Observation and explanation

Norwood Russell Hanson (1924-67) was a man out of his time, a character from the Florentine Renaissance growing up in the contemporary United States. Hanson showed how much can still be achieved, even within the professionalized technocratic society of the mid-twentieth century, by the true amateur: the man who makes himself the master of an art or science out of curiosity, love or sheer cussedness, quite unconnected with the business of earning a living. And he showed how such an Amateur can achieve a kind of richness and variety of experience in a whole range of activities which spills over the boundaries between them. In this way, he became a "jack of many trades" and, in his own very special way, a master of them all. When Russ Hanson died in April 1967, he was piloting his own personal Grumman Beareat, in which he had been planning to attack the world air-speed record for piston engined planes. (He had learned to fly as a U.S. Navy pilot during World War 2 and, during his years at Yale, he would give summer aerobatic displays under the soubriquet of "The Flying Professor.") But he was also a talented musician, improving at the organ or on the horn or trumpet, and equally a remarkable drafts-man, with a special flair for grotesque and imaginative figure drawings reminiscent of Fuseli or Blake. If his own house needed attention, again, he would do the work himself; manhandling steel girders into position which many builders would have blanched at. Even the theoretical physics which he wrote about so authoritatively and confidently as a philosopher was largely self-taught; and, by the last years of his life, he could discuss the most technical problems of quantum mechanics with leading professionals in the field, in a way that won their respect-in strange contrast to the frustrated exasperation with which working scientist regard the arguments of most professional philosophers of science. Hanson got hi university education largely as a returned serviceman, at Chicago and Columbia Universities, and he went on as a graduate to Oxford. There he quickly added a mastery of the methods of post-war British philosophical analysis to his earlier skills, and was appointed to a University Lecturer-ship in philosophy of science at Cambridge University. After the Suez affair of 1956, disillusioned with Britain, he moved back to his native U.S.A. and threw himself into the task of organizing the newly-created interdisciplinary department for the History and philosophy of science at Indiana University, which owes its continuing impetus largely to his efforts. Hanson's essays and polemical writings cover th whole spectrum from philosophical logic to theology-the theology, needless to say, of an Unbeliever: for suggestible, Dogmatism, even in defense of views he happened to support, would rouse his disputatiousness; worse still than believing "the right thing for the wrong reason," was believing anything for no particular reason at all. The two books published in his lifetime, on patterns of Discovery and The Concept of the Positron, were both of them intellectual plum-cakes; variable in texture, but stuffed with good things. The essay which follows gives us more characteristic snatches of that flavory, idiomatic style, which he made so much his own and which his friends came so much appreciate. Stephen Toulmin: January 1971.