliography"[7] (or "enumerative bibliography")—that is, it was concerned with the intellectual content of books, with preparing lists of books on particular subjects, with the classification of knowledge and the arrangement of libraries.[8] Thomas Hartwell Horne, in An Introduction to the

Study of Bibliography (1814), went somewhat further and included discussion of the materials of books and the history of printing; but when he referred, in his preface, to "the infant science of Bibliography," he obviously meant nothing more than "the classification of books as a field of knowledge."[9] The use of "science" in the general sense of "systematic knowledge" recurs in most of the nineteenth-century discussions. It is explicit, for example, in Reuben A. Guild's The Librarian's Manual (1858), which defined "bibliography" as "the Science or Knowledge of Books" (p. 3). That he equated this science primarily with checklists is evident when he went on to say, "In Great Britain Bibliography as a Science has received less Attention than upon the Continent, although valuable Works have been produced by Horne and Lowndes, Dibdin and Watt" (p. 5). His view of bibliography as a "practical Science" (p. 5) was still essentially the same two decades later when he wrote an article entitled "Bibliography as a Science," in which "bibliography" really means "librarianship."[10] Similarly, E. Fairfax Taylor, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875), though he included some account of printing history under "Bibliography," defined his subject as "the science of books, having regard to their description and proper classification"—using "description," in the sense standard at the time, to mean a recording of the basic facts considered necessary to identify a book (those we would now think appropriate for a checklist).[11]

It is generally recognized that a new meaning for "bibliography" developed in the last third of the century from the work of William Blades, Henry Bradshaw, and Robert Proctor on incunabula. Blades's The Life and Typography of William Caxton, published in 1861-63, attempted to classify and date Caxton's books on the basis of a close examination of their typography; according to T. B. Reed, writing in 1891, this book "marked a new epoch in bibliography, and disposed finally of the lax methods of the old school."[12] Blades himself had commented a few years earlier on the achievement of Bradshaw, whose important classified indexes of incunabula began with his work on the de Meyer collection in 1869:

In remarks of this kind, both "bibliography" and "science" are obviously used in a different sense from the way in which Horne or Guild had understood them. "Bibliography" here means what we would now call "analytical bibliography," with the emphasis on physical evidence, and "science" refers not to systematic knowledge in general but to the examination of empirical data. The movement initiated by these men is what lies behind Henry Stevens's statement in 1877 that bibliography "is fast becoming an exact science, and not a whit too soon. It is high time to separate it from mere catalogue-making"[14] —a statement which was echoed in remarkably similar language by W. A. Copinger in his "Inaugural Address" before the newly formed Bibliographical Society fifteen years later.[15]

However inexact the term "exact science" might be, it served the rhetorical purpose these writers had in mind: an effort to contrast the methodical inspection of evidence found in books with the dilettante interest in old books merely as antiquarian objects. It is important to note that the putative inexactness which the new "exact science" would replace did not lie in the pursuit of enumerative bibliography but rather in the casual attitude of book collectors who—like the "new" bibliographers themselves—regarded books as physical objects. Since Stevens and Copinger both made a point of saying that bibliography—in their sense—was distinct from "mere" cataloguing, they may have given the impression that cataloguing was inexact work and that analytical bibliography was the exact work that had developed from it. But such an interpretation is actually an illogical mixture of two concepts which lie behind their statements: first, that "bibliography" in the sense of listing or cataloguing is a separate activity from "bibliography" in the sense of attention to books as physical objects; and, second, that the "exact" pursuit of the second kind of bibliography (examination of physical evidence) is replacing the "inexact" (vague dilettante interest). The first concept concerns definition of the field of activity; the second concerns the degree of seriousness with which the field is pursued. When the definition of an activity shifts in the middle of a discussion of a particular attribute of that activity, only confusion can result, and this kind of confusion could be regarded as the motif running through the whole history of attempts to link the words "science" and "bibliography." It is no wonder that Olphar Hamst, as early as 1880, felt that the word "bibliography" had so many meanings as to be useless for "any scientific purpose."[16] One further point may be noted about these early descriptions of analytical bibliography: the use of the phrase "natural-history method," like that of "exact science," was meant to be suggestive, not precise. Obviously Blades knew that books, being man-made objects, could not be studied in exactly the same way as plants or insects, but there was no reason for him to make that point, since he was concerned only with a general analogy between two examples of the use of empirical observation, in order to contrast that method with one which did not involve systematic observation at all.

In the years which followed, the Bibliographical Society and several younger bibliographical societies continued to advertise the "scientific"

nature of physical bibliography. The title of Falconer Madan's "On Method in Bibliography," read before the Bibliographical Society in 1893, is characteristic of the concern of these groups that their field should be systematic.[17] Speaking before the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society in 1899, John Ferguson said that bibliography "has nothing to do, in the first instance at least, with the contents. They may be good, bad, or indifferent, but they do not concern the bibliographer. If one may so say, he is not a book-ethicist, but a book-ethnologist."[18] Ferguson's choice of ethnology as his scientific analogy skillfully suggests that bibliography has both an objectivity of method and a concern with the human; even more revealingly he called bibliography "the biography of books" (p. 9). He did not develop the point, but his recognition that physical bibliography is a form of history probably accounts for his unwillingness to label bibliography flatly as a science; it is, he said, "the science or the art, or both, of book description" (p. 3). Although he went on to concern himself principally with the enumeration of books, his few comments on physical bibliography constitute an intelligent revision of the scientific analogy. Another speaker (J. Christian Bay) before another bibliographical society (the Bibliographical Society of America) observed in 1905, "Bibliography, as taught and practiced in the circle to which I address myself, ranks now equal to, if not among, the exact sciences"—phraseology which makes plain the metaphorical nature of the statement.[19] And Victor H. Paltsits at about the same time compared bibliography to anatomy in its concern with analyzing the "component parts" of a book.[20] Both writers, however, went on to confuse the issue somewhat by making the inevitable contrast with "library routine" and the compilation of lists. The whole tendency of this period to glorify the "scientific" aspects of bibliography, in contrast to what went before, is well summed up in James Duff Brown's Manual of Practical Bibliography (1906): Brown's chief interest is obviously in reference bibliography, but his contrast of the scientific present with the dilettante past[21] is characteristic of the viewpoint lying behind the insistence on science in analytical bibliography as well.

By 1912 the tradition of comparing bibliography with science was well established, and W. W. Greg had given enough thought to the matter that he was ready to make what would be the first of an important series of statements on it. He recognized that a general analogy with science could be drawn, for bibliographers "are gradually evolving a rigorous method for the investigation and interpretation of fresh evidence."[22] But what distinguished his remarks from previous ones is that he turned the scientific analogy into a criticism, saying that bibliography was not yet a "satisfactory science":

Like the writers before him, Greg contrasted enumerative and analytical approaches but, unlike them, did not feel that the analytical had developed far enough to provide cause for celebration; the scientific analogy, if it was useful at all, apparently could serve to stimulate bibliographers to greater activity. Still, Greg used the word "science" in his own definition, which at the same time gave currency to another element that would complicate the issue. His chief interest in analytical bibliography, in contrast to that of Blades or Bradshaw, was the effect which its discoveries might have on the establishment of texts, and he defined bibliography (he called it "critical bibliography") as "the science of the material transmission of literary texts" (p. 48). In effect, his definition tended to make analytical bibliography the servant of literary study; and, while he did not say that the editorial process—choosing among variant readings and correcting mistakes—was a science, his statement did use the word "science" and did mention "literary texts." He had entered a fertile ground for misunderstanding, and it is not surprising that debates about the scientific nature of editing would occur, especially after others began to pronounce similar definitions.

Of course, one of the principal accomplishments of the Bibliographical Society in its early years—reflected in the emphasis of R. B. McKerrow's "Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors . . ."[23] —was to demonstrate the bearing of analytical bibliography on literary matters; and it is understandable that A. W. Pollard, as he surveyed in 1913 the Society's first twenty-one years, should have defined bibliography as dealing with "the material mediums . . . through which the thoughts of authors reach those who will take the trouble to gain a knowledge of them."[24] George Watson Cole followed in 1916 with another statement stressing textual transmission—the "perpetuation of thought . . . by means of the printing-press"—as

the domain of bibliographical study.[25] And Falconer Madan, in his Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society in 1920, saw bibliography as "the groundwork to which every literary researcher and writer will instinctively turn"; like Greg, but more elaborately, he had recourse to "science" in expressing the connection between bibliography and literary study: "It is not too much to say that our work bears, or ought to bear, the same sort of relation to literary subjects of research as mathematics bear to natural science."[26] By a curious shift, the natural-history analogy was now more indirect; bibliography was not compared to science directly but instead to mathematics, as a tool employed in the sciences, thus making bibliography a tool of literary study—a rather narrow view of both mathematics and bibliography. Whether this statement was intended as a summary of the current situation or as a recommendation for the future is not clear, but in any case its hint of some sort of exactness in bibliographical work is unusually vague. This tendency to increase the distance between analytical bibliography and science was furthered in Pollard's Presidential Address to the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society in 1923. Entitled "The Human Factor in Bibliography," it pointed out that, unlike botany and geology, bibliography deals with human productions, and any analogy between bibliography and science was therefore somewhat limited.[27] Pollard expressed a point of view which has been heard often since then, but one cannot help feeling that its target is a nonexistent argument, since surely no one who had called bibliography scientific had believed that its materials of study were of precisely the same order as those in the physical sciences. It was bibliographers like Greg and Pollard, interested in the literary application of analytical bibliography, who were finding increasing reason to suggest qualifications of the scientific analogy; but ironically their association of bibliography and literature helped give rise to the misconception that bibliographers were attempting to put literary criticism on a scientific footing.[28]

During the 1930s two bibliographers in particular—Greg and McKerrow—made comments about science which go to the heart of the matter. In each case they attempted to rectify certain fallacies which they believed the comparison with science had led to, and one begins to feel that they found the analogy more distracting than helpful. Greg, in his Presidential Address of 1930, recognized that bibliography is essentially a historical study; whether or not it is scientific thus turns into the question of whether historiography is a science, and Greg answered in the affirmative: "The knowledge of human events, and the methods by which that knowledge is pursued, have just as good a claim to be called a science as have any other body of facts and any other instruments of research."[29] Whereas he had believed earlier that bibliography was an immature science, he thought that it had now moved to a new stage, and he pointed out the meaninglessness of the often-used phrase "exact science":

Although Greg was still calling bibliography a science, the implications were now different, since it had been equated with history. And as history it was an independent discipline, not "the slave of other sciences" (p. 259).[30] If from the beginning analytical bibliography's subject had been described as (in Greg's words) "human events"—as opposed to "natural events"—there would perhaps have been less misunderstanding about it. By the end of the decade McKerrow seemed even more exasperated with the scientific analogy. In his Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare (1939) he observed that the popular reputation of "science" caused people to wish "to bring within its scope, at least in name, many subjects which cannot properly be said to belong there" (p. vi). He admitted that science could be defined so as to include bibliography: "Truth is truth and logic is logic . . . and in a sense any honestly conducted enquiry may be termed scientific." But science as "usually understood," he asserted, involves demonstration by controlled experiment; in this sense the "textual critic"[31] cannot be scientific: Taken together, these statements of Greg and McKerrow cover the crucial points: analytical bibliography is a form of historical investigation; its conclusions are on a lower plane of probability than the inductive generalizations of many sciences because of the impossibility in bibliography of repeating past events as experiments; it can be thought of as scientific only if "science" is taken in an extremely general sense. One wonders what more needed to be said on the subject.

The scientific analogy, however, having become established, continued to turn up. G. F. Barwick, sketching the history of the formation of the main bibliographical societies, used "scientific bibliography" to mean the examination of a book "as an entity" (as opposed to list-making) and commented on various societies in terms of their attention to "scientific bibliography."[32] Arundell Esdaile considered bibliography to consist both of enumeration and analysis, the first of these being an "art" and the second a "science."[33] And Stephen Gaselee, agreeing that both are legitimate aspects of bibliography, went farther than previous writers in finding that both could be called scientific in the same sense—"both are a part of science, at any rate of that natural science to which bibliography is ordinarily and reasonably compared."[34] In addition to comments of this kind, there was one event in the 1930s which gave new force to the scientific analogy: the publication of John Carter and Graham Pollard's An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets (1934). A spectacular instance of answering a bibliographical question by recourse to the laboratory was bound to become a classic illustration of "scientific bibliography." Yet no one would be likely to argue that the laboratory analysis of paper is a peculiarly bibliographical technique; it would be more accurate to say that it is a technique from a field other than bibliography which proved to be helpful in investigating a bibliographical problem. Microscopic analysis fits the popular conception of "science," but bibliography does not achieve scientific status merely through association with it. The way in which the Enquiry could legitimately be said to represent a "scientific" approach to bibliography

is in the frame of mind of its authors, whose objectivity in assessing physical evidence led them to see the necessity for turning to another discipline for assistance.[35] A carefully worded statement on the dust-jacket of their book clearly reflects this distinction, saying that the book "introduces scientific methods which have never before been applied to bibliographical problems of this period." But probably most people, when they call Carter and Pollard's work "scientific bibliography," are thinking of the microscope and do not reflect on the fact that they are thereby attaching an additional meaning to an already overburdened term.

Bibliography continued to be referred to as vaguely "scientific" through the 1940s,[36] though two important essays did appear—Madeleine Doran's "An Evaluation of Evidence in Shakespearean Textual Criticism" and R. C. Bald's "Evidence and Inference in Bibliography," both in the English Institute Annual of 1941. These essays constitute the most serious and extended treatment that had appeared of the implications of the scientific analogy, following the lines of Greg's and McKerrow's comments; more than that, they provided a direct examination of the nature of bibliographical reasoning and demonstration. Bald, agreeing with Greg, classified bibliography as history —or, more precisely, said that it belongs among those "organized human activities . . . loosely known as 'history and the social sciences'" (p. 162). Just as history studies "monuments" (material objects which survive) and "documents" (accounts of events, liable to human error), so bibliography, he reasoned, examines both books themselves, as physical objects, and external evidence bearing on their production and distribution.

Because historical study involves human actions and because laboratory experiments cannot recreate the past, the method of "proving" a case in bibliography could be likened more appropriately to that followed in a court of law than to that employed in a scientific investigation.[37] "Bibliography," he summarized, "cannot claim for its conclusions the same universal validity as belongs to those of the exact sciences" (p. 162). Miss Doran, in her essay, provided a concise expression of this point of view: It would be hard to find a more compact and penetrating statement of the case. Four years later the Bibliographical Society's commemorative volume, Studies in Retrospect, 1892-1942 (1945), naturally gave some attention to the development of bibliography as a "scientific" pursuit,[39] but it included no comment which brings together all the central issues as this one does.

From this point forward the most prolific commentator on bibliographical theory has been Fredson Bowers, and his writings, as one would expect, repeatedly touch on the "scientific" question.[40] However,

he uses the word "science" infrequently, and it is clear that he follows in the line of those writers who find the scientific analogy somewhat facile. His position, as set forth in "Some Relations of Bibliography to Editorial Problems,"[41] is that, although there has often been an "inferential identification of bibliography with textual criticism," the two are separate, and analytical bibliography can be pursued independently of any possible application to textual matters. Since analytical bibliography deals with physical evidence, it lends itself to logical, systematic procedures; "strictly bibliographical evidence," Bowers says, "crosses the line of probability into something close to the field which in science would be regarded as controlled experiment capable of being reproduced" (p. 58).[42] Textual criticism and editing, on the other hand, require cirtical insight: "the great emendations have been inspired art and not systematic science" (p. 45);[43] evidence in this area "can seldom if ever afford more than a high degree of probability, and this is essentially different from positive demonstration" (p. 57). Bowers makes clear, both here and in succeeding essays, a point which some of the later writers on "science" in bibliography do not seem to recognize—that analytical bibliography, while it may at times invalidate a literary argument through a factual demonstration, cannot (and does not claim to) eliminate the need for judgment and critical acumen in editing. Indeed, Bowers repeatedly defends the authority of informed critical insight, when coupled with an understanding of the extent to which analytical bibliography can contribute to the solution of a given problem: In a concise statement of the point he says, "Bibliography endeavors to take as much guesswork as possible out of textual criticism, and the literary method endeavors to inform bibliography with value judgments as a check on mechanical probability."[45] Although Bowers does occasionally apply the word "scientific" to analytical bibliography,[46] therefore, he is careful not to use it to describe editing; and he has done more than any other bibliographer to give substance to the word, by examining at length—in his 1959 Lyell Lectures[47] —the nature of the evidence which analytical bibliography produces and the soundness of the conclusions drawn from that evidence.

We shall have occasion shortly to return to those lectures. But, first, it is worth noting that the use of the word "science" in connection with analytical bibliography—as a brief historical sketch of this kind reveals—has developed in two phases. First came the enthusiastic phase, in which bibliographers found science a useful analogy to help them advertise the fact that their field was a serious and systematic study, not a dilettante pursuit. Exaggeration was probably inevitable;[48] but however strongly they claimed bibliography to be science, these bibliographers generally did not examine in detail the implications of such a comparison but instead used it in a vaguer way for its suggestive value.[49] The second—or critical—phase began when bibliographers, taking these scientific claims more literally, recognized that a comparison of bibliography with "science" (that is, in the usual sense of "physical science") involved pointing out many differences, perhaps as many differences as similarities. Leading bibliographers of the past fifty or sixty years have taken this second position and have stated over and over various distinctions between bibliography and "science." At the same time, through both phases, the issue has been complicated by shifting terms, with one person talking about a different kind of "bibliography" from another, or using "science" in a different sense. One begins to wonder whether the whole matter was not a red herring from the start. Presumably the point of the analogy is to define bibliography,

and definition by analogy can sometimes be illuminating, even when the supposed analogy serves as something to be reacted against. But when the comparison involves a concept as complex as "science," it may do more to confuse than to clarify. Whether bibliography can be defined as a "science" or as something else is of less importance than understanding, in a direct way, what in fact it does, what its methods of procedure are, what its strengths and weaknesses may be. More direct discussions of such matters might have promoted greater understanding than that which has resulted from the perennial concern with the "scientific" quality of bibliography. The course of these "scientific" comments over the years is not an inspiring one and appears to be leading nowhere; the last word on the subject would seem to have been said, and said repeatedly. But apparently Bradshaw's concept of a "natural-history method"—and all that follows from it—is so intriguing to bibliographers that they cannot let go of the analogy, for it remains a matter of discussion.

II

The recent essays on this subject continue the historical trend toward the criticism of the scientific analogy: they find fault, in one way or another, with the supposedly scientific pretensions of bibliography. Insofar as they touch on the nature of bibliographical evidence or the historical aspect of the field and fail to make distinctions between one kind of bibliography or one aspect of science and another, they repeat past history. In this sense the TLS is right in saying that they have "revived the old argument about the scientific nature of bibliography" (though apparently it was never dead). But in another sense they are pitched on a different level, for they offer extended discourses on the philosophic background, the methodology, and the logic of bibliographical demonstration. It does not matter if, for purposes of argument, they assume greater claims for the scientific rigor of bibliography than have normally been advanced; but they do little to alter one's feeling that the question of science in bibliography, initiated as a metaphor to help elucidate the nature of the subject, has developed into a verbal smog which threatens to hide it.

McKenzie's "Printers of the Mind"—the starting point for the current debate—is essentially a statement of the weaknesses of the inductive method.[50] Many of the conclusions reached through analytical bibliography, McKenzie shows, are unsound or less certain than

they were thought to be, because in each case a generalization was based on an insufficient body of inductive evidence. The question which obviously follows is whether any body of inductive evidence can ever be large enough to support more than a reasonable guess. Although McKenzie is ostensibly criticizing bibliography for not being sufficiently "scientific," his discussion demonstrates that bibliography is like "science" in proceeding by empirical observation and that the problem of induction is therefore basic to both. Philosophers have never proposed a satisfactory solution to the problem of induction. Indeed, in the form in which it is often posed, there can be no solution: for if induction is by definition not a form of deduction, and if valid conclusions can result only from a deductive argument, then induction must be ruled out as a legitimate process of logical demonstration.

McKenzie's way of dealing with this dilemma is a standard one: to advocate the insertion of qualifications in any inductive generalization and thus the conversion of such generalizations into hypotheses to be tested deductively. In his words, "A franker acceptance of deductive procedures would bring a healthy critical spirit into the subject by insisting on the rigorous testing of hypotheses, and the prime method of falsification—adducing contrary particulars—would impose a sound curb on premature generalizations" (p. 61). This line of reasoning—given its classic statement in Karl Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery (trans. 1959)—rejects inductive generalizations in favor of unfalsified hypotheses; but it does not confront squarely the logical objection to inductive evidence, since any finite body of evidence which fails to provide falsification for a hypothesis would be open to the same kind of objection. There would seem to be little difference between a generalization held provisionally to be true on the basis of examined evidence and a hypothesis for which no falsifying evidence has yet been located. In either case, further investigation may overturn present judgments. This sort of argument, in other words, appears to make little distinction between induction and deduction, except for the supposed greater caution of the latter. But if the goal of observation is to find some kind of regularity that will be useful in making further observations, excessive qualification may almost negate the process. As Max Black says, "In converting a purportedly inductive argument into a valid deductive one, the very point of the original argument— that is, to risk a prediction concerning the yet unknown—seems to be destroyed."[51] One could perhaps restate McKenzie's observation, without

recourse to induction or deduction, simply by saying that bibliographers should be more careful in framing general statements and more thorough in surveying the relevant evidence. Clearly this is sound advice, and the most impressive part of McKenzie's essay is his effective account of instances in which bibliographers have jumped to conclusions that must be modified in the light of further evidence. McKenzie's article is important and timely: his work on the Cambridge University Press records has put him in a position to understand the value of knowing in detail the various jobs in progress in a printing shop at any one time, and one of the weaknesses of much bibliographical analysis in the past has been that the production of a single book was looked at in isolation, without sufficient regard for the total activity of a shop. The great value of McKenzie's essay, in other words, seems to me to lie in its challenge to widely held generalizations rather than in its theoretical discussions about the logic of bibliographical investigation.

Nevertheless, the objections to induction which McKenzie summarizes ought to be faced by bibliographers—anyone whose work involves argument from empirical observation should give some thought to the logical validity of what he is doing. The inconclusiveness of inductive reasoning cannot be denied, but it seems shortsighted to limit "scientific" argument to the deductive. Philosophers of science recognize that there is no such thing as "the" scientific method, except perhaps in the broadest characteristics.[52] One can say that "science" or "scientific method" involves scrupulous fidelity to evidence obtained empirically and a systematic means of handling that evidence. But the details of the procedure will vary from one kind of situation to another or from one area of endeavor to another. Inductive investigations can be "scientific" in this sense, and to deny their legitimacy is greatly to restrict the range of research. In justifying induction one must finally turn to the pragmatic or common-sense argument of common experience. Everyone, from birth, learns to get along through an inductive process. From time to time one's generalizations are proved incorrect, when the expected does not occur, and one makes adjustments in the generalizations; but the whole concept of "rationality" or "rational behavior" depends on expectations of regularity based on past experience. Perhaps there is no ultimate regularity in the universe; the point, however, is that the projection into the future of a seeming regularity from the past appears to be the only way of proceeding in

the short run. If induction is denied, all human concepts would seem to be destroyed with it.[53] Furthermore, a deductive argument is conclusive only in terms of its premises, which may themselves be unrelated to the "real" world (that is to say, logical validity and truth are separate concepts). Therefore, to establish "truth"—that contact with the "real" or "objective" which is the aim of research—involves the testing of those premises by what amounts to an inductive procedure, even if it is expressed in terms of Popper's theory of falsification. In other words, one is driven to induction on pragmatic grounds, despite the unassailability of logical objections to it. I am making this amateurish summary of a familiar philosophical debate in order to suggest two points: first, bibliographers—though they should understand the implications of inductive reasoning—need not hesitate to proceed inductively, so long as they do so with care and responsibility; second, to collect and examine evidence with care and responsibility is by definition to be scientific, and discussions about whether or not bibliography resembles one particular scientific pursuit or another seem somewhat fruitless exercises (except perhaps to demonstrate the multiplicity of individual paths which scientific endeavor takes).

The more direct and positive approach to scientific method in bibliography is to accept induction openly and to set about examining what constitutes responsible handling of inductive evidence in this particular field, given the nature of the problems which bibliographers wish to solve. Fredson Bowers did exactly that fifteen years ago in his Lyell Lectures. After distinguishing analytical bibliography (concerned

with books as "tangible objects") from textual bibliography (in which analytical bibliography is applied to "internal form, or contents" of books) and suggesting in general the relations of bibliographical research to editing, Bowers examines the nature of bibliographical evidence and states that one of the "laws" of bibliographical procedure "requires us to reason inductively from specific, concrete evidence in the text" rather than deductively from "our general ideas about printing practice" (p. 36). Of course, if "our general ideas" were adequately buttressed with evidence, there would be no problem, but finding that evidence returns us to an inductive search—thus the inductive process is basic, whatever it is called, and Bowers is not interested in debating the terminology.[54] Instead, he proceeds to—what is the heart of the matter—the question of the interpretation of inductive evidence, and he sets up "three orders of certainty": the demonstrable, the probable, and the possible. Now to say that inductive evidence can ever lead to a "demonstrable" case (one in which physical evidence "leaves no loophole for opinion") entails certain assumptions —that all relevant evidence is known and has been examined[55] or that extreme coincidences do not in fact take place. In other words, one has to begin with some notion of the range of occurrences which it is reasonable to expect. Bowers calls this notion the "postulate of normality," which "depends on the working hypothesis that all we know at any given time must be the truth, and therefore the details of the printing process and their handling that have been recovered (when tolerably full) must represent 'normality' unless we have stubbornly inexplicable evidence to the contrary" (p. 72). The phrase "when tolerably full" underscores the central problem, since one must have surveyed a certain quantity of evidence in order to interpret a new piece of evidence, and yet without that new evidence itself the interpretation may be faulty. Nevertheless, some assumption of normality is unavoidable: At this point McKenzie would say that we do not have a large enough body of evidence to define satisfactorily any kind of "normality."[56] Still, his description of a deductive process based on a recognition of "the partial and theoretic nature of bibliographical knowledge" is not, in practical terms, very different from Bowers's picture of an inductive procedure in which explanations "based on imperfect evidence" are modified or corrected by new evidence. Obviously we never know enough; but if we are to proceed, we have to assume that we know enough to get on with. Bowers's discussion, by providing numerous examples of what he regards as demonstrable, probable, and possible interpretations of bibliographical evidence, shifts the focus from the theoretical to the practical. He is not principally concerned with arguing the philosophical question of inductive versus deductive reasoning; the assumption lying behind his analysis seems to be that, since the demonstration of a "truth" finally rests on empirical observation, one might as well accept induction and proceed to confront and examine the evidence that turns up. As a result, his book is a more direct investigation of the "scientific" nature of bibliography than any other discussion, for, instead of concentrating on how well bibliography conforms to certain abstract qualities of "science," he looks at concrete examples of what bibliography in fact consists of, in order to see what particular brand of "scientific method" emerges as most appropriate for dealing with bibliographical evidence.

In the same year in which McKenzie's essay was published, James Thorpe delivered a paper entitled "The Ideal of Textual Criticism" at a Clark Library Seminar.[57] One section of this paper collects quotations

from several bibliographers—especially Greg and Bowers—which seem to assert the scientific nature of "textual criticism," and it cites a few instances of quantitative and mechanized approaches to textual problems. Thorpe then proceeds to conclude, "I can see nothing in the present or future of textual criticism, however it is carried on, which will make it answerable to the term 'science' or 'scientific'" (p. 68). Of course, if "science" is taken to mean "the physical sciences," it is easy to agree with him; but, since no analysis of the term or of the nature of textual criticism accompanies the statement, it has the effect of being simply an assertion, placed in opposition to a series of other assertions. The scientific analogy is worth analyzing if some illumination of the nature of the subject emerges, but little is gained by asserting its inadequacy or inappropriateness, particularly since leading bibliographers over the years have repeatedly made the same point. Although the bibliographers cited by Thorpe did make the comments he quotes, I hope that my earlier historical survey has shown the general drift of the major statements of the last half-century to be in the direction of finding fault with the scientific analogy and recognizing the important place which critical judgment occupies. The difficulty here—as in so many similar discussions in the past—is one of definition. Does "science" mean the same thing throughout all of Thorpe's quotations and in his own remarks as well? More to the point, does "bibliography" mean the same thing, and the same thing as "textual criticism"? Although Thorpe elsewhere discusses at length the relation of bibliography and textual criticism,[58] he does not at this point raise the issue of shifting definitions. His subject is specifically "textual criticism," yet the word "bibliography" is what apears in a number of his quotations; and it should be clear by now that the two terms have not normally been regarded as synonymous. (Even when "text" or "textual criticsm" appears, it is by no means certain that the writer is asserting the "scientific" nature of every step of the editorial process.) The trend in recent decades, as shown above, is to think of the techniques of analytical bibliography (analysis of physical evidence) as perhaps having certain "scientific" qualities but to regard textual criticism (often defined to include editing) as being—true to its name—critical. Thorpe may be concerned about the increasing amount of attention which an editor is expected to give to bibliographical information, but that is a different matter from suggesting that the editorial process itself is claimed to be mechanical (which is what "scientific" often means in this context). If Thorpe's conclusion is that editing involves critical judgment (or literary criticism), most people would undoubtedly agree, including those from whom he quotes. One can concur, in other words, with what Thorpe appears to be saying at the end and yet not see how he is led to that statement by quoting comments on "scientific" bibliography and textual criticism from various periods—especially without analyzing the sense in which each writer was using the key terms.

A similar problem emerges in Peter Davison's incisive discussion[59] of McKenzie's position, for Davison is chiefly interested in textual criticism, while McKenzie is concerned with analytical bibliography. In what is surely one of the most penetrating analyses of the nature of bibliography yet written, Davison argues persuasively that McKenzie's view of scientific method is oversimplified and that his view of bibliography as amenable to the "hypothetico-deductive method" is unrealistic. Nevertheless, Davison's examples are editorial problems, and he shows the shortcomings of the deductive method in terms of editing. He points out, for example, that editors "have to provide answers even if evidence is insufficient or contradictory" (p. 13); and he goes on to explain that the deductive method

All this seems reasonable, but it does not meet McKenzie on his own grounds, since McKenzie is talking about analytical bibliography. What starts out as a criticism of McKenzie's position—the advocacy of the deductive method for a particular purpose—turns into a criticism of the appropriateness of the deductive method for a different purpose. I do not believe that McKenzie would disagree with Davison's position in regard to editing: that an editor must frequently make decisions on the basis of his own interpretation and judgment (informed by whatever data are available) rather than on the basis of conclusively established facts. But McKenzie would still say that the deductive method should be followed in bibliographical analysis—in establishing, that is, the facts and hypotheses which may turn out to be of use in the process of editing. It is possible to meet this argument—as I tried to show earlier—by examining the general problem of induction; but Davison, though he makes an effective case against deduction, does not really speak directly to McKenzie's point, since he shifts the area of application to textual criticism. Once again, a debate about the scientific aspects of bibliography is rendered less clear than it might be through the failure to draw distinctions among different kinds of bibliography (or between "bibliography" and "textual criticism").

Davison's important essay takes up a still larger issue. The existence of essays like McKenzie's and Thorpe's, he believes, may suggest that bibliography is at a "moment of crisis," that it is engaged in what Thomas S. Kuhn calls "paradigm rejection"[60] —the replacing of one paradigm by another when the former is judged to be inadequate to handle the problems with which it is faced. He cites examples of dissatisfaction with the usual concepts of "author" and "text" and with the stemmatic approach to textual criticism. He then argues—in the most intriguing part of his discussion—that, just as a creative writer reflects the changing world-views that result from new scientific theories, so an editor (who responds to "the needs, general and scholarly, of his own society") should perhaps "take note of these changes in the physical explanation of our world and the response of creative writers thereto" (p. 27). The rise of the "new bibliography" is placed in this context:

One illustration is the study of the history of textual transmission: Insofar as this argument says that a man inevitably reflects the characteristic interests and approaches of his intellectual milieu, it is making a generalization about all men and not about bibliographers in particular. But in applying this observation to bibliographers, it has the merit of stressing the humanistic aspects of the field, of saying that bibliographers are like "creative writers," historians, and others who meditate on human behavior, in their reaction to scientific theories about the physical universe. By proposing a pervasive influence of science on bibliography, Davison is paradoxically setting the two apart, for he associates that influence not with specific methodological changes but with an altered outlook that bibliographers share with other thinking human beings. The result is to provide a strong affirmation of the creative in bibliography and to reject the idea that bibliography is like "science" (although the rejection is on a deeper level than is usually implied by the comparison).

The affirmation is salutary, and it gains weight from the thoughtful analysis lying behind it. But one is surprised to find the conclusion couched in language which seems to reopen the troublesome issue of "scientific bibliography." Davison is urging bibliographers to a renewed faith in intuition and subjective judgment:

Here is the most sophisticated use yet made of the scientific analogy. But to claim that the recognition and acceptance of creativity in bibliography somehow involve modification of the bibliographical paradigm is to suggest that bibliography has been more rigidly mechanical than would appear to be the case, judging from the statements, and the work, of its practitioners. Even in the limited area of analytical bibliography—or in Newtonian physics—imagination plays its role (in recognizing significant evidence, in devising ways of arranging it, in making connections between related occurrences). Furthermore, if the bibliographical methods springing from McKerrow and Greg are regarded as the reflection, in the bibliographical area, of the nineteenth-century scientific revolution, it is hard to see the aptness of comparing a further development of those methods with Newtonian science. In any case, the emergence of ways of looking at the universe which go beyond Newtonian physics can indeed be said to require modification of a paradigm, since the Newtonian laws were thought to be universal; but the rules of procedure in analytical bibliography were never claimed to have the same kind of universal application throughout the whole realm of bibliographical pursuits. (Newtonian laws might be thought of as operating in all areas of one horizontal plane—which serves well enough to provide a perspective for everyday purposes—though we recognize the existence of other planes; in contrast, rules of analytical bibliography might be thought of as operating in the limited areas of several planes forming one vertical segment of the bibliographical whole, though we recognize that other segments—editing, for example—border on it.) Besides, to compare "Newtonian physics" and the "precise techniques" of analytical bibliography is seemingly to mix explanations with approaches, though both are called "methods." If the methods of the two areas are compared, it is true that both require care and accuracy, but so do all scholarly pursuits; if the discoveries of the two are compared, both share the ultimate inconclusiveness of all inductive generalizations, though one offers in support an incalculably greater body of evidence than the other. That bibliography and science can be compared in certain carefully defined respects and contrasted in others is not at issue. But Davison's closing comparison, like so many similar ones in the past, diverts attention from, rather than clarifies, his main point and therefore does less than justice to what he has to say.

Another essay which stresses the humanistic nature of bibliography appeared at about the same time as Davison's. Morse Peckham, in "Reflections on the Foundations of Modern Textual Editing," is chiefly concerned with examining the concepts of "text" and "author,"[61] but he begins by questioning the appropriateness of the words "mechanical" and "scientific" as descriptive of bibliography. To

think of book production as a mechanical process in which the "human factor" must be adduced to explain anomalies is, he says, an inversion of the truth, since book production is essentially a form of human behavior, and its study is therefore a branch of historiography: That bibliography is a historical study has been expressed before, by Greg and others, in less elaborate language, and Peckham is right in saying that it does not need to be repeated—except in the hope that one more repetition may convert those who apparently do not yet understand. But are there really any bibliographers who do not understand that they are dealing with human productions and human behavior? It seems unlikely, and yet the kind of terminology Peckham objects to undoubtedly persists. The problem, of course, is one of rhetoric. The old scientific analogy has become so entrenched as a cliché that it continually turns up in one form or another. While its history shows that it is productive of enough confusion that it might better be avoided, it obviously still serves a purpose for some writers. I do not believe that most bibliographers who use the term "human factor" would disagree with Peckham's statement that the term "actually explains nothing" and "only admits that the explanation has broken down." One impulse to use the scientific analogy comes from the need to explain just what approach the analytical bibliographer is taking toward human behavior; since he is dealing with an area which involves the use of mechanical instruments—pens, presses, type-formes, type matrices, paper moulds, and so on—his approach is to see how much can be explained by factoring out the "human" element and concentrating on those instruments. Obviously what he is trying to describe ultimately is a human action, but he wants to see how far he can go in that direction by examining the products of mechanical instruments. He can never go all the way, and sometimes he can hardly get started; when he resorts to a term like "human factor," he is admitting that his explanation can go no farther. Certainly the suggestion that his work is a "scientific" treatment of "mechanical" operations is an overstatement and a cliché, but the motivation for it is clear enough. The difficulty comes—as it has repeatedly—when people react to the rhetoric on a different level from the one intended, and Peckham's complaint about "human factor" is another instance.

Nevertheless, he usefully redirects our attention to the basically historical nature of bibliography and recognizes where that leaves the scientific question: "The scientific status of analytical bibliography is the scientific status of any historiographical construct" (p. 132). This, too, has of course been said before, but what Peckham adds that is new is his approach to the definition of historiography. Since statements about past events cannot be verified by empirical observation, he argues, their interior logic has no relation to any "truth" outside the historical account unless the historian, like the scientist, makes predictions about currently existing artifacts, which are thus subject to repeated direct observation. As he puts it in another essay, historical statements "cannot tell us how to locate the phenomenally perceptible, but only how to construct other statements that may, or may not, successfully instruct us how to locate something in the world before us."[62] In other words, the historian "predicts about where he is going to find documents and artifacts and what their attributes are going to be" (p. 133); and "like any scientist," Peckham says, the historian, after checking his prediction, may have to adjust the thinking that led to it. The question whether history is a science has been more widely debated than the question of bibliography's scientific status,[63] and what Peckham has done is to offer another explanation of the sense in which history does resemble science. His argument, though expressed in different terms, arrives at essentially the same point as McKenzie's: that analytical bibliography—or history—is scientific insofar as it continually

tests hypotheses against directly observable evidence, insofar as the "printers of the mind" move outside the mind.[64] In contrast to the natural sciences, however, with the large body of evidence which they have amassed, "analytical bibliography certainly is not a very highly developed science" (p. 134)[65] —a point which Greg made long ago. Peckham's analysis does not reach any new conclusions, but it goes farther than previous discussions in treating the relations of bibliography and science in the context of historiography.

The recognition that analytical bibliography is history should answer any questions about whether it is an independent pursuit or only the servant—"handmaid" is the favorite term[66] —of another pursuit. But the question has generated a considerable amount of heat, and recourse to the analogy of "pure" versus "applied" science has not helped to answer it.[67] When Copinger, and Greg after him, called bibliography the grammar of literary investigation,[68] they did not mean to imply that the grammar was of no interest in its own right. But the fact that analytical bibliography grew up in the hands of people who were concerned with literary texts led a number of literary scholars to believe that it existed only as an aid for establishing texts.[69]

As a result of this way of thinking, Bowers found himself in the position of insisting on the seemingly self-evident: that bibliography is "an independent discipline of scholarship and not merely an ancillary technique to literary investigation."[70] The possibility of understanding the word "bibliography" in various ways is again at the root of the matter, as it is when Thorpe returns to this issue. He quotes S. L. M. Barlow as saying, "It is none of the business of the bibliographer or the pure scientist what use is made of his findings";[71] and he objects by replying, "In my way of looking at textual criticism, its value derives only from serving the useful purpose of helping to present the text which the author intended" (p. 68). But "bibliographer" does not necessarily mean "textual critic"; it can mean "analytical bibliographer," whose field of interest—the printing practices of a given period or a given shop as revealed by physical evidence—is surely a legitimate subject of inquiry in its own right. If it had been as popular to call bibliography "history" as it has been to call it "science," these matters would probably have aroused less controversy; and Peckham's emphasis on the historical nature of analytical bibliography is therefore welcome.

Forty years ago Georg Schneider, in his book on reference bibliography, said, "It makes little difference whether bibliography is termed a science or an art, a technique or a skill, or even all of these together."[72] One is particularly ready at this point to apply the statement

to other areas of bibliography as well. The act of classifying a subject in terms of a larger framework ought to help clarify the nature of that subject, but the history of the association of bibliography with science shows that there are exceptions. Part of the trouble, it is evident, is that bibliography is not "a subject" but a related group of subjects that happen to be commonly referred to by the same term. There should be no problem in recognizing historical bibliography (the study of printing, publishing, and associated areas at particular times in the past) as history; nor is it hard to move from there to an understanding of analytical bibliography (the examination of the physical evidence in books as a clue to the processes of their production) as history. Descriptive bibliography again is history (the history of the forms in which a given group of books has appeared), drawing on both historical and analytical bibliography. It may have occasion, depending on the nature of the problems encountered and the level of detail contemplated, to utilize instruments or methods of measurement generally regarded as "scientific,"[73] but that fact does not make it a "science," except in the general sense that it is striving for accuracy; it may often take as its field of investigation the books written by a particular literary figure, but that fact does not make it a "literary" study. Textual criticism and scholarly editing,[74] however, though they draw on these three historical kinds of bibliography and though they aim at establishing the history of particular texts, deal with questions of meaning in texts which can frequently be resolved only by literary sensitivity, and they can reasonably be thought of as part of the field of literary criticism[75] —but they could also be defined as a form of history, and to debate the matter would be as fruitless as to debate whether they are a form of science. To regard bibliography as principally historical is not to settle anything, since the status of history is also in question;[76] but it places the debate about the scientific nature of bibliography in the context of a larger debate, about which much more has already been written, and it associates bibliography with other pursuits that concentrate on unique past events,[77] thus providing a more immediately acceptable analogue (if indeed it is not a tautology).

The impulse to use a scientific analogy is ultimately the natural human inclination to believe that what one is doing now is more rigorous and precise than what people were doing in the past. Speaking of textual criticism, Housman, in a well-known passage, says that "the most frivolous pretender has learnt to talk superciliously about 'the old unscientific days.'" But the truth is, he continues, "The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now."[78] To talk about what one is doing can sometimes help one to proceed; but there are other times when it seems best to get on with the work and to define the work by doing it.[79]

Notes