In fact, Dana was proper to be essential. For anybody not enthralled by Lyellian dogma, the speculation fell silent at a vital level: the manufacturing of elevation. Dana and others wished to know the way sediment piles on the seafloor turned mountains, not simply how they turned crumpled up. Continental uplift was at finest a partial reply to this query, and within the absence of a extra express account of how uplift and isostasy work together, it couldn’t clarify how trenches of sediment come to dominate landscapes. In later years, Dana would develop his personal reply to this query, which might dominate American geology for a number of generations (Dott 1997). Within the course of he coined a time period that might come to be related to Corridor’s mannequin (and his personal): “geosynclinal,” quickly shortened to “geosyncline.” Its significance may be gleaned from a 1944 presidential handle to the Geological Society of America, during which the speaker, Adolph Knopf, praised “the geosynclinal doctrine” as “a terrific unifying idea, probably one of many biggest in geologic science” (Knopf 1948, 667).
Alas, the times of the “geosynclinal doctrine” have been numbered. Immediately, it’s normally remembered with amusement as an virtually unfathomable mishmash of concepts. Corridor’s mannequin, specifically, is often singled out for criticism as absurd, confused, and principally unintelligible (e.g., Dvorak 2021). However absolutely that is unfair. Intelligibility is a operate of background assumptions, and for many who shared Corridor’s assumptions, the speculation no less than made sense. This isn’t to say it was acceptable or fully with out interpretive difficulties. It’s simply to say that intelligibility is just not an intrinsic property of concepts; audiences matter too (Expensive 2006). Whether or not James Corridor actually left mountains out of his concept of mountain constructing is a matter of perspective, and from an necessary perspective– Corridor’s personal— he didn’t.
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