On footnotes in academic tracts

The ever entertainingly informative Mary-Claire vanLeunen has, among other things, the following to say about footnotes in her classic A Handbook for Scholars:

There are scholars who footnote compulsively, six to the page, writing what amounts to two books at once. There are scholars whose frigid texts need some of the warmth and jollity they reserve for their footnotes and other writers who write stale, dull footnotes like the stories brought inevitably to the minds of after-dinner speakers. There are scholars who write weasel footnotes, footnotes that alter the assertions in their texts. There are scholars who write feckless, irrelevant footnotes that leave their readers dumbstruck with confusion.

The footnote should never be your first choice for expressing an idea. …

On the other hand, vitality is a greater virtue than unity any day. The footnote is an awkward tool, inelegant, all thumbs, but it has a breath of life to it. In many contexts the appearance of a footnote parallels the moment when we draw our chairs closer to a speaker and bend forward: Now we’re getting to the good stuff, now we’re getting to the heart of it. Clumsy and halting though footnotes undoubtedly are, they’ve given us too much enlightenment and pleasure for us to turn our backs on them now. By using footnotes judiciously you can fill your reader in on general information he lacks, satisfy his curiosity about fine points, whisper delicious tidbits in his ear, and share with him an occasional small frolic.

The first and last sentences of the quote above reminds me of a book of V S Ramachandran, in the preface of which, while talking about the footnotes that he has inserted in the book, he says that Oliver Sacks once told him “The real book is in the footnotes, Rama”.

In any case, in this post, I want to give an example of another type of footnote that does not explicitly appear in the listing of vanLeunen above — one in which, with a wave of his or her  hand, the author dismisses an entire tract on line of scholarly activity as wrong or pointless.

Here is Thomas S. Kuhn, somewhere towards the middle of his The structure of scientific revolutions (Yes; finally, I have managed to find not only the time but also the perseverance to read the book, which, shortly, will allow me to use the word paradigm in my conversations, writing and blogposts :

No wonder that some historians have argued that the history of science records a continuing increase in the maturity and refinement of man’s conception of the nature of science.^*

^…

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* For a brilliant and entirely up-to-date attempt to fit scientific development into this Procrustean bed, see C. C. Gillespie, The edge of objectivity: an essay in the history of scientific ideas (Princeton, 1960).

Note that Kunh’s book was published two years after Gillespie’s!

I have also seen a similar footnote in one of the classic materials science monographs, which runs somewhat along these lines: I solved this problem in the year XXX. Nearly twenty years later, so-and-so [who is the author of another classic monograph, by the way] tried to solve the same problem and got his answers wrong.

Though not related to any footnotes or academic tracts, since we are talking about rubbishing one’s peers, no discussion is complete without quoting the story of how Eshelby got his FRS: Eshelby, it seems, was sore that he was not elevated to the rank of Fellow of the Royal Society. So, in one lecture, he described all of the then current theories on a particular topic and what was wrong with each of them, and then wrote the names of the authors of each one of them, and, finally wrote “FRS” after each of the names in big, bold letters. Apparently, he was elected an FRS that year and never repeated the performance!

Tags: A handbook for scholars, J D Eshelby, Mary-Claire vanLeunen, The structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas S Kuhn