"The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about"
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Geertz is poking at a comfortable fantasy in intellectual life: that “science” speaks one language, with one shared standard for what counts as insight. He names three neighboring tribes - mathematicians, physicists, historians - and then quietly shows how far apart they actually are. The line works because it doesn’t accuse anyone of confusion; it treats difference as data. That’s classic Geertz: culture is not decoration on top of thinking, it is the medium thinking happens in.
The key move is the pairing of private virtues: “physical intuition” versus “beauty or elegance.” In physics, intuition often means a felt sense of how nature will behave before the algebra catches up - a hunch disciplined by experiment and error bars. In mathematics, “beauty” is less vibe than criterion: compression, symmetry, inevitability, proofs that feel like they couldn’t have been otherwise. Put those side by side with historians, whose talk is saturated with causality, contingency, archives, and the ethical problem of narrating real lives, and you start to see Geertz’s subtext: each field trains its own sensibilities, its own taste, even its own masculinity of certainty.
Contextually, this sits inside Geertz’s lifelong argument that ideas are local. He’s warning against importing a physicist’s rhetoric of intuition into history, or treating mathematical elegance as the gold standard for explanation everywhere else. “Worth thinking about” is doing more than it admits: it’s a polite invitation to intellectual humility, and a nudge to ask whose standards we smuggle in when we declare something “rigorous,” “natural,” or “beautiful.”
The key move is the pairing of private virtues: “physical intuition” versus “beauty or elegance.” In physics, intuition often means a felt sense of how nature will behave before the algebra catches up - a hunch disciplined by experiment and error bars. In mathematics, “beauty” is less vibe than criterion: compression, symmetry, inevitability, proofs that feel like they couldn’t have been otherwise. Put those side by side with historians, whose talk is saturated with causality, contingency, archives, and the ethical problem of narrating real lives, and you start to see Geertz’s subtext: each field trains its own sensibilities, its own taste, even its own masculinity of certainty.
Contextually, this sits inside Geertz’s lifelong argument that ideas are local. He’s warning against importing a physicist’s rhetoric of intuition into history, or treating mathematical elegance as the gold standard for explanation everywhere else. “Worth thinking about” is doing more than it admits: it’s a polite invitation to intellectual humility, and a nudge to ask whose standards we smuggle in when we declare something “rigorous,” “natural,” or “beautiful.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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