Talk:Scientific Revolution/Archive 1

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archived 18:13, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Note to the editors: You can time-stamp your posts anonymously with 5 tildes, thus 10:24, 20 September 2005 (UTC).

This is advocacy, not an encyclopedia article. Does anybody feel confident they know about the topic to be able to fix it, or should I get out the chainsaw? --Robert Merkel

This is pretty bad. The Scientific Revolution is a oft-used term by historians of science, and not nonsense as the writer of this atricle wishes us to believe. Ought to be completely rewritten. --Victor Gijsbers

Done. Still a lot of room for improvement, though. --Victor Gijsbers

Reason for revert: for example:

Rather, Aristotelian philosophy dependend upon the assumption that man's mind could elucidate all the laws of the universe through reason alone.

From aristotle:

Whereas Plato was an idealist and a rationalist who believed that what we see is an imperfect copy of the intelligible Forms, Aristotle thought that what we know of the world must begin with the senses (see materialism and empiricism). Thus, Aristotle set the stage for what would eventually develop into the scientific method centuries later.

This confuses me... :) Martin

We need to revert the revert! The article we have on Aristotle is misleading, if not totally wrong. Aristotle did not in any way practice what we moderns call science! He wrote about subjects that were later investigated with the scientific method. However, as a matter if principle Aristotle and all later Aristotleians refused to compare their ideas with reality; they did not perform experiments. I think the article we have non Aristotle was written by a non-scientists. RK

As for the position that science is a religion, that is only a recent ad homenin attack by religious fundamentalists who are fearful of science. It is also used by people who, quitre literally, have no idea what the word means. Science is the opposite of religion; science is a method, and not a position. There are no beliefs about the physical world in science that one must hold to; rather, all one's ideas about the world are provisional truths, and one must be willing to change these beliefs if facts surface that justify such changes. In contrast, most religions do not allow for one to abandon one's core religious beliefs ever. Belief is essential to most faiths. This striking distinction muct be preserved in the article. RK

RK, Aristotelians did not refuse to compare their ideas with reality. They did not do experiments, true, but this was a logical consequence of their idea of natural and imposed behaviour: in an experiment, you will see imposed behaviour, not natural behaviour. Thus experiments do not help you to understand nature. The change from this view to the experimental tradition was one of the major developments of the scientific revolution, as I described. However, although Aristotle did not practice modern science, he surely practiced something we ought to call science. He based his science on observation; did you know Aristotle was the first great biologist? While living on the island Lesbos, he dissected lots of animals and wrote biological treatises based on what he observed. Victor Gijsbers

Ok, I agree with your analysis. I just think that this definition (terminology) is an important point. RK

Is the distinction between science and religion really essential to this article? I thought it was a rather tangential point, myself - better suited to science and religion or some similar article. Martin

Nope, I'd say that has to go. It has nothing to do with the subject. Victor Gijsbers
Here I disagree. This is a great example of a scientific revolution: the change from observation to experimentation is a revolution. RK

I applaud RK's counter-revisionist efforts in the matter of literary criticism, though I'm not sure "socialist" (cf his change summary) is quite the right epithet. The word has been pretty much superceded by PoMo, I'd say.

But substantively, there's still an odd problem, and I'm not sure how to NPOV it. Or a couple of problems. In the four-step program, Galileo is described as 'presenting the observational process in a form which appears to have the rigour of the 'unimpeachable' Euclidean proof, in his "falling bodies experiments."' I don't know how to improve this, because I don't really see what it means. An old-fashioned way of describing Galileo's work would be that he did experiments and developed mathematical theory to account for them. Is the statement I've quoted any more than an attempt to make him sound bad, as if he claimed mathematical certainty for experimental data? Dandrake 07:29, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

I think you have hit it right on the head. The wording used by these particular literary critics is intended to obfuscate the point, and belittle the scientists involved. A straight-forward explanation in plain English would work against their purposes! RK

Then, 'Third, Robert Boyle sets about transforming Galileo's 'idealised' thought experiment as characterised by Galileo's "falling bodies experiments".' [Pretty soon I'll correct the text's odd inconsistencies in quote-mark usage.] This I understand: it's the old claim that Galileo's reported experiments were actually just thought experiments: he couldn't have really performed them, you know, because it was not possible to measure time that accurately. In fact, the claim is simply wrong. Galileo's experimental work was replicated forty (40) years ago, yielding rather surprising accuracy. Not to mention that his experimental notebooks are known in detail.

(Which is less surprising? That writers keep quoting each other without catching up with data from the 1960s? Or that the scholarly historians never actually tried the experiments (apparently) before deciding that they were impossible? But I digress.)

Anyway, the factual error tends to make the whole argument of this section require restructuring. Since I think the argument is all wrong, I must invite others to try that project. Dandrake 07:29, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

Good points. I would support your editing of this article. RK 01:44, Jan 6, 2004 (UTC)


Well, I meant what I said about inviting the Cultural Materialists to join the discussion and see if they vould re-work the text; but they don't seem to have this piece watch-listed. And my patiecne with wrong information is limited. I don't really like the kind of hack I inserted; a good article does not so obviously fight with itself. But getting some of the information from the past forty years (Yes, I am deliberately tweaking the noses of the hyper-post-modern critics) into the article was the only alternative to deleting that section completely. A better way of integrating these things into the article is invited from anyone who can do it; but please don't ignore the existing research.

While I'm up, I see that the very few quote-marks previously in the article were double, which is the best usage anyway; so I'll make changes for consistency. If there's a style sheet for scare-quotes, I haven't seen it. Dandrake 00:13, Jan 9, 2004 (UTC)

About the Galileo thought experiment issue:

Recent discussions regarding Galileo do not concern themselves with the question of whether or not Galileo did or did not actually conduct his experiments.

The key transition from Galileo to Boyle is presentational, in that the experimental process is deliberately, systematically and (theoretically) incontrovertably interwoven with the witnessing, record keeping, publishing, review and debating process, so that 'accusations' of 'imaginary experiments' or falsified experiments cannot be unjustifiably made (as perhaps they might have been in the case of Galileo) about those observations of nature which are successfully admitted to the body of scientific knowledge.

I don't know of any such challenge actually being made before the 20th century; but I could be wrong, and that doesn't change your point anyway. Given what you say, it seems that the wording about idealised thought experiments could be modified to look more like what you say here and less like "he didn't necessarily do the experiments"; then my counter-paragraph would become pointless, and could be removed. This would be a good thing for the article IMO.

Galileo 'broke the mould' by successfully gaining acceptance of the experiment as a process which could successfully challenge received authority, Aristotle, the church, the bible and deductive reasoning as a uniquely satisfactory source of revelation concerning the natural world.

Without Galileo, there is no reason to believe Boyle would have been inspired to originate or indeed refine (into a form which is now the norm) this seemingly definitive structure of the observational knowledge acquisition process.

Boyle was essentially making it such that the suspicions concerning Galileo's having concocted a fictional experiment would no longer need to be endured, providing 'Boylean rigour' was sustained in the overall knowledge body building regime (in other words, document the 'boring' details of your experiments, rather than rely upon Euclidean proofs as a means of validating your conclusions regarding their results).

Nonetheless, put in its historical context, the Euclidean proofs were (ironically) what helped others recognise the revolutionary nature of Galileo's work, even though the Euclidean proof was in a way the opposite of what made it revolutionary.

Ericross

These are good points, as far as I'm concerned. I respectfully suggest working them more fully into the text of the four-part summary. As it stands, what is supposed to a presentation of the conventional wisdom has a "this is wrong" tone, and also does not accurately present that side; I really think a criticism of that position would be stronger if the presentation didn;t start out by getting people's backs up. Dandrake 20:48, Jan 10, 2004 (UTC)

To Dandrake

I did not intend to give the impression that Boyle was seeking to 'address the shortcomings of Galileo's prescription of experimentalism' in the sense of this being some kind of 'criticism' of Galileo, although admittedly, if Boyle is exhorting, as he is, experimentalists to 'document their experiments' in a way more compatible with the 'forensic' preparation of evidence for a trial, there is obviously an implied criticism of a more casually presented testimony, lacking in sufficient detail to persuade those not expecting to have to replicate the experiment in order to confirm the results.

I know of no evidence to support the claim that Boyle sought to show anything but respect to Galileo, in his attempt to progress further in Galileo's direction.

Boyle was NOT saying:

"Look at Galileo, see how sloppy he was in leaving out sufficient detail so as to make his descriptions of his experiments seem to be speculative fantasies?".

Boyle was saying (in my words):

"If we want to realise the dreams of Bacon and Galileo, we need to take Bacon's injunction to 'put nature to the question' and Galileo's example of how to do this successfully, and use the rigours of a process which has the well established disciplines of jurisprudence (systematically tested evidence and published judgements) to produce a body of precedents and statutes which will constitute the human account of the laws of nature, an enterprise which will honour the memories of these two great figures and hopefully serve humanity better than the prevailing ignorance and mysticism which this future body of knowledge is intended to supplant."

Galileo convinced sceptics that 'practical human investigative action' could overcome the inaccurate descriptions that the natural shortcomings of our mechanically unaided senses and minds have lead us to accept and which the inevitable emergence of established dogma has discouraged us from challenging.

Bacon, independently of Galileo, championed and planned the campaign of challenge, but did not provide a demonstration of a successful challenge in the way that Galileo had, leaving an unfulfilled agenda to inspire his successors.

Boyle saw the validity of Galileo's method of challenge and accepted the Baconian targets of such a challenge, but also recognised that few if any experimental examinations of natural phenomena offered the same opportunity for Euclidean proof-style validation of their results as the 'falling body experiments' and so Boyle sought and identified an alternative method of validation of experimentally obtained knowledge, namely a 'legalistic' trial of that knowledge.

Boyle's recognition of the value of experiments, combined with his solution to the 'validation problem' renders his contribution in science such that it is of equal value when compared with the legacies of Galileo, Bacon and Newton.

Ericross

I'm trying to edit the literary-criticisms section according to the way I understand the above argument, which is IMO much more reasonable and better presented than the text in the article. If I've misunderstood, we need further discussion. But something has to be done, at least to the four-step program for the SR, the presentation of which is not what anyone believes, but a caricature by its critics, laced with sarcasm and scare quotes. For the moment, please note, I'm not touching the rebuttals of conventional SR ideas; just that which they claim to rebut. "Straw man" is an impolite and abused term, but it's relevant here.

I've now rewritten the First point, and have gladly torn out the paragraph I wrote in answer to it. If anyone wants to revert, don't forget to revert the counter-paragraph as well. Dandrake 06:15, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)

Ditto the third step, and its false imputation of mere thought experiments, and the rebuttal to that. Speaking of "mere", I changed that to "pure" reason in point one, because scientists do not consider reason to be "mere". [You're not going to invoke Mere Christianity on me, surely; not here.<g>] Dandrake 06:29, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)

To Dandrake:

Here's the current state of the paragraph:

"A recent trend in literary theory, "Cultural materialism" denies that there was a scientific revolution, or that if a revolution occured, it denies that it was important. Literary critics who hold this point of view have a unqiue, and many would claim, mistaken, definition of what the term "revolution" means. These literary critics hold that if a scientific revolution did not occur instantaneously, and without historical precedent, then by definition it cannot be a revolution, and can only be an evolution. If the scientific revolution was only an evolution, then it must have little or no importance."

I want to improve upon this.

I appreciate the courtesy of taking it up here; gives one a warm glow of self-righteousness, no?-- to be out of the edit wars that pop up elsewhere. However, this is really addressed to the wrong person: that para was edited by RK. I've dropped a note in his user talk page, in case he hasn't noticed this traffic. Hence I'm not taking up the issue myself, for the moment. With an exception below. Dandrake 02:26, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC)

"denies that there was a scientific revolution"

Would be more representatively phrased as

"questions whether there was a scientific revolution"

and also:

"it denies that it was important"

might be better put as being:

"questions whether it was important".

However, this is still not really getting to the heart of the latest exploratory work in this field, which has moved on, with the advent of the enormous 1985 impact of "Leviathan and the Air Pump" to anthropologists like Bruno Latour ("We have never been modern" 1993).

The questions are now concerning not whether there was a scientific revolution of not but what revolutions are as a sociological phenomenon.

At first sight it seems clear cut, we can say "there was a time when people did x and there was a time before that when nobody did x" and this has few definitional problems if the thing in question is at least to some extent physical, such people riding on trains rather than relying upon horses for transport.

But in the case of science, it is certainly the case that:

(1) pre-scientific explanations were more commonly given and accepted than scientific ones for a period long after the scientific revolution was claimed to have occurred

(2) some of the changes which account for the revolution are methodolgical, others presentational, others theoretical and still others contingent events, all of which add up to a 'spread of chronology' so diffuse that from a historical standpoint there are only arbitrary criteria available for setting the beginning and end of the revolution.

If something like a revolution cannont be set steadfastly in time, then it challenges the simple everyday notion of the meaning of the term.

Modern anthropologists are concerned with the subtle interplay between pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and post revolutionary manifestations of social phenomena, a study which reveals most practical realities to be much more hybridised combinations than any monolithic construct such as "the scientific revolution" will permit.

Even today, the nature of consciousness, as a scientific topic, is as permeated by metaphysics as it was before even Descartes began to speculate upon the problems we have in terms of reducing it to being the subject of a scientifically accessible experiment.

Science was too fuzzy an innovation, too multidemensional a set of changes, too similar and interconnected to its predecessors to have had a clear beginning sufficiently distinguishable to label a revolution unless you start with Archimedes.

Other questions concern whether the thing called "the scientific revolution" was a political construct, a religious artifact (of appeasesment or challenge) or merely a historical confection whose 'landmark dates' are actually of limited relevance to the timeline for the spread of scientific acceptance.

Nobody is claiming that none of the things associated with the scientific revolution were possibly revolutionary, it is just that some are asking whether, when you add it all up, you get something a lot less "time specific" and "thematically holistic" than, say "the transistor revolution" or the transition from the stone age to the bronze age.

Anthropologists rarely find any revolution which totally escapes the 'amorphous hybrids' and 'chronological parallelism' challenges, but the scientific revolution has only recently been seriously brought under scrutiny in this way, so one can anticipate many more surprises.

Oh, and by the way, no anthropologist thinks an evolution is less important or interesting than a revolution, because evolution poses the prospect of Darwinian/Lamarckian phenomena (intermediate stages, adaptive processes, acquired inherited or transmitted characteristics).

Ericross

An interesting presentation, and I don't deny it has a point. However, the reaction of us scientificalists is not just wounded pride at the notion that some people people think this stuff unimportant; there is a serious disagreement of facts, insofar as the question of whether there was a revolution is a metter of fact.
I have thought, and now am thinking seriously, about yet another section that I might add, an empirical one. Whereas Latour et al. explain how much people's thinking didn't change, the new section would tell specifically, from the scientist's point of view, how much the knowledge of the material world did change during an extraordinarily short time. I.e., Hey, something radical happened. Hope to draft it soon. Dandrake 02:26, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC)


I've re-read this discussion, and maybe it's time to push forward a bit.

First of all, I see nothing wrong with the suggested changes in wording. I think they should just go in.

On the larger issue, there are major and minor disagreements about Revolution. The major one concerns what revolution we're looking at: what I'll call the sociological discussion obscures or distracts from the revolution in science that is a large part of what scientists and such people mean when they say Scientific Revolution. I've started to compose a section on that, but haven't made it come out right. It shows, I think, that that revolution was staggering in size and speed and specificity of time—in the context of science. And it's also completely unmistakable as to its reality.

Is this limited revolution a phenomenon worthy of serious study by other scholars: historians, philosophers, sociologists, et al.? Seems so to me (and to lots of people on the Science side of this divide, when they're not simply exasperated at the unscientificness of all those non-scientists) because the aftereffects of that change are of a lot of importance, practically and (another point to debate) intellectually.

Then, there's the question whether anything revolutionary really happened in people's ways of thinking and behaving, at least outside the lab. There will be disagreement here, too; but at least the point that the change in people's thinking (insofar as it happened) was not condensed enough in time to be revolutionary—extracting myself from that sentence—such a case can certainly be made.

Another problem remains: I don't see that the position you've developed here has much in common with the exposition in the article section that's now called "Literary criticisms". Maybe I haven't reread that section soberly enough. My current feeling (and I emphasize that word) is that the talk page is making more sense than the article page, an unusual situation that should not persist forever.

Anyway, I intend to tune up my Empirical section, and place it before the Literary one. That, as I see it, places the more restricted view first and the broader one after. With luck, it could give some context for the literary-criticism debate. Dandrake 02:54, Feb 3, 2004 (UTC)

Dan, I hope you do not feel that I am being too self-indulgent, lazy, or am imposing unfairly, if I license you (as if such a license was called for on an open system!) to act as an 'amanuensis' for the debate we have begun here.

No problem. In principle, that is; but the difference between practice and theory in practice is always greater than it is in theory.

Please feel free to amend the main article to reflect the changes we seem to agree upon and to identify the controversies we have identified.

And I've simply made the simple changes, which remain relevant after a recent edit or two. But in practice, I don't think I can present any fair summary of the things you're saying, though (as I remarked before) they make a good deal more sense to me than the section as it stands. I suppose the ideas will have to simmer a while longer.Dandrake 21:52, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

Here is my problem with the scientific revolution in a nutshell:

Something fundamental began to change.

But the change between Galileo and Boyle is just as revolutionary as the change between Boyle and Newton.

Westfall shows that Newton's Principia was a systematic fraud, perpetrated because Newton felt compelled to disguise the impact of Cartesian mathematics on his discoveries, because he was convinced they were heretical.

Newton actually made the 'science' harder to take seriously than the 'proto-science' which preceded it, but this so embarrassed those unable to cope with the Byzantine mathematical gymnastics necessary to apply his knowledge in the form he had delivered it that there is a strong case to be made that the attribution of a scientific revolution to him, Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, etc. was actually a politically correct fig leaf at the time, which, in the light of the technological revolution which succeeded it, seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (but it was a prophecy nonetheless, a fact which has only recently come under scrutiny by historians).

Newton's work is both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary and those historians who used him in the earliest references to what we would now call the scientific revolution, were 'honouring his memory' rather than serving science.

Not, of course, that one could put him outside the account of the development of science, nor to diminish his positive contributions, which were in fact no less great than they had seemed before this distorting process was identified.

How many scientific revolutions were there?

Were they all the same thing?

The war between science and mysticism, although crucial to the story of the revolution, does not seem to begin at a point in time where it serves to satisfactorily demarcate the birth of the revolution (astronomy was not exclusively unscientific before the scientific revolution) so when did it start?

I'm not sure those questions actually help, but the point is, something was claimed, proclaimed and accepted, shortly after these people were all dead, to have been a 'scientific revolution'.

What it was, when it began, what distinguished it from what went before, how it changed things, which things it did not change, which claims it made that can still be challenged philosophically and coherently, make it a phenomenon which is ultimately amorphous and more complex than anything else we happen to describe as a revolution.

Scientists should not be so disturbed that it is being challenged, because to challenge it is good science, because the historical analysis available to us today demands, just like the reports of new experimental data on any well established phenomenon, a re-examination of that phenomenon: new questions need to be asked, new answers sought and the body of scientific knowledge, rather than being threatened by 'anti-science' is strengthened, as it always has been, by a public, vigorous, robust, carefully recorded and ventilated debate.

The scientific revolution has enough in common with other revolutions that it seems picky to say that certain characteristics disqualify it, and yet using similar criteria, other seemingly less important revolutions seem to 'retain their credentials', which seems an odd state of affairs.

But equally, the things that purport to constitute the scientific revolution are so fundamental to human knowledge, that if it is necessary to determine that the scientific revolution was in fact a far more complex and unique set of phenomena than these lesser revolutions, then in fact it will ironically be the case that including it in the category of 'revolutions', far from crowning it with the glory that something so fundamental deserves, will be to diminish its relative importance as a consequence of over-simplifying its developmental history, which may transpire to be best served as being considered to be, as a historical phenomenon, in a category of its own, something which perhaps may altogether transcend our very understanding of terms like 'revolution' and 'evolution'.

If the scientific revolution as we now know it, turns out to be nothing more than a romanticised and distorted mish-mash of vaguely and arbitrarily connected changes, there is nothing to preclude this eventually being replaced by a future systematic and much more scientifically, philosophically and historically accurate account of how we got from Aristotle to Galileo, to where we are now.

We might find that we will still call that account, or some period within it, the scientific revolution, but equally, we might not.

Ericross.


Meanwhile, my own idea of a presentation of what scientists are thinking of (as I perceive it) has cooked long enough that I'm going to insert it. It goes just before this section, giving the "literary" school the last word, sort of, which is appropriate for the broader concept of the revolution. Maybe. Dandrake 21:52, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)

"A pragmatic view..." is my attempt to define what scientists and their friends are likely to think of as the scientific revolution behind all the theorizing about the scientific revolution. (I was going to call it an empirical view, till I noticed the heading preceding it; in this context, pragmatic is less misleading even though less accurate.) It is a "Fern Seed and Elephants" view—that being the title of a collection of pieces by C. S. Lewis, in one of which he accuses theologians of searching diligently for a fern spore while overlooking an elephant standing next to them.

In this case there seems to be an unmistakable set of events in history, so vastly important that all its foes and all its friends have made great edifices of theory and explanation, and have worked in such detailed fashion on the origins and the consequences and the structure and the timing and how and when people became Modern and all, that they don't notice the elephants that Galileo and Kepler rode in on. The article attempts to express this position a bit more politely. If it fails, and seems to cast too much doubt on the legitimacy of other approaches, this is not surprising in light of my actual opinions; let's discuss it here. Dandrake 23:15, Feb 12, 2004 (UTC)


Deleted the sentence about some experts saying that science didn't really exist till the 19th century. It may be true, but it's not supported in the article or in anything it points to (so far as I can see), and such stuff doesn't belong in an introduction. Dandrake 05:01, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)


Moved the section on the scientists' scientific revolution to the front, on the grounds that it outlines the data for all the theorizing. Dandrake 22:44, Feb 17, 2004 (UTC)

Moved the following paragraph here because it makes a controversial claim:

I have yet to see any historian publish a dispute of the views given.

Also, writers like Principe and Markley ARE historians.

Westfall systematically demonstrates that Newton's Principia was a fraud in terms of brilliantly constructing an edifice whereby his laws of motion are derived from Euclidean geometry (he learned the trick from Galileo, but everyone was at it in those days, even Spinoza) in order to conceal the (what he correctly recognised as heretical) source of his discovery, Cartesian analytical geometry.

Can you clarify what the fraud is? The standard narrative (see, I've picked up a fashionable term or two) used to be that he wrote the derivation of his physical work in classical terms because the world wasn't ready to understand a presentation in algebra and his own newly invented calculus, which of course would otherwise be the natural and superior way of presenting it. Even if he had the unworthy motive of protecting himself from losing his job and [fill in whatever the English were doing to heretics that year], it's not clear that that constitutes fraud per se. By the way, I of course reject categorically the notion that Galileo's presentation was a "trick". Just exactly how do Bruno and his friends think he ought to have presented the work instead? Do they in fact have any understanding whatever of what Galileo's work was? As you may see, I don't like accusations of fraud against valid scientific work which in its substance has stood up to 350 years of peer review; I regard it as a extraordinary claim requiring (as scientists believe) extraordinary support. Dandrake 02:04, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

As Russell points out, this artifice of Newton's was not purely scientific, it was political, and it held back British scientific development for over a century.

My point in the context of the scientific revolution, was that both the historians and the scientists took an extraordinarily long time before they saw through this.

You can only trust scientists and historians once science and history have taken enough time to (as Bacon would have put it) put their work to the question.

Please note that the thrust of both the literary and anthropological criticism is not to 'deny' the scientific revolution, but instead it is to question it in the light of perspectives which, once the historical events have been considered, will leave a clearer picture of the phenomenon. (nobody is telling anyone to 'write the term out of the history books', just to add some fresh and important caveats). No literary critic or anthropologist is going to claim that the developments attributed to the scientific revolution weren't important, nor even that they were not necessarily attributable to a revolution, notr even that the revolution had nothing to do with science, but what they are doing is refusing to accept that the traditional 'linearity' of the relationships identified in this sentence fully describe the phenomena.

They are not denying or deprecating the scientific revolution, they are demythologising it and building a better account.

I can't believe that an encyclopedia would be satisfied with sustaining the mythology, such that Galileo, for instance, was as irreconcilably divorced from his protosientific contemporaries as he was truy represented by his recantation.

Well, I for one wouldn't try to sustain that mythology, because I can't figure out what it means. I can figure out pieces of it: "completely divorced from his protoscientific contemporaries"? Who on Earth would say that? He wasn't even divorced from his protoscientific predecessors, such as Tartaglia, from whom he got (proximately, anyway) the Euclidean methods that were essential to his analysis and that you for some reason seem to perceive as trickery.
As for "tru[l]y represented by his recantation", I don't know what to make of it, being unaware of anyone who has ever taken the recantation seriously as a statement of what Galileo believed. There may be something missing from my understanding of the slightly confusing "as ... as" construction in that sentence.
So I really don't have a position on it until I understand it.
This much I know: I'm not trying to stop anyone from investigating the history of science, and even digging up stuff I don't like. (The paragraph you moved is, as I mentioned before, not mine, so I don't feel really protective of it, though I mostly agree with it; more on that, maybe, another time.) I'm objecting to specific points that appear to be saying things that are unsupported or demonstrably wrong; for instance, the charge of fraud against Newton, which still hasn't been explained, and the "thought experiment" claim that I took out of the four-step plan because it represented (as I read it) an experimentally disproved assertion of fact.
By the way, after looking at the page history, I assume this is you, having accidentally got logged off, and not some third party? I'm going to work to cool my rhetroic a bit next time; but as you know, being a student of history of science, the word "fraud" is a serious red flag to wave at anyone who takes science seriously. Dandrake 22:49, Feb 18, 2004 (UTC)

Just because the lit-crit and anthropo telescopes have imperfect and grimy lenses (lit-crit writers are their own worst enemies when it comes to putting even their simplest and most useful ideas into an intelligible form) are you saying that we should be afraid of looking through them ourselves?


Ericross

Here's the paragraph in question:

Most historians of science dispute this view; all revolutions (scientific, social, politicial, historical) are non-instantaneous; all revolutions are always based on a number of historical precedents. Even the revolutionary development of Quantum mechanics in the early 20th century depended on a number of evolutionary steps, each based on findings from previous experiments. Thus, denying that the scientific revolution took place, or was of great importance, due to its evolutionary nature is facile. Given this view, one must deny that all revolutions of any sort have ever taken place.

Contents

more history, less historiography

I was surprised to find so much historiography here, and almost nothing said about what happened.

It would be better to lay outline some of the history itself, and then append the historiographic material at the end. Or else start a new article about it.

The title of the article suggests that this should be an article about the scientific revolution itself, not about how historians feel about it.

On the face of it, this sounds reasonable, and it is certainly what the ordinary reader would expect.

However, there is a problem. "The Scientific Revolution" is a category invented by historians in the 20th century. No one in the 17th century could have used such a phrase. Neither "scientific" nor "revolution" could be used in these senses.

The concept was developed, mainly at Cambridge and later in the US, for specific purposes. It was designed to show that the Royal Society, laissez-faire capitalism, English Protestantism, and the 1688 Settlement were the origins of modernity, not Catholic absolutism or the French Enlightenment, which led to Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Anglo-American science, empiricism and democracy had won the Second World War, because they constitute Progress, unfettered by European ideologies.

Thus, wherever one starts the narrative of the Scientific Revolution, it always reaches a climax with Boyle, Locke and Newton. It's made that way. Chemistry and statistics have traditionally been embarrassing exceptions, to be ignored or explained away somehow.

In recent years, historians of science have abandoned "the Scientific Revolution" as a useful conceptual framework, and tend to see it as the name of a university course or a textbook, as a useful fiction for students' convenience, like "Feudal Society" or "Western Civilization". As a framework, it directs attention away from what was important in the creation and establishment of new knowledge at the time towards highly selective ancestor-worship of the supposed forefathers of modern science.

Historians are now well aware that the subjects and methods which were later taken into the 19th-century classification, "Science", were not necessarily the most influential in the thinking of any given group of natural philosophers in the 17th century. How the Bible was studied was at least as crucial as what trust could be placed on experimental results. Differing views of God's providence were supremely important. How truth claims came to be accepted was usually more significant than the specific content of the claims.

Unfortunately, this shift in historical analysis tends to be obscured by the popularity of the term "Scientific Revolution", because every student, general reader or practising scientist thinks that the meaning of "scientific" is perfectly transparent. The historiographical concept has been naturalized. Its political work has been successful, as can be seen from American diatribes on the superiority of Western Civilization over "medieval" Islam.

The article as it now stands is partly a product of recent trends in scholarship and partly of the reaction against those trends. Both aspects are ill-digested. For example, the present section on unidentified "literary critics" and "cultural materialism" is simply unrecognizable as having any coherent relationship to the scholarship. These labels apparently reflect the author's splenetic reaction to the work of historians of science, rather than being accurate descriptions of anyone at all.

I would suggest that the article should open with a clear, evenhanded statement of the historiographical issues, linked perhaps to a fuller discussion of how the scholarship has evolved, and then the events and developments in various intellectual fields of the period could be summarized.

    • David Harley, 2 March 2006


Indeed, and Floris-Cohen’s 1994 book The Scientific Revolution: An Historiographical Inquiry , would be a most useful reference work for this project recommended by Harley. In effect it charts the dilution and degeneration of the concept, in spite of the author’s own unproven faith that there was a scientific revolution (effected by Newton's Principia) and that it should not go the same way as the notion of ‘the Renaissance’, to be seen as laregly a myth. The main logical problem here is that you cannot provide a history of something that never was, but only a historiography of historians' blunders.

No satisfactory proof that there was a scientific revolution has ever been given. For a critique of the standard Koyrean thesis that the core of the supposed scientific revolution was that Newton’s dynamics comprised an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution, see my various comments on the Wikipedia ‘Discussion’ pages for ‘Inertia’ [to be found by text searching on ‘A.Bellamy’], especially ‘The historical misunderstanding of inertia’ in the Talk Archive #1 @ [[1]].

The following statement by Newton effectively knocks out the Koyrean anti-Aristotelian inertial- dynamics revolution thesis:

ISAAC NEWTON ON ARISTOTLE: "All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance...ARISTOTLE was of the same mind, since he expresses his opinion thus [in On The Heavens, 3.2.301b]: 'If a body, destitute of gravity and levity, be moved, it is necessary that it be moved by an external force. And when it is once moved by a force, it will conserve its motion indefinitely'. And again in Book IV of the Physics, text 69, [i.e. Physics 4.8.215a19] speaking of motion in the void where there is no impediment he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton.]

    • A.Bellamy 13 March 2006

Emergence ?

The recent changes to the Existence section seem to replace one definition with another, without saying so explicitly. On the one hand, there is the idea with respect to which the entire section was written: around 1600 certain major, rapid changes took place, as enumerated in the text that follows. On the other hand (as now changed) there is the idea of a long-drawn process that for reasons not specified is called revolution and that began around 1600.

It's perfectly reasonable to discuss conflicting concepts of "scientific revolution"; the section in question was written as a description one, with the reasons why it is widely accepted as a real revolution.

The section as modified gives nothing whatever to support the change. I'd take the liberty of saying that it's replacing one POV with another, without justification or discussion. How about an article that describes both and gives some reason for seeing the second definition as justified? Dandrake 23:24, 10 October 2005 (UTC)


Since a month has passed with no one expressing a dissent, I've undertaken to change the text to eliminate such dismissive POV as describing one conception of the S R as a "notion". The text now says that it describes one position, and then describes it. As I said before, it would be a legitimate contribution if someone were to do the same for another conception of it. The question of the best subtitle remains open. Does anyone care? Dandrake 02:50, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Science also mathematical circa 1600

The article currently claims "At the beginning of the [17th] century, science was highly Aristotelian; at its end, science was mathematical, mechanical, and empirical." But science was also mathematical at the beginning of the 17th century, as such works as Galileo's 1590 De Motu and Kepler's 1607 Astronomia Nova both attest (or those of Benedetti and Tartaglia do, not to mention Tycho Brahe). The founder of the mathematical dynamical science of motion was Aristotle in his Physics (e.g. see Physics 7.5), with such as his basic law of motion that average speed v α F/R, where F = Force and R = Resistance (also see Sir Thomas Heath's Mathematics in Aristotle). Thus this false contrast should be deleted. --Logicus 18:12, 5 April 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Who are 'the literary critics' of the scientific revolution thesis ?

The article has a whole section on what it variously calls "the literary critics" and the "cultural materialist" critics of the scientific revolution thesis. But it notably fails to name any such critics or cite any reference works by these people that would enable the verification of its claims. Could it please do so. Does anybody know who they are ? --80.6.94.131 14:37, 9 April 2006 (UTC)Logicus

  • I was about to ask myself what was going on in this section. It is not the case that only "literary critics" have criticized the historiography of the "scientific revolution" -- prominent historians and sociologists of science have made similar arguments as well. Anyway I will try and fix that up at some point. --Fastfission 01:45, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
    • Hey I agree, this section really needs work. Postmodern critiques of science and the philosophy and history therein are fine and indeed healthy and encyclopedic, but my first recommendation would be to change the title from "Literary Criticisms" to "Postmodern Criticisms" or something to that effect. Googling +"literary criticism" +"scientific revolution" has a lot of hits (23000 or so) but most of the top hits pertain to how the scientific revolution was a predecessor of literary criticism, not of how lit crits have challenged the historiography of the scientific revolution. --M a s 00:05, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

It is difficult to know what to do with the whole article as constituted, based as it is on the traditional but unproven and indeed mistaken claim that Newton’s Principia was somehow revolutionary, and in particular a revolution against Aristotelian science at the beginning of the 17th century in respect of being mechanical, experimental and mathematical. But the Principia was not anti-Aristotelian, Newton himself attributed its first law of motion to Aristotle, and it was no more experimental and observational nor more mathematical than science at the beginning of the 17th century. And nor was it mechanistic, but rather posited anti-mechanistic inherent powers of matter such as the force of inertia and gravity, being specifically polemically conceived by Newton as the refutation of anti-Aristotelian Cartesian mechanism and its attempt to reduce the science of motion to kinematics by eliminating inherent powers of matter and forces such as posited in dynamics. [See Newton’s anti-Cartesian polemic De Gravitatione written just before the Principia , published in Hall & Hall Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton 1962.] Newton restored the Aristotelian dynamical approach to the science of motion. Hence if Wikipedia wishes to persist in its claim that there was a scientific revolution, it must at least change its basis to some more tenable thesis on what was revolutionary. --80.6.94.131 18:14, 8 May 2006 (UTC)Logicus

What? --M a s 16:10, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
What I mean is, critiquing Newton the man is Ok, criquing the Victorian romantization is probably healthy as well. But aren't the peers and contemporaries of Newton a closer judge of his "revolution" than you or I or Wikipedia in general? Alexander Pope wasn't writing in the 21st c. after Derrida and Feyerbrand and all when he wrote his epitaph. The Bernoulli gang couldn't have found the curve of constant decent without the inverse-square law. Gauss wouldn't have been interested in curve fitting if not for the errors he got when he fit his observations to Newton. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be descriptive, not normative. People do use the phrase "Scientific Revolution" and the Wikipedia article should describe why people use it, what it means to them, what is the history behind the term, what's the basis of modern critiques of the term... --M a s 16:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Newton's Principia - a non-revolutionary great scientific achievement ?

The theory that there was a Scientific Revolution is now part of a general historiographical theory that all great scientific achievements are revolutionary implied by such as Kuhn in the prevailing conventional wisdom that any innovation in science is a revolutionary 'paradigm-shift'. The Scientific Revolution itself was allegedly the mother of all revolutions whose modelling by Koyre as a Bachelardian mutation was the paradigm of Kuhn's general model to which Kuhn added a top-dressing of the later Wittgenstein's paradigms and incommensurable linguistic concept-games. This view that great scientific achievements are revolutionary seems so ingrained that to deny something is revolutionary is nowadays interpeted as denying it is a great achievement. M a s seems to fall into this error.

Comments on M a s

M a s writes above on 9 May: "What I mean is, critiquing Newton the man is Ok,..."

But I am not "critiquing Newton". You mistakenly infer that to say something is not revolutionary is to criticise it and that I thereby somehow deny the Principia was a great scientific achievement, which I do not. For I am not criticising Newton the man nor his Principia and its important innovations, but rather the historiographical theory that great scientific achievements are revolutionary. This is because I maintain contra Kuhn and others that science develops by REFORMATIONS of its theoretical systems rather than by revolution and their wholesale overthrow. Hence I only deny Newton's great scientific achievement in the Principia was revolutionary, not that it was a great and innovative scientific achievement. In particular it did not overthrow the Aristotelian dynamical programme in the science of motion as traditionally claimed. Rather it only creatively revised and reformed it as it had come to be developed by Galileo and Kepler with its two different major auxiliary theories of impetus and of inertia. Newton synthesised them into his core concept of the inherent force of inertia that causes the continuation of uniform motion, like impetus, and resists accelerated motion, like Kepler's inertia. In short, the Principia was a great scientific achievement not by being revolutionary, but by virtue of being a creative further development and reformation of Aristotelian dynamics as it had evolved by gradual reforms in response to criticism over two millenia, and to which Newton applied his great but non-revolutionary mathematical innovation of the theory of fluxions.

Against revolutionist history of science I maintain it is thoroughly implausible that humanity is capable of overthrowing all its basic assumptions at once as in Kuhn's culturally prevailing theory of scientific development; revolutionist historiography also produces bad history of science that overlooks or air brushes out the missing links of gradual evolution to create the false impresion of revolutionary discontinuity. It is also potentially demoralising for the science education of young people to portray the greatest scientific achievements as herculean imaginative feats of total revolution of which only the most exceptional geniuses are capable, rather than more limited piecemeal reforms that just revise part of the whole system rather than wholly overthrow it and that can be gradually achieved by dogged perseverance and hard work as with Newton. Specifically note that Newton himself said in the Principia that its three laws of motion were already well known to mathematicians.

M a s askes: "But aren't the peers and contemporaries of Newton a closer judge of his "revolution" than you or I or Wikipedia in general? Alexander Pope wasn't writing in the 21st c. after Derrida and Feyerbrand and all when he wrote his epitaph."

Here M a s begs the very question of whether Newton did effect a revolution by supposing he did. Maybe he meant to say 'a closer judge of whether he was revolutionary than you or I or Wikipedia...'. But I am not aware that any of Newton's contemporaries regarded the Principia as revolutionary in respect of overthrowing some all-prevailing orthodoxy, albeit it was clearly intended to restore Aristotelian dynamics against anti-Aristotelian Cartesian kinematics in the science of motion. Do you know of any of Newton's contemporaries who did ? (Would you wish to argue Voltaire thought Newton was revolutionary, just because he maintained the space of the solar system was largely empty compared with the model of the solar system in continental Cartesian celestial physics ?) And I certainly cannot recall that Pope's epitaph claimed the Principia or Newton were revolutionary, however much light it claimed they turned on. And with respect to the 20th century claim that Newton was revolutionary because he overthrew Aristotelian dynamics, Newton himself made no such claim and even attributed his first law to Aristotle. And certainly one of Newton's leading contemporaries, the Principia's English translator Andrew Motte, in his own 1729 book on Newtonian dynamics A Treatise on the Mechanical Powers, justified its first law of motion in the very same terms as Aristotle's Physics 215a19-22 that Newton cited as his first law of motion, namely 'once moving, there is no reason why it should ever stop here rather than there'. D'Alembert also did so.

M a s's interesting observations on the prior indispensibility of Newton's Principia to the contributions of the Bernoulli's and Gauss mentioned are surely red herrings inasmuch as these contributions do not establish the Principia was revolutionary, however great its innovations, which did not by the way include 'the inverse square law', already well known before the Principia.

M a s advises: "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and should be descriptive, not normative. People do use the phrase "Scientific Revolution" and the Wikipedia article should describe why people use it, what it means to them, what is the history behind the term, what's the basis of modern critiques of the term"

I largely agree with these principles, and am not aware of breaching them, whereas the current Wikipedia article clearly takes sides on the affirmative side in the debate over whether there was a Scientific Revolution.

In spite of the useful contributions of Fastfission and M a s, we still have no names for who the alleged literary critics of the Scientific Revolution thesis are. --80.6.94.131 18:12, 10 May 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Thanks for the continuing conversation Logicus. Methinks Logicus ascribes too many motives to Newton. Likewise I think Logicus might set the threshold too high for what could be considered a "revolution." Then the definitional problem becomes a sorites - one or two good ideas don't make a revolution, three or four don't either, but after 100 years or so, then it's maybe a revolution.
Or Logicus denies historians their poetic license to use the phrase "revolution" metaphorically ala Jefferson or Voltaire or I say, tongue-in-cheek, other great men. On that note I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about the education of young minds, but likewise I think it does a disservice to say or imply that science pre-17th C linearly progressed throughout to science post-18th C, without emphasizing the biographies, society and culture of the peoples who made contribitions.
I grant that much of the 19th C ideals about history are like Ozymandias, sands stretching far away. I recognize that Logicus is not critiquing this strawman necessarily, but is instead critiquing Kuhn (because this "revolution" was his favorite case study). But I see in this and similar postmodern interpretations a rejection of biography for the sake of society and culture. The pendulum swings, I suppose.
Thanks, --M a s 22:18, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS REPLIES TO MAS[In square brackets]:

MAS: "Methinks Logicus ascribes too many motives to Newton." [Given you profess concern with biography, I challenge you to name just one motive I ascribed to Newton that was documentably too many i.e. was not one of his motives.]

MAS: "Likewise I think Logicus might set the threshold too high for what could be considered a "revolution." Then the definitional problem becomes a sorites - one or two good ideas don't make a revolution, three or four don't either, but after 100 years or so, then it's maybe a revolution." [This is an interesting logical point, but misplaced here. For the way the issue of the Scientific Revolution has traditionally been set up, it is not a question of any number of new GOOD ideas, but rather of the REJECTION and REPLACEMENT of OLD ideas by NEW ones that logically CONTRADICT them, its traditional modernity tale being that of the overthrow of the ancient and medieval Aristotelian framework of natural philosophy and its science of motion that was contradicted and replaced by that of the Principia. On this basis any number of good ideas would still not constitute a revolution if they do not overthrow any old ideas. Thus, for example, on this basis Newton's importantly innovative mathematical theory of fluxions was not revolutionary because however innovative it did not contradict and overthrow any previous mathematical theory, but was rather a creative supplement that filled a gap rather than displaced some prior theory.

In general it is certainly not my wish to play Humpty Dumpty and dictate the meaning of 'revolution' in order to eliminate the Scientific Revolution merely by definition, but rather to do so by substantive critical reassessment of its factual historical misrepresentations, such as the false claim that Aristotle's dynamics was non-mathematical, refuted by Physics 7.5 for example, and hence to claim that the 'mathematisation of nature and dynamics' by such as Galileo and Newton was revolutionary because it overthrew a purely qualitative Aristotelian physics, as Wikipedia did before my editing. It is also false to claim the Principia was mechanist and did not appeal to occult forces, as the Wikipedia article originally claimed, or that Aristotle's dynamics held that bodies inherently resist all motion or that their speed is proportional to their weight in free-fall as Philoponan dyanics claimed. Thus in factually contesting the alleged facts of revolution, I adhere to the traditional meaning of 'revolution' in this historical context as the rejection and overthrow of key principles in some domain by others that logically contradicted and replaced them.

Thus the issue of revolution or not in this sense is not a question of any number of new ideas over whatever period of time, but rather the LOGICAL issue of whether and when all the principles of a prevailing theory, or at least its core principles, have all been REPLACED or not by others that CONTRADICT them. Hence with respect to the original Scientific Revolution thesis that Newton's dynamics overthrew Aristotle's, the simple question is whether it did or not in this sense of contradicting and replacing its key principles. And to date the thesis that it did remains logically unproven. In its original form that Newton's first law of motion was denied by Aristotle's dynamics, it is demonstrably false because if Aristotle had logically denied it and thus asserted that locomotion in a void would terminate, then he would have thereby invalidated his own proof of the impossibility of locomotion in a void in Physics 215a19-22 on the ground that it would be interminable. Moreover Newton himself quoted this very passage as essentially asserting his first law in respect of its principle of the continuation of externally unforced and unresisted motion in a void without gravity:

NEWTON: "All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance...ARISTOTLE was of the same mind, since he expresses his opinion thus [in On The Heavens, 3.2.301b]: 'If a body, destitute of gravity and levity, be moved, it is necessary that it be moved by an external force. And when it is once moved by a force, it will conserve its motion indefinitely'. And again in [Physics 215a19-22} he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton.]

So what basic principles of 17th century Aristotelian dynamics, if any, did Newton's Principia overthrow ?]

MAS:"Or Logicus denies historians their poetic license to use the phrase "revolution" metaphorically ala Jefferson or Voltaire or I say, tongue-in-cheek, other great men." ['Poetic licence' may be appropriate for the history of poetry, but is surely inappropriate where analysing claims about the logic and methodology of scientific discovery and development is concerned given the Wikipedia article claims, albeit without any evidence, that the alleged 'scientific revolution' was a revolutionary change in scientific method. But where did Jefferson and Voltaire use the phrase 'revolution' metaphorically ? Can you cite any examples ? ]


MAS: "On that note I wholeheartedly agree with your comments about the education of young minds, but likewise I think it does a disservice to say or imply that science pre-17th C linearly progressed throughout to science post-18th C, without emphasizing the biographies, society and culture of the peoples who made contribitions." [But I neither say nor imply any linear progression of science, let alone without emphasizing the biography, society and culture of its contributors. To the contrary I am primarily concerned with analysing the non-linear dialectical evolution of Aristotelian dynamics from Aristotle's Physics into Newton's Principia as an empirical problem-solving process of trial and error and the gradual emergence of Newton's axiomatisation of Aristotelian dynamics by way of its development and criticism by the dynamics of such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, Philoponus, Avicenna, Averroes, Buridan, Oresme, Benedetti, Galileo and Kepler and others. For example, in the case of the first law, as Newton points out it was essentially already stated by Aristotle, although this is overlooked by those who do not read Newton's published writings fully. But then it was apparently denied by Philoponan evanescent impetus dynamics that supposedly predicted the termination of any projectile motion in a void when its self-decaying impetus expired. It was also denied by Kepler's novel 'inertial' variant of Aristotelian dynamics, stemming from Averroes, with his novel auxiliary theory that posited all bodies have 'inertia', a non-gravitational inherent resistance to all motion in proportion to their mass that would terminate unforced motion in a void. Kepler's innovation of 'inertia' was to prevent Aristotle's law of motion v α F/R predicting externally unresisted forced motion (F > 0 & R = 0), like planetary motion in Kepler's celestial dynamics, would be infinitely fast because v α F/0 since bodies have no non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion in Aristotle's original dynamics, because then Aristotle's v α F/R would become v α F/m rather than v α F/0. But Newton then restored the Aristotelian 'principle of inertia' by revising Kepler's theory of inertia by positing inertia only resists all motion EXCEPT uniform motion, whereby externally unforced motion in a void would not be terminated by inertia. And by virtue of the critical contributions of Philoponus, Avicenna and Averroes-Kepler, Aristotle's law of motion v α F/R was eventually transformed into Newton's second law a α (F-R)/m. Is this lightningly brief sketch sufficiently non-linear and appreciative of other contributors for you ?]


MAS: "I grant that much of the 19th C ideals about history are like Ozymandias, sands stretching far away. I recognize that Logicus is not critiquing this strawman necessarily, but is instead critiquing Kuhn (because this "revolution" was his favorite case study). But I see in this and similar postmodern interpretations a rejection of biography for the sake of society and culture. The pendulum swings, I suppose. Thanks, --M a s 22:18, 10 May 2006 [You see what is not there ! I am not arguing about any 19th century ideals about history nor about Ozymandias so far as I am aware, but if anything against Vico's theory of discontinuous historical blocks, such as ancient, medieval and modern science, the theory of the scientific revolution being an attempt to constitute a total discontinuity between medieval and modern science. Nor am I giving a "postmodern interpretation", but rather arguing that post-medieval 'modernity' as constituted by the alleged Scientific Revolution is a myth, and whereby so is post-modernity. Nor do I 'reject biography for the sake of society and culture'. In fact apparently unlike others I actually bother to read the works of the scientists themselves, such as Aristotle, Galileo and Newton, and with a careful logical scrutiny. And I find a very different picture of their theories emerges from that portrayed by historians of the scientific revolution, typically the antithesis. But certainly here I am only concerned with the objective LOGIC of the development of scientific theories and of scientific method rather than the history of people, noting that the traditional theory of the scientific revolution is a fantastical mythological historical fairy tale of the origin of 'the modern scientific method' and the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy.

The problem here is not one of swinging pendulums and changing intellectual fashions, but the bog-standard problem of providing a truthful historically accurate account of the facts of scientific development most importantly for the purpose of science education. For example it is surely a monumental scandal that schoolchildren are taught, as Wikipedia also claims, that Galileo discovered the correct law of free-fall, when in fact his scholastic universal law of free-fall that purely gravitationally accelerated motion is uniformly accelerated, the fundamental law of his celestial dynamics, was radically mistaken because like the scholastics he mistakenly thought gravity was a universal constant rather than a variable, it was never generally accepted, and it was certainly rejected by Proposition 32 of Book 1 of Newton's Principia, according to which gravitational fall is exponentially increasingly accelerated inversely to distance. Galileo's theory of free-fall in his Dialogo and Discorsi was justly publcily ridiculed by Fermat, and its rejection was fundamental to the development of Newton's gravitational celestial dynamics. The kinematical analytic truth that in uniformly accelerated motion s = gtt/2, whose discovery was not original to Galileo, should not be conflated with the radical empirical falsehood that gravitational fall is universally uniformly accelerated. [e.g. see Koyre's paper A documentary history of free-fall]. Thus, for example, whereas in his Dialogo Galileo publicly derided the jesuit Father Scheiner for predicting it would take a canonball about 5 days to fall from the altitude of the lunar orbit because he predicted it would take less than 4 hours because of his radically mistaken theory that gravitational fall is uniformly accelerated, as even Stillman Drake sheepishly admits, Scheiner was very near the truth and Galileo grossly mistaken, replete with his radical underestimation of the actual rate of gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface at about half its real value to boot. But the standard theory of the scientific revolution is replete with such highly misleading nonsense as that Galileo discovered some correct law of free-fall by experiment. --80.6.94.131 15:57, 16 June 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Thanks again Logicus. If I can sum your arguments up as I see it, you demand that a "revolution" be a a complete (1.) rejection of one style of philosophy or way of thinking about the world in favour of another, (2.) correct, philosophy or way of thinking of the world, and just as importantly the two philosophies must be logically contradictory (3.) Or, I think more accurately, you claim that others attach this meaning to revolution, and then apply that thinking to the events that took place around the 17thC.
And then you go on, with a careful reading of the original texts, to argue that in reality, pre-17thC science was not logically contradictory to post-17thC science. You apply a strict, almost sentential logical approach to the readings of the text.
And then from this, you argue that no revolution took place.
I cannot defend this definition of revolution- all things follow from a contradiction. If pre-17th C science had claimed that 2 + 2 = 5, then by using some sophisticated sentential logical argument we could argue that pre17th C science could also claim that the moon is made of cheese. In other words, with this definition of revolution, we could argue that pre-17thC science could have got absolutely everything wrong.
And then I cannot also appreciate the appeal to reading the original works as strictly and as hermaneuticly as has been done above. Godel found a logical fallacy in the the United States Constitution, but darned if a real revolution hadn't taken place.
Rather, I think the historians who use the "Scientific Revolution" are quite aware that pre-17thC science had gotten a lot of the way of the world right, but was incomplete. And post-17thC was right as well, but a little more complete. And 21stC is even more "right" but yet still incomplete. --M a s 22:10, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Bacon...

"Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), whose greatest scientific experiment amounted to stuffing snow into a dead chicken, nevertheless penned inductive reasoning, proceeding from observation and experimentation." This seems to downplay the Baconian Method, which is basically the foudation of science as it is done today. However, changing it seems a bit trivial, and this is hardly the place to discuss the importance of the Baconian Method.

Logicus comments: Even if, contra hypothetico-deductivism, science were inductive, proceeding from observation and experimentation as claimed here, the question would still remain of how Bacon's method went beyond the empirical inductivist methodology of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics in any respect. --80.6.94.131 18:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Dante

In the section Early and medieval views of science, Dante is named as one of the key influences. Does he really belong in a list with figures like Galen and Aristotle? Isn't he following received opinion rather than determining it?

I agree. Dante is not, to my very feeble knowledge of the period, a major scientific influence, and the idea of the four elements goes back considerably earlier than him. (I'd venture it probably gets traced back to the Greeks but I'd let someone more educated in this period fill that in. I know next to nothing). --Fastfission 02:57, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Good removal. See four elements - Greeks are ca 450BC. --M a s 15:36, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Koyre in 1939?

I'm not one to doubt Steve Shapin, but I'm sure he means something more subtle than Koyre was the first one to use the term 'scientific revolution' to define the changes in the 16th-18th century? A quick JSTOR search for "scientific revolution" comes up with dozens of pre-1939 usages of the term in this context, referring specifically to the work by Galileo and Newton and the like. OED gives an entry from 1803: "1803 S. MILLER Brief Retrospect of Eighteenth Cent. I. II. 416 The frequency and rapidity of scientific revolutions may be accounted for in various ways." Perhaps someone can clarify..? (I don't have a copy of the book on hand, but I could get one if necessary) --Fastfission 01:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I think there's been a good deal of revisionist history on this article. I think it's in need of an expert.
I have no idea what to make of, e.g.,
To some extent, this arises from different conceptions of what the revolution was; some of the rancor and cross-purposes in such debates may arise from lack of recognition of these fundamental differences. But it also and more crucially arises from disagreements over the historical facts about different theories and their logical analysis, e.g. Did Aristotle's dynamics deny the principle of inertia or not ? Did science become mechanistic ? --M a s 15:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
What is meant by mechanistic? Also, what's up with the irony quotes in:
The Aristotelian scientific tradition's primary mode of interacting with the world was through observation and searching for "natural" circumstances. It saw what we would today consider "experiments" to be contrivances which at best revealed only contingent and un-universal facts about nature in an artificial state. Coupled with this approach was the belief that rare events which seemed to contradict theoretical models were "monsters", telling nothing about nature as it "naturally" was.
Thanks, --M a s 15:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
Um, the first quote needs help from someone with considerable expertise in sci-rev historiography. More expertise than I have, anyway. I infer that the scare-quotes in the second quote have been added to indicate that the terms have specialized meanings here. "Natural" has specific meanings in Aristotelian discourse; here it refers to what objects, animals, elements, etc., do "by nature," that is, when they are left alone and not interfered with. "Experiments" means experiments in the modern sense, with controlled and contrived circumstances, as opposed to "experiments" in the literature of medieval science, which is synonymous with "experiences" (this word tends to confuse newcomers to the subject). "Monsters" are aberrations, including not just monsters in the modern sense but also comets and all sorts of prodigies. They fall outside the normal course of, er, "nature." All this should probably be explained, with proper references. Maestlin 16:42, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
I think I wrote the second one. The source for that is, I think, Peter Dear's Discipline and Experience. --Fastfission 19:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

The relevant Shapin quote (p.2) is: "The phrase "the Scientific Revolution" was probably coined by Alexandre Koyré in 1939, and it first became a book title in A. Rupert Hall's The Scientific Revolution of 1954." The sentence has a footnote: "In the 1930s the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard referred to "mutations" (or large-scale discontinuities) in the development of the conceptual structure of science, a usage Koyré soon developed: 'The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was without a doubt such a mutation... It was a profound intellectual transformation of which modern... was both the expression and the fruit."

Hope that helps.--ragesoss 19:11, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

That's really strange. I'm pretty sure he's wrong on it being coined in 1939. Very odd. Not worth stressing over, but maybe we should use his actual quote in the article, just to futher credit whose statement it is. --`Fastfission 19:45, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I did put Floris Cohen's book The Scientific Revolution in the References to help out with such issues as discussed here. Look at its page 21, and also take a look at Bernard Cohen's book on the history of the notion of scientific revolution. --80.6.94.131 18:13, 15 June 2006 (UTC)Logicus

Some interesting points and issues have been raised here on which I shall comment asap. Immediately note Koyre was replying to Duhem's massive historical challenge to Mach's claim in his Science of Mechanics that Galileo invented dynamics since he wrongly presumed Newton said so in the Principia, whereas Newton only said his 3 laws of motion were already well known to mathematicians and that Galileo had used the first two in his analysis of projectile motion. The most interesting question here is when Newton's dynamics was first characterised as revolutionary and as a revolution against Aristotelian dynamics, because this was the original nub of the 'scientific revolution' thesis. Meanwhile also see my replies to Mas a few sections above. --80.6.94.131 16:14, 16 June 2006 (UTC)LOGICUS

Bacon & Hooke

The Bacon anecdote about chicken-stuffing is a myth -- see John Gribbin, The Fellowship, Allen Lane, 2005. And surely Robert Hooke should be in the list of important pioneers?

Charlie T 20 August 2006

This article really needs focus and improvement

I just did a comparison and found that scarcely any significant changes have been made since this article was designated History of Science Collaboration of the Month. Let me make a few random comments:

I think this topic is very important; as Herbert Butterfield said:

Since [the Scientific R]evolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world — since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics — iit outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes — mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.

Can we tell why Butterfield thought it was so important and why Shapin doubts that it took place? This article scarcely tries.

[Butterfield thought there was a scientific revolution and that it was so important because he mistakenly thought Newton's physics wholly overthrew Aristotelian physics. See 'McCluskey and Butterfield on the Scientific Revolution' below. Logicus 13:00, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]

Looking through its sections I'd rate them:

  • Introduction — Fair
  1. Emergence of the revolution — Fair
  2. Early and medieval views of science — Long, but weak; only need to summarize the medieval world view
  3. Infusion of classical texts — Superfluous Delete
  4. New scientific developments — Just a catalogue Delete
  5. Theoretical developments — Needs organization
  6. Methodological developments — Needs organization and additions; its more than just mechanization and empiricism (see the range of approaches facing Newton that Westfall discusses in the first chapter of Never at Rest
    1. Mechanization — Fair
    2. Empiricism — Even Koyré wouldn't buy this stereotype
  7. Postmodern critiques — What critiques are meant, citations please (If it can't be justified, delete it)

As a medievalist I shouldn't say this, but I'm disturbed to see an article on the Scientific Revolution beginning with a section on ancient science, and then going on to the recovery of ancient learning in the Twelfth Century. When asked to fix a starting point, I've always had the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and Vesalius's Fabrica. Looking for an ending point, I fudge and make it the death of Newton in 1727.

Maybe we should start improvements to the article within something like those limits. It is an important topic. --SteveMcCluskey 02:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Proposed Outline

Rather than just gripe about it, I thought I'd put up an outline for a new article.
I've also decided to copy the present article to User:SteveMcCluskey/Scientific Revolution where everyone is invited to engage in radical revisions. I'll be away the rest of today so I won't make many changes until tomorrow.
"The desire to edit is a basic human need."
--SteveMcCluskey 15:05, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
  • Introduction
  1. Significance of the "Revolution"
  2. Ancient and medieval background
  3. Transformational developments and their reception
    1. Copernicus's De revolutionibus
    2. Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica
  4. New Approaches to Nature
    1. The Mechanical Philosophy
    2. The Chemical Philosophy
    3. Empiricism
    4. Mathematization
  5. Subsequent Developments
    1. The New Astronomy
      1. Kepler
      2. Brahe
      3. Galileo
    2. The New Physics
      1. Galileo
      2. Newton's Principia
  6. Institutional changes
    1. The changing role of patronage
    2. Networks of communication
      1. Printing
    3. Scientific societies

Partial changes made

I've just dumped the changes I've made incorporating the first two sections of this outline into the article. In real life my inbasket is overflowing so I'm taking a wikibreak and will remove the working draft from my userpages.

The rest of the article is still a bit of a shambles -- as a work in progress it's still redundant (and even self-contradictory). A bit from the section on Post-Modern critiques (perhaps stressing Shapin more than unnamed "postmodern"critics) could go in the section on Significance of the "revolution".

See you in a month or so; have fun with this. --SteveMcCluskey 15:07, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Logicus comments

Before you implement any of this, could we please have a testable definition of a scientific revolution from you that you propose for the article ? And in which sciences you claim there were revolutions ?

McCluskey says “Needs organization and additions; its more than just mechanization and empiricism (see the range of approaches facing Newton that Westfall discusses in the first chapter of Never at Rest”

Its not even mechanisation and empiricism theses so far as I am aware, mechanism vanquished by Newton. Both theses fail. Could you please kindly list the range of approaches Westfall discusses for those who have not read him or don’t have him to hand ?


McC says: “When asked to fix a starting point, I've always had the Scientific Revolution begin in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus and Vesalius's Fabrica. Looking for an ending point, I fudge and make it the death of Newton in 1727. Maybe we should start improvements to the article within something like those limits.”

I suggest not. I suggest the article should be more historiographical rather than asserting there was a scientific revolution in some specific period. If it wants to get into specific periodisations it should not fudge but give the conceptual reason why a specific date is given. Presumably you give 1543 for starter because you think there was ‘a Copernican revolution’, but there wasn’t as distinct from a heliocentric ‘revolution’ because Copernican project of saving the physical reality of the celestial spheres (by means of heliocentrism) failed with Tycho/Kepler and transits of comets. Given your Butterfield viewpoint, ironically you should especially note that not being a historian of science himself but only a follower of Duhem, he dated the revolution 1300-1800 as in his book title The Origin of Modern Science : 1300-1800 . The dating you give is like the original traditional 19th century type dating before Duhem’s major intervention to put the beginning back to the 14th century in the alleged overthrow of Aristotelian dynamics by Parisian impetus dynamics.
I appreciate its very difficult constructing coherent Wikipedia articles given participation policy, and also that we apparently fundamentally disagree about many issues, but you might like to consider the following rough note ideas for the style of an article that might possibly make it much more interesting than the present one and the way you are heading ?
“The traditional thesis of the alleged 'scientific revolution' as portrayed in the 19th century by such as Mach was that Aristotelian philosophy and physics was totally overthrown and replaced in the 17th century by Galileo's and then Newton's physics that allegedly fundamentally contradicted it and its alleged 'law of inertia'. However, at the turn of the 20th century the French physicist, philosopher and historian of science Pierre Duhem backdated the alleged fundamental contradiction and overthrow of Aristotelian physics to the 14th century scholastic impetus dynamics developed at his alma mater, Paris University, by clerics such as Jean Buridan, and of which he regarded the dynamics of Galileo and Newton as a continuous development. Thus followers of Duhem such as the Cambridge historian Butterfield, although not himself a historian of science, dated the scientific revolution as a transition that occupied the period 1300-1800, and Kuhn also followed Duhem in dating the overthrow of Aristotelian physics to the 14th century. Duhem's research led to the founding of the new 20th century academic subject 'history of medieval science' that was promoted by an unlikely alliance of Stalin and the Vatican, both of whom had an ideological interest in there being medieval science as Duhem had uncovered that was 'pre-bourgeois feudal' science corresponding to the feudal mode of production and was also 'clerical', whereby the Church had promoted rather than obstructed 'the scientific revolution'.

But in the 20th century reaction against Duhem led by such as Koyre, Maier and Drake, efforts were made to restore the alleged inertial-dynamics revolution to the 17th century by finding allegedly important conceptual discontinuties between scholastic impetus dynamics and Newton's law of inertia that was said to have eventually replaced Aristotle's, and that Duhem had supposedly overlooked. But in turn Duhem's supporters subjected the efforts of Koyre and Maier to robust criticism.

However, with respect to the project of pushing the alleged scientific revolution ever further back, for the last 20 years the historian of the philosophies of Aristotle's commentators, Richard Sorabji and his assistants, has argued that the alleged anti-Aristotelian physics revolution must be backdated even further than Duhem (and Kuhn) did to the physics of Philoponus in the 6th century. Thus on this basis the scientific revolution conceived as the overthrow of Aristotelian physics and replacement by Newton's would roughly be the period 600-1800.

But most significantly, against the common fundamental premise of all these theories of a scientific revolution, Newton and other scholars have claimed Aristotelian physics essentially observed the Principia's law of inertia, whereby if so it would follow there was no scientific revolution on this basis on which it was originally posited. Assessing these claims requires careful logical and conceptual analysis of both Aristotle's Physics and other Aristotelian works and also of Newton's Principia and other works that has yet to be undertaken by academic historians of science.

Beyond this original and core claim of a scientific revolution as an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution in physics, with lower and upper dates according to when its different proponents claim Aristotelian physics was overthrown and Newton's physics fully replaced it, claims of revolutions in other sciences have also been made, but mostly if not wholly with insufficient conceptual definition both of what constitutes a revolution in a science and of the theoretical system the overthrown science consisted of to determine whether there were or not. Claims have also been made of a methodological scientific revolution such as in the mechanisation, or the mathematisation or the empiricism of scientific research, but they have never been verified and are often easily refuted.

It is arguably evident from the leading historiography of the idea of 'the scientific revolution' by Floris Cohen that it is a radically degenerating and increasingly ill-defined concept, and for that reason, as Cohen fears, in imminent danger of dissolution as a fiction like that of the Renaissance, but to whose prevention Cohen's own forthcoming efforts at its regeneration are devoted. However, the question arises of whether it may be doomed for the deeper historiographical reason that Vico's project of constructing block periodisations by absolute discontinuities in history - of which Renaissance and the scientific revolution thesis are prime examples, as Butterfield's view demonstrated - is itself untenable like all alleged absolutes ? Or is it doomed for the more superficial reason that ..." Logicus 18:12, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

Newton on the Scientific Revolution

The recent changes by Logicus rely heavily on the interpretation of a direct quotation from Newton, in which Newton claims that his first law of motion was already known to the ancient atomists and to Aristotle. Most Newton scholars recognize Newton's claims for the antiquity of his ideas as a recurring theme in his writings.'

An important and revealing study of Newton's attitude to the supposeed ancient lineage of his ideas is J. E. McGuire and P. M. Rattansi, "Newton and the 'Pipes of Pan'," Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 21, No. 2. (Dec., 1966), pp. 108-143. McGuire and Rattansi note that in the 1690s, Newton was preparing a series of classical scholia for the second edition of the Principia, in which he planned (according to various sources) to attribute his ideas to Pythagoras, Plato, Thales, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Democritus. He attributed the Copernican system to the Egyptians, and the atomic system to Epicurus, Democritus, Ecphantus, Empedocles, Zenocrates, Heraclides, Asclepiades, Diodorus, Metrodorus of Chios, Pythagoras, and Moschus the Phoenician.

The fact that Newton claimed that his ideas were in Aristotle or in other ancient sources, does not necessarily mean that they actually were. Primary sources like this require careful analysis by historians familiar with Newton, his life, his achievements, and in this case, with the content of Aristotle's Physics and its later influence. That is one of the reasons why Wikipedia cautions against the use of Primary sources and has a strict policy against Original Research. --SteveMcCluskey 01:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

McCluskey and Butterfield on the Scientific Revolution

The above changes proposed by Steve McCluskey on 26 August and subsequently apparently rely heavily on the interpretation of his quoted claim made by Butterfield being unquestionably true, namely that there was a scientific revolution that overthrew Aristotelian physics, But the fact that Butterfield and some others make this claim does not necessarily mean it is true. And Steve's proposal apparently violates the NPOV principle because the question of whether there was a scientific revolution is a matter of debate, which he seems to ignore. And the fact that Newton claimed his ideas were in Aristotle does not necessarily mean they were not. (So far as I am aware the McGuire and Rattansi article Steve quotes notably never discuss the truth-value of Newton's claim I quote, which has only ever been touched on by B.Cohen.) However, in citing Wikipedia's No Original Research principle, maybe Steve is trying to suggest my changes breach it, whereby his would not be breaching the NPOV principle. But as the following Wikipedia definition attests, mine do not:

“Original research is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to material placed in articles by Wikipedia users that has not been previously published by a reliable source. It includes unpublished material, for example, arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories, or any new analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position - or, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, that would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation".”

But (i) the Newton material I quoted was previously published by what Steve would surely regard as 'a reliable source', (ii) the view that there was no scientific revolution is not novel, (iii) the view that Aristotle essentially stated Newton's first law of motion in Physics 4.8 was also stated by Sir Thomas Heath in his 1949 Mathematics In Aristotle, for example, and is endorsed by most commentators, and in his 1908 Identity and Reality Meyerson reported it was the unanimous view of classics scholars at that time that the principle of inertia was presupposed by ancient Greek physics including both the atomists and Aristotle, but then sought to show they were wrong, the view accepted by his disciple Koyre. As for the claim that primary sources require careful analysis by historians familiar with the subject, agreed, but the problem is the quoted Newton claim never has had but has been largely ignored by academic historians of science, possibly because it challenges the conventional academic wisdom straight from the horse's mouth.. There is also the question of whether historians of science have the requisite training in logic and philosophy of science to be capable of the logically valid careful conceptual analysis required in such matters. In particular apparently the only academic historian of science to have discussed the status of Newton's claim in a publication, namely Bernard Cohen, apparently dismissed it on the logically invalid ground that Aristotle denied the void, as though this entails he also thereby denied the law of inertia, thus overlooking the fact that Descartes, who Cohen claimed first asserted the law of inertia, also denied the void, as did Newton because he denied the possibility of gravitational action at a distance without any intervening medium. The law of inertia is not a logically existential assertion of the void, as Cohen and his mentor Koyre imagined, but rather a logically counterfactual conditional principle of the behaviour of a body subject to zero net impressed forces, and its truth-value is logically independent of the question of whether there is a void or not, as the logically more astute Descartes and Newton realised.

Butterfield's Blunder

Steve apparently proposes the article should be devoted to elaborating the doctrine that there definitely was a scientific revolution that overthrew scholastic philosophy and Aristotelian physics - as maintained by Butterfield and others - rather than be a more historiographical article on the debate about this controversial issue, which is surely required by the NPOV principle. But Butterfield did no original research in the history of science, and his exposition of the traditional thesis that there was a scientific revolution because there was an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution in which Newton's first law of motion contradicted and replaced Aristotle's doctrine of inertia and so wholly overthrew Aristotelian physics is one of the clearest most overt examples of the fallacy of confusing Aristotle's doctrine of gravitational resistance to motion with a doctrine of inertia. Butterfield's blunder here was as follows.

A traditional logical error made by Aristotle commentators is to presume that in addition to his theory of sublunar natural/gravitational motion and resistance to virtually all except straight downward motion by the inherent nature/gravity of bodies, Aristotle also posited a second internal inherent property of bodies that resists all motion whatever, namely by its tendency towards rest, and which they call 'inertia'. Thus on this analysis Aristotle posited TWO inherent properties of matter that resist motion, namely the almost omni-directional resistance of gravity and the wholly omni-directional resistance of inertia. But this is apparently a blunder of illogical analysis that fails to see that the inherent tendency to rest in Aristotle's dynamics is solely due to a component of gravitational resistance to motion rather than to some additional non-gravitational property of 'inertia', and that Aristotle's dynamics does not posit any inherent tendency to resist all motion whatever. For if it did, it would not have predicted that natural/gravitational fall in a vacuum (i.e. 'free-fall') would be infinitely fast as in Physics 4.8.215a.25f, because then this would be prevented by the internal resistance of any such omni-directional 'inertia', just as it is in Kepler's and Newton's dynamics. Those who believe Aristotle believed in both gravity and also in some additional inherent nature of bodies to be at rest fail to see the latter is just part of the former whereby it must be discounted when comparing the predictions of Aristotle's dynamics with Newton's first law of the non-gravitational/non-natural behaviour of bodies. For a logically valid comparison of Aristotle's and Newton's dynamics re the law of inertia one must compare what gravity-free bodies do in Aristotelian dynamics with Newton's first law, and this is exactly what Newton himself did in comparing his first law with Aristotle's analysis of the behaviour or gravity free-bodies in Physics 4.8.215a19-22.

One of the most striking examples of this illogical blunder in accounts of Aristotle's dynamics of mistakenly attributing a second inherent resistance to motion in bodies called 'inertia' in addition to that of gravity is to be found in the following account of Aristotle's theory of motion given by the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield in his by now well outdated 1949 The Origins of Modern Science, cited in the Wikipedia list of book references on inertia:

"On the Aristotelian theory [of motion] all heavy terrestrial bodies have a natural tendency towards the centre of the universe, which...was at or near the centre of the earth; but motion IN ANY OTHER DIRECTION was violent motion, because it contradicted the ordinary tendency of a body to move to what was regarded as its natural place [and to be at rest there]. Such motion depended upon the operation of a mover, and the Aristotelian DOCTRINE OF INERTIA was a doctrine of rest - it was motion, not rest that always required to be explained." [p.3 Butterfield 1957 edition. My insertions in square brackets and my caps for emphasis.]

Here Butterfield first gives an account of Aristotle's theory of nature/gravity according to which nature/gravity opposes 'violent' motion, which Butterfield commendably correctly describes as 'motion in ANY other direction than straight to the centre of the earth', and which must logically therefore include resisting horizontal motion, for example, such as the hauling of a ship along the horizontal in Physics 7.5. He then also correctly tells us that such violent motion requires a mover, but crucially fails to note this could logically be because such violent motion is resisted by the nature/gravity of the body which it contradicts, as he himself has just indicated.

But then suddenly out of the blue Butterfield illogically conjures up "the Aristotelian doctrine of inertia" as a "doctrine of rest" that supposedly explains why violent motion needs a mover, namely to overcome resistance from some non-gravitational "inertial" tendency to rest, but which resistance is in fact entirely Butterfield's illogical concoction. For this resistance is just the gravitational tendency to rest and resist motion contrary to gravity that Butterfield has already depicted, albeit omitting mention of its tendency to rest aspect, rather than some additional second force of inertia inherent in bodies. What Butterfield calls Aristotle's 'doctrine of inertia' is in fact his doctrine of gravity or gravitational resistance to any motion not straight downward. This traditional error was further promoted by Annaliese Maier's 1950s attempts to prove that the 'tendency to rest' in scholastic physics was due to inertia rather than to gravity, but whose documentation in the Oresme extract she quoted, proved the very opposite to the logically astute reader. As Oresme expressed this Aristotelian theory of gravity in his 14th century De Caelo et Mundo:

"For the reason why such things as men or animals experience work or effort in moving themselves or other heavy things is that their WEIGHT inclines them towards rest or to be moved with some other contrary motion"

But without their inherent gravity, bodies would have no internal resistance to motion in Aristotle's dynamics, neither the horizontal tendency to rest nor the vertical tendency to a contrary motion.

Thus Butterfield failed to see that the main reason why sublunar violent motion required a mover in Aristotle's dynamics was to overcome gravitational resistance to motion, just as it does in modern physics, thus promoting the anti-Aristotelian and anti-Newtonian myth of a fundamental discontinuity and post-medieval modernity in physics. Certainly Butterfield never proved Newton's law of inertia contradicted Aristotle's nor that it overthrew Aristotelian physics. Thus the Wikipedia article on the alleged scientific revolution and its alleged importance should not be based on Butterfield's views as gospel as McCluskey seems to propose. Logicus 12:34, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Three Two points on this discussion.
First, Logicus misunderstands what I'm doing in this work in progress. [[But do I understand correctly you are biasing it in favour of the thesis that there was a scientific revolution ?Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] As I said in an earlier discussion (02:57, 26 August 2006 (UTC)):,
"Can we tell why Butterfield thought it was so important and why Shapin doubts that it took place? This article scarcely tries."
So far I've gotten to the point on Butterfield. I don't have Shapin at hand and hope someone will take a hard look at his work.
Secondly, Logicus proposes a radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Physics, which I have not encountered in almost forty years of research and teaching in the history of science. [I would be most grateful if you could provide the reference for where you encountered this interpretation almost 40 years ago (-: Did you not also encounter it 44 years ago in the Hall's 1962 publication of Newton's interpretation of Physics ?Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] If Butterfield misinterpreted Aristotle, his "misinterpretation" is shared by Galileo Galilei, Alexander Koyré, E. A. Burtt, I. B. Cohen, Richard S. Westfall, David C. Lindberg, G. E. R. Lloyd, and (as Logicus points out), Anneliese Maier. I would like to see a similar array of secondary sources cited to support the claim of continuity from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton. [I don't accept this claim at least for Galileo. Do you have any evidence that Galileo thought Aristotle held a doctrine of inertia as described by Butterfield ? I say not. What say you ? Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)] --SteveMcCluskey 13:26, 11 September 2006 (UTC) [[But I am not claiming absolute continuity from Aristotle to Newton, but rather only denying revolutionary discontinuity in core principles of Aristotelian dynamics as it had come to be developed by the 17th century. And I have already pointed out, if you care to re-read what I said, Newton and Sir Thomas Heath held that Aristotle stated the law of inertia and Meyerson [1908] reported readers of ancient Greek physics at that time unanimously held it presupposed the law of inertia. Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]
Third, we disagree on the nature of Original Research. As Logicus points out, “Original research is a term used in Wikipedia to refer to ... any new analysis or synthesis of published material that appears to advance a position - or, in the words of Wikipedia's co-founder Jimbo Wales, that would amount to a "novel narrative or historical interpretation".” Lacking secondary sources, it is clear that Logicus is preparing such a novel historical interpretation. --SteveMcCluskey 13:36, 11 September 2006 (UTC) [Need I point out yet again this is not so, as McCluskey himself may be confirming in possibly telling us above that I am advocating an interpretation of Aristotle's Physics he himself encountered almost 40 years ago. For the hard of logical understanding, rather I am certainly defending an old and now minority view, proponents of which I have mentioned, and not currently championed by academic historians of science who have studiously ignored Newton's important claim that first came to light in 1962, rather than advancing a novel interpretation. The simple question they have to answer is whether Newton was essentially right or wrong.Logicus 15:30, 11 September 2006 (UTC)]
Clarifying my point, as I said above: "Logicus proposes a radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Physics, which I have not encountered in almost forty years of research and teaching in the history of science." Logicus then transforms this to claim that he is "advocating an interpretation of Aristotle's Physics he himself [McCluskey] encountered almost 40 years ago." As I said before, I have not encountered it in almost forty years; to restate; the first time I ever encountered it was in Logicus's discussion. I do not believe it is supported by the primary source quoted from Hall and Hall, since I believe Logicus is misinterpreting Newton's text.
On another related point, it is somewhat ironic that Logicus considers Butterfield's 1948 work to be outdated, but prefers to cite as authoritative Meyerson's 1908 Identity and Reality and Thomas Heath's (1861-1940) posthumously published Mathematics in Aristotle. To move outside historians of the scientific revolution, the conventional view of Aristotle's Physics that every violent motion requires the continuous action of a moving cause (contrary to Newton) is presented in G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought (1968), pp. 175-180 and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, (1946), vol. 1, pp. 314-5.
Finally, let me raise a matter of style. Logicus's habit of intermeshing his comments with previous comments, makes it extremely difficult to follow the chronological and logical sequence of the discussion. Most readers find it preferable to read comments in chronological sequence. --SteveMcCluskey 17:11, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS:

[Re your first point, I indicated the transformation I made that you refer to was a joke by means of a smiley emoticon. Never mind. But behind the joke there was the serious point that whilst as an academic historian of science arguably you should have read that interpretation of Aristotle's Physics stated by Newton in the Halls' book either 44 years ago in 1962 when it was first published or at least in the 1960s, nevertheless I anticipated that like most historians of science and of the scientific revolution you have never seen it. And indeed you now confirm this in admitting the first time you have encountered this 'Newtonian' interpretation of Aristotle's Physics was in my discussion. But I was giving you the benefit of the doubt as claiming you first read Newton's interpretation almost 40 years ago. Is it also your experience that few historians of science, if any, have ever read it or even know of it ? ]

Re "I do not believe it is supported by the primary source quoted from Hall and Hall, since I believe Logicus is misinterpreting Newton's text."

But can you prove your beliefs are correct ? First, the Newton document is surely not a primary source but rather a secondary source with respect to the point at issue, namely the nature of Aristotle's physics, being a secondary commentary on the primary source that is Aristotle's 'Physics' by the classics scholar and historian of science Sir Isaac Newton. According to Wikipedia "A secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources." It can only be considered a primary source as evidence on the issue of what Newton himself believed about Aristotle's 'Physics', whether rightly or wrongly. That document surely shows that at least Newton held the view that Aristotle's dynamics did not contradict the Principia's first law of motion as the original scientific revolution (in physics) thesis maintains. Do you claim otherwise ? How do you interpret Newton's text ?]

"On another related point, it is somewhat ironic that Logicus considers Butterfield's 1948 work to be outdated, but prefers to cite as authoritative Meyerson's 1908 Identity and Reality and Thomas Heath's (1861-1940) posthumously published Mathematics in Aristotle. "

[Indeed, but what I partly had in mind was that such works as Butterfield's that maintain Aristotle's dynamics contradicted Newton's first law are now outdated post-1962 simply by virtue of not discussing the surely important fact that Newton himself is now published as holding the contrary view. But Heath is not outdated in this respect because he concurred with Newton's opinion, whereas Meyerson is because he rejected it in spite of reporting it to be the prevailing opinion amongst readers of ancient Greek philosophy in 1908.]
[As for your point about the conventional view, I have pointed out why this 'conventional view' is mistaken below, because violent motion also requires a mover in Newton's dynamics, although NASA may well be initially interested in the expert advice on O-level Newtonian Physics of Messrs Lloyd and Copleston that anti-gravitational violent motion does not require a motor, with a view to eliminating their enormous rocket-fuel bills (-: However, may I also point out that even the more general principle that all motion requires a mover is not contrary to Newton, for as even Bernard Cohen himself eventually admitted in his 1999 Guide to Newton's Principia (p98), and contrary to the main thesis of his 1960 Birth of a New Physics, by virtue of his concept of the force of inertia, Newton had not fully abandoned this basic principle of 'the old physics'. But Cohen mistakenly imagined Newton had even partly abandoned it only because he wrongly imagined Newton's first law did contradict that principle, whereas of course it does not since that law says nothing whatever about whether there is a mover in uniform motion or not. (Without elementary logic, history of science is blind !) Newton fully endorsed the principle that all motion requires a causal force as follows: "Force is the causal principle of motion and rest. And it is either an external one [i.e. vis impressa] that generates or destroys or otherwise changes impressed motion in some body; or it is an internal principle [vis insita = vis inertiae] by which existing motion or rest is conserved in a body, and by which any being endeavours to continue in its state and opposes resistance." [De Gravitatione, p148, Hall & Hall, 1962 CUP] The main point to be made here is that even 'the conventional view' that Newton rejected the principle that 'all motion requires a causal force' was eventually challenged by Cohen, its erstwhile ardent advocate, and indeed correctly so to his credit, although he notably overlooked mentioning it again in his 2002 Cambridge Companion.] Logicus 17:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

What did Newton say ?

Here I just present the two paragraphs I put into the article, that Steve has now deleted, so that people can see what Newton actually wrote alongside what Butterfield wrote and how it challenges it.

"The 20th century historian, Herbert Butterfield, was less disconcerted but saw the change as equally fundamental.

"Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world - since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics - it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements within the system of medieval Christendom.... [I]t looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.[2]"


However, the view of Butterfield, Koyre, Kuhn and others that there was a scientific revolution was based on their opinion that Newton's physics overthrew Aristotelian physics because Newton's first law of motion was contradicted by Aristotle's law of inertia. But the logically more astute Newton himself was of the contrary view that Aristotle had essentially espoused his first law of motion, from which it follows there was no scientific revolution as Butterfield and others claim, namely an anti-Aristotelian inertial-dynamics revolution. For Newton wrote as follows:

"All those ancients knew the first law [of motion] who attributed to atoms in an infinite vacuum a motion which was rectilinear, extremely swift and perpetual because of the lack of resistance ….Aristotle was of the same mind, since he expresses his opinion thus … in Book IV of the Physics, text 69, [i.e. Physics 4.8.215a19] speaking of motion in the void where there is no impediment he writes: 'Why a body once moved should come to rest anywhere no one can say. For why should it rest here rather than there ? Hence EITHER it will not be moved, OR it must be moved indefinitely, UNLESS something stronger impedes it [My caps].' " [From one of Newton's Scientific Papers in The Portsmouth Collection, first published in Hall & Hall's 1962 'Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton'.] Logicus 14:37, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: why Shapin says "There is no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this book is about it."

Logicus seems to imply that Shapin (and other recent scholars) doubts the existence of the Sci Rev because of a continuity between Aristotle's physics and Newton's. This is definitely not the case. For the most part, in The Scientific Revolution (1996), Shapin describes the theotretical and empirical developments of the scientific revolution in the same terms as most modern historians of science. His discussion of Aristotelian physics embodies the standard take: natural motion vs. violent motion, with natural motion in circles (celestial) or tending toward "natural place" (terrestial) and violent motion irrelevant to natural philosophy.

Shapin's and other modern historians' doubts about the scientific revolution generally do not call into question the intellectual changes describes in tradition Sci-Rev historiography. As Shapin puts it in the bibliographical essay at the end:

Traditional views of the Scientific Revolution have been hotly disputed, and even rejected, by some recent historians. Grounds of dissent have varied, but in one way or another this newer work tends to be skeptical of the coherence and integrity of what had previously been understood as the Scientific Revolution. Revisionist historiography is suspicious of talk about its "essence," its coherency and effectively methodological character, and its unambiguous "modernity."

He goes on to discuss the different ways historians have a) shown that different sciences changed in different ways, and some were little affected by the traditional central aspects of the Sci-Rev, b) found striking discontinuties between early modern (post-Newton) physic and how we now understand modern physics, c) shown how the broad intellectual changes had numerous other causes besides the traditional "Great Men" of Sci Rev historiography, d) challenged the importance/coherence of the (single) scientific method that was traditionally supposed to have emerged in the Sci Rev, etc. There is no mention of Newton's physics not actually being radically different than Aristotle's as part of historians' criticism of the scientific revolution.

Peter Dear's 2001 Revolutionizing the Sciences: Eurpean Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700 has a similar take, adding complexity and variance to the transitions traditionally called the Scientific Revolution (but with much less emphasis on historiography than Shapin). Like Shapin's book, it seeks to show that the changes traditionally called the Scientific Revolution were less universal and more fragmented and varied in context and consequence than in traditional accounts (and were not the only important cultural and scientific changes happening). But again, they do not repudiate the standard Sci Rev story, they just reinterpret it.

Based on the sources I'm familiar with, I can see no justification for the changes Logicus is suggesting, which seems to interpret a primary source in direct contradiction of the consensus of historians.--ragesoss 01:29, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS:

Thanks for the comments and information.
  • Nowhere have I implied "Shapin (and other recent scholars) doubts the existence of the Sci Rev because of a continuity between Aristotle's physics and Newton's." I have never discussed Shapin's views, but am well aware he does not challenge the hitherto unproven thesis of a fundamental contradiction between Aristotle's and Newton's physics that allegedly constituted a scientific revolution.


Ragesoss says: "[Shapin's] discussion of Aristotelian physics embodies the standard take: natural motion vs. violent motion, with natural motion in circles (celestial) or tending toward "natural place" (terrestial) and violent motion irrelevant to natural philosophy."

As a matter of interest, this is most certainly not 'the standard take' on Aristotelian physics, in which violent motion is most certainly not irrelevant to natural philosophy because the analysis of detached violent motion (i.e. projectile motion) was crucial to the overthrow of Aristotelian physics on the Duhem-Kuhn analysis of the matter or on a 'non-standard take' vital to the development of the Aristotelian programme into the 17th century with its auxiliary theories of impetus in such as scholastic Parisian physics. And also the perpetual rotational violent motion of the sublunar fire belt was of course central to Aristotle's 'Metereology' and its theory of comets etc..

Ragesoss concludes:"Based on the sources I'm familiar with, I can see no justification for the changes Logicus is suggesting, which seems to interpret a primary source in direct contradiction of the consensus of historians."

Can we please be clear about what I am proposing ? I am objecting to the radical changes McCluskey has proposed, that the article be rewritten according to the Butterfield viewpoint stated, that there was a scientific revolution because Newton's physics overthrew scholastic philosophy and Aristotelian physics, and allegedly because the latter contradicted Newton's first law of motion. My objection is that this crucial issue of whether Aristotle's physics denied the 'law of inertia', and upon which the thesis of a scientific revolution was founded and developed by such as Koyre and others, is a matter of debate whereby an article on 'the scientific revolution' should adopt a NPOV approach. To show it is a matter of debate because some scholars maintain Aristotle affirmed the law of inertia, I have cited the testimony of the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar Newton himself, of the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar Heath, and also pointed out that on Meyerson's 1908 account at that time classics readers of ancient Greek philosophy all believed, like Newton, that the atomists, Aristotle and others all postulated the law of inertia. I have not made any claims about current scholars. I am simply appealing to the following Wikipedia NPOV policy to prevent an important minority viewpoint from being excluded and to prevent the article being written as though there definitely was a scientific revolution:

"The policy requires that, where there are OR HAVE BEEN conflicting views, these should be presented fairly, but not asserted. All significant published points of view are presented, not just the most popular one. It should not be asserted that the most popular view or some sort of intermediate view among the different views is the correct one. Readers are left to form their own opinions. As the name suggests, the neutral point of view is a point of view, not the absence or elimination of viewpoints."

As a matter of fact there is no 'consensus of historians' on Newton's claim in the Newton document as Ragesoss implies if only one historian of science has ever made substantive published comment on its truth-value. This surely scandalous situation surely speaks volumes in itself.

Moreover, the Newton document in question is surely not a primary source as Ragesoss and McCluskey claim, but rather a secondary source on the Wikipedia definition "A secondary source summarizes one or more primary or secondary sources.", since it is the classics scholar and historian of science Newton summarising a point about the ancient Greek primary source here that is Aristotle's Physics, giving a Latin translation and interpretation of it. It could surely only be considered a primary source as primary evidence of what Newton himself believed, but that is not what is apparently at issue here, which is not about what Newton himself believed, but rather whether Newton's secondary commentary about Aristotle's Physics is true or not. But maybe it could possibly be argued that the Wikipedia definitions are so logically incoherent they exclude nothing. In which case nor do they exclude it being classed as a secondary source.

[My caps]

Logicus,

It would help if you refrained from personal voice in your contributions. Perhaps you might wish to revoice the recent edits in the article, including those referring to 'logical astuteness'. One way to indicate good faith might be to rephrase things.

[(i) I don’t understand what you mean by ‘personal voice’, by which I understand the first person singular, but which I have never used in any of my contributions to articles, as distinct from discussions. However, if you refer to inserts such as [My caps]in a Newton quote, then this is a standard scholarly device for indicating one has used capitals or whatever to emphasise something rather than these being in the original. What alternative device do you suggest ?(ii) The recent edits I made in the article that also referred to Newton’s ‘logical astuteness’ were removed by McCluskey without consultation. Why should I revoice them ? Can you guarantee they can be put back without McCluskey or others removing them again ? Please let me know. But certainly if evaluation of somebody’s analysis is to be banned from articles, you have a lot of editing to do before you get to me (-: (iii) Who or what would it help if I did things as you want, and would you be kind enough to rewrite what I said as you think it should be written so that I can understand and evaluate you kind attempts to help me somehow. (iv) Are you suggesting I have somehow indicated ‘bad faith’ (is that Sartre’s concept)? Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]

Might there be a date for Newton's unpublished writings in Hall & Hall? The reference to "first law" suggests that they are post Principia.

[Yes, as I recall they were evaluated post Principia E1 by the Halls precisely because of the reason you state. Then as I also recall Bernard Cohen in his 1964 Notes & Proceedings of the Royal Society article Quantum in Se Est… , the only article by any academic historian of science to have ever discussed Newton’s paper that I am aware of, dates them in the 1690s [as McCluskey said] as part of a series of memoranda on the historical sources of his philosophy to his accolyte David Gregory either for his forthcoming book on the Moon to which Newton wrote the anonymous Preface on historical antecedents or for the Principia E2, or maybe both, I cannot recall. Do check that article for yourself. I never finished my debates with Bernard about these matters before he died, but if you do bother to read his article, you should note(i) Bernard’s logical error in apparently agreeing with a German commentator’s dismissal of Newton’s claim on the ground that Aristotle denied the void, but as did Descartes to whom Koyre and Cohen attributed the law of inertia. (ii) Bernard’s claim that nobody else in Newton’s time attributed the first law to Aristotle, whereas if you read the Newtonian Andrew Motte’s ‘Treatise on the Mechanical Powers’ (Motte who first translated Principia E3 into English), you will find he justifies the first law in exactly the same terms as Aristotle does in Physics 4.8.215a19-22 as quoted by Newton, and as also did D’Alembert, namely that ‘there is no reason for the body to stop here rather than there and thus nor anywhere’. The possibility Bernard overlooked was that it was tacitly accepted that Aristotle had first stated the first law whereby nobody would bother to state the obvious. (iii) Bernard’s claim that no contemporary historian would attribute any contributory role whatever in the law of inertia to Aristotle, whereas Eddie Grant did exactly that the very same year (as I recall) in his 1964 ‘Motion in the Void’ article.Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]

When one interpolates replies, it is possible to indicate who is saying what with the : markup, which indents replies to statements. Or the * markup puts a bullet point before the statement.

[Thanks a lot for that. Don’t have time to study all the Wikipedia formating tricks, so that’s helpful.Logicus 18:11, 12 September 2006 (UTC)]
This is an example. --Ancheta Wis 04:00, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Is the Aristotelian principle 'violent motion requires a mover' anti-Newton ?

Above Stever McCluskey tells us: "the conventional view of Aristotle's Physics that every violent motion requires the continuous action of a moving cause (contrary to Newton) is presented in G. E. R. Lloyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of his Thought (1968), pp. 175-180 and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, (1946), vol. 1, pp. 314-5."

This view may well be presented by Lloyd and Copleston. But is it true ? For in Aristotelian dynamics the violent motion of a sublunar body, as opposed to its natural motion, is a motion against its own nature/gravity, and therefore requires a motive force to sustain it against the countervailing force of gravity, just as it does in Newton's dynamics, as in the case of the directly upward projectile motion (i.e. violent motion) of a body with gravity, for example. That is why all space rockets require a continuously acting motor to overcome gravity and reach space, for example. Have Lloyd and Copleston misunderstood either Aristotelian or Newtonian physics, or possibly both ?

Perhaps people would like to think about this most crucial issue of whether Newton's dynamics did in fact completely overthrow the ancient and medieval authority of Aristotelian physics and scholastic philosophy and hence constitute scientific revolution as Butterfield and others claim, or whether they were in agreement that sustained motion against gravity requires a sustained motive force ?

Thanks for the other comments from various contributors, to which I shall reply asap. LOGICUS 81.132.185.177 10:02, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Are we getting boring?

Recent vandalism included the following:

"your about to read the most borest thing ever in the entire world."

Setting aside his grammar, he reminded me that in our recent debate about inertia and the concept of the SR, we've added a lot of detail that doesn't really belong in an encyclopedia article. My additions read like a laundry list of ancient philosophers and don't really belong here; interested readers can follow up using our footnotes.

I've prepared two abridgements on a userpage. You might want to look and comment here. Thanks, --SteveMcCluskey 15:14, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I've copied Logicus's comments here, so we can keep the discussion in one place. --SteveMcCluskey 18:34, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
I have already edited out the reference to Galileo's concept of inertia in the article because as even your 'authority' Westfall points out, he didn't have one. Rather he had a theory of impetus (an auxiliary theory of Aristotelian dynamics). It was Kepler and then Newton who developed the theory of inertia (originating from Averroes), another auxiliary theory of Aristotleian dynamics according to which bodies have a non-gravitational inherent resistance to motion, all motion in Kepler's case and all motion except uniform motion in Newton's case. It was Newton who synthesised the Aristotelian auxiliary theories of impetus and of inertia into his bizarre hybrid concept of the force of inertia.Logicus 18:11, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
Three short responses.
  • "my authority" was not Westfall, but Clagett who discusses Galileo's concept of inertia on pp. 158-9, 667-9 in his Science of Mechanics.... Galileo's concept changed through time, in his Two Great World Systems he was struggling with the concept of impetus, but by the Two New Sciences he was clear on the concept of inertia -- at least as it applied to horizontal motion.
  • You marked your removal of the reference to inertia as a "minor edit"; minor edits are for small spelling and grammatical changes, not for changes relating to the meaning of the discussion. Since you consider this a minor edit, should I assume that you won't mind if I change it back :)
  • Once again, please indent your remarks to set them apart from other editors'. You should know the routine by now since this point has been raised a year ago about your discussions on Inertia.

--SteveMcCluskey 18:52, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Steve asks: Are we getting boring ?: Logicus Comments

Arguably 'we' are not, but you are (-: What happened here was that I edited your new section 'Significance of the "revolution" ' in an attempt to both observe NPOV policy and also make it much more interesting. As copied above in 'What did Newton say ?', I quoted Newton's claim that Aristotle espoused his first law of motion that effectively contradicts your quotation of Butterfield's view of the scientific revolution as the overthrow of Aristotelian physics, thus setting up an interesting antinomy of 'authorities' at the outset - Butterfield and others versus Newton (no contest in my view(-:) - that could be expounded and explored by the article. Arguably issues are much more interesting to people if expounded dialectically as debates between opposing views that give their reasons and conceptual logic: anyway, such was the view of Socrates, Plato, Galileo, Berkeley and others, for example. However, you removed my edits on the mistaken grounds that they violated Wikipedia NOR and NPS policies, which they did not, presenting neither a historically novel viewpoint nor a primary source. But you saw fit to at least accept the fact that those you regard as chief scientific revolutionaries cited ancient pedigrees for their views, and you elected to write a very boring paragraph listing these, and which is anyway logically pointless to developing a narrative of a scientific revolution because the next boring paragraph tells us few historians of science have found any such influences as claimed (so why bother mentioning them in the first place ?), and then tells us Copernicus and Galileo were both influenced by some older theories. But this is all trying to observe the conceptually mindless authoritarian rituals of the academic discipline form, quoting 'authorities' and displaying supposed learning, rather than conceptually explaining things to people, especially younger and poorer people who have Internet access who I presume are the main users of Wikipedia and have most likely never heard of any of the people you cite or what their ideas were ? What the reader really might well want to know by now is such as what a scientific revolution consists of, in what sciences there were revolutions, if any, and the conceptual details of what they consisted of. (By the way, I don't understand the Donne quote and why he thought fire was put out and the Sun and earth were lost.)
I don’t know what to suggest to prevent your producing a boring article by virtue of an ‘academic’ approach (as opposed to a more ‘journalistic’ approach). I have already suggested a historiographical/dialectical approach above. Previously, as and when I found the time I was gradually trying to reform this article piecemeal into a more NPOV and dialectically interesting article as well as more historically accurate (e.g. the dialectic between the historians' mechanisation thesis on the one hand and Newton's rejection of mechanism in the Principia), but your intervention has probably scuppered that. 80.6.94.131 15:43, 15 September 2006 (UTC)


Steve says: "my authority" was not Westfall, but Clagett who discusses Galileo's concept of inertia on pp. 158-9, 667-9 in his Science of Mechanics.... Galileo's concept changed through time, in his Two Great World Systems he was struggling with the concept of impetus, but by the Two New Sciences he was clear on the concept of inertia -- at least as it applied to horizontal motion.

Logicus comments: In the first instance rather than correct your apparently mistaken exposition of Galileo's dynamics, since you apparently prefer 'authority' rather than reason in determining the truth (-:, I quote Westfall who you seem to regard as an authority in matters of the scientific revolution: "Galileo did not employ the word inertia. For that matter, whatever his phraseology, he did not employ the concept of inertia in precisely the form we hold it today." p18 The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanism and Mechanics. 1977 CUP. (I should have said Westfall said Galileo did not use the TERM inertia.) As it happens, like Feyerabend and others, Westfall was of the mistaken opinion that, unlike Newton, Galileo held a theory of circular inertia just because he maintained that a canonball on the upper surface of a perfectly smooth sphere gravitationally concentric with the centre of the Earth's gravity would roll around a great circle forever once moving (i.e. Cusa's thought-expt), but of course Newton's dynamics predicts the same in such gravitational circumstances, whereby Westfall should logically also have concluded Newton held a theory of circular inertia, but did not, thus perpetuating a traditional historian of science red-herring. Cusa's thought-experiment was a 'refutation' of the Aristotelian theory of horizontal gravity, that is, the gravitational tendency to rest on the horizontal that the self-refuting Maier strikingly failed to prove was due to inertia according to Buridan and Oresme, rather than to gravity/weight. As for Clagett, he does not discuss Galileo's concept of inertia in that work, but rather Galileo's concept of impetus and also his principle of indifference to rest or motion on the 'horizontal' i.e. the surface of gravitationally concentric sphere, such as a perfectly calm lake. In what respect do you claim Galileo was 'clearer on the concept of inertia' in the Discorsi than in the Dialogo ? On what you possibly mean by 'inertia', 'Galileo' held a theory of the permanent conservation of rectilinear impetus in the absence of all resistance in the Dialogo and there is no reason to think he did not in the Discorsi so far as I am aware. Do you disagree ? 80.6.94.131 16:10, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Newton's Point Of View (NPOV) and Wikipedia policy contra McCluskey & Ragesoss

In edited inserts to McCluskey's recent editing of this article, I quoted Newton's attribution of the Principia's first law of motion to Aristotle as evidence that there is a point of view that there was no scientific revolution as traditionally conceived by Koyre, Duhem, Butterfield and Co, namely that Newton's physics totally overthrew Aristotle's because the latter denied Newton's law of inertia [See above 'What did Newton say ?'].

But it was claimed by McCluskey that this constituted doing ‘original research’ in preparing a novel viewpoint, banned by Wikipedia policy, and also using primary sources, which Wikipedia cautions against, but does not ban and in fact even encourages. McCluskey then removed my edited inserts and the Newton quotation. And McCluskey's objections to my defending Newton's point of view - interpreting primary sources against the consensus of historians - were then echoed by Ragesoss. But it is important that people should be aware of Isaac Newton's interpretation of Aristotle's physics, at least because it is provably correct, and especially because historians of science have almost exclusively maintained a notably deafening silence about it since it was first published in 1962, whereby it is very little known.

Here I present more detailed Wikipedia policy evidence than before that these claims of McCluskey and Ragesoss are mistaken because (i) the Newton document is not a primary source but rather a secondary source and (ii) the research I present is 'source-based research' that Wikipedia recognises as fundamental to writing an encyclopedia', and not 'original research'.

I quote from Wikipedia's No Original Research Policy as follows:

Wikipedia NOR Policy

"Primary and secondary sources

  • Primary sources present information or data, such as archeological artifacts; film, video or photographs (but see below); historical documents such as a diary, census, transcript of a public hearing, trial, or interview; tabulated results of surveys or questionnaires, records of laboratory assays or observations; records of field observations.
  • Secondary sources present a generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of information or data from other sources. Original research that creates primary sources is not allowed. However, research that consists of collecting and organizing information from existing primary and/or secondary sources is, of course, strongly encouraged. All articles on Wikipedia should be based on information collected from published primary and secondary sources. This is not "original research"; it is "source-based research", and it is fundamental to writing an encyclopedia."

The Newton paper I have presented gives an analysis and interpretation of information from another source, namely Aristotle's Physics. The latter is presumably the primary source here, being a primary source about the nature of Aristotle's physics along with his On The Heavens, providing direct evidence of whether it affirmed or denied Newton's law of inertia, and thus whether there was a scientific revolution or not. Moreover, the Newton secondary source claim that I am defending - that Aristotle's physics affirmed the law of inertia - was also held by other classics scholars and historians of science, such as the Cambridge Trinity historian of ancient Greek science Sir Thomas Heath, whereby it is obviously not a "novel historical interpretation" even in the 20th century and thus not the forbidden 'original research' McCluskey claims it is.

Rather, in the words of Wikipedia policy, I am providing "information collected from published primary and secondary sources. This is not "original research"; it is "source-based research", and it is fundamental to writing an encyclopedia." This research is defending an old viewpoint - the viewpoint of Sir Isaac Newton himself - that is now a minority viewpoint by providing and analysing primary, secondary and tertiary sources to demonstrate how the currently prevailing contrary view is both unproven to date and mistaken, whereby Newton's view merits mention at least as an alternative view that has not been refuted.

Here I provide some sources supporting Newton's viewpoint. First here is a secondary source commenting on the primary source Aristotle's Physics by the Cambridge Trinity classics scholar and historian of ancient Greek science and maths Sir Thomas Heath. He is commenting on his own translation of Aristotle's Physics 4.8.215a19-22, the same passage cited by Newton as evidence that Aristotle endorsed his first law of motion.

ARISTOTLE'S PHYSICS 4.8.215A19-22: " "Further, no one could give any reason why, having been set in motion, [a body in a void] should stop anywhere: for why here, rather then there ? Hence, EITHER it will remain at rest, OR it must continue to move ad infinitum UNLESS something stronger impedes it." [My caps for emphasis]

But attention should be drawn to the last sentence in the above passage, because the statement in it constitutes a fair anticipation of Newton's First Law of Motion. There is a similar passage in Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae, c.6, which has been noted as containing a similar anticipation of Newton's First Law: 'For everything is borne along in its own natural direction unless this is changed by some other force.' But Aristotle's statement seems to me more complete." [p115-6 Mathematics in Aristotle, Oxford Clarendon, 1949]

Now here is a tertiary source reporting that readers of ancient Greek physics at the turn of the century almost unanimously believed it postulated the law of inertia, including Aristotle's physics, the secondary source here being the opinions of those classics readers:

EMILE MEYERSON: "It is sometimes asserted that this principle [of inertia] was known to antiquity. It is certain that in following the exposition of a Greek atomic system, such as that of Democritus, through the refutations of Aristotle, or that of Epicurus in De Rerum Natura, a modern reader is almost without fail led to believe that these philosophers implicitly postulated [the law of] inertia." [p113, Identity and Reality, 1908]

Note how similar the reported view of the modern classics reader was to that of the older classics reader Newton. Meyerson then went on to claim these readers were wrong because, he mistakenly claimed, the law of inertia is the assertion of an unforced interminable straight motion, which of course it is not, and because Aristotle denied there is any such motion he therefore denied the law of inertia. Thus it seems he initiated the elementary logical fallacy that was then repeated and exported from France to America by his equally logically challenged disciple Koyre in his 1939 Galilean Studies dedicated to Meyerson. Koyre further invalidly concluded the discovery of the law of inertia presupposed positing an infinite universe and void to make room for that interminable straight motion he mistakenly thought the law of inertia asserted. But Newton's first law only states that any body neither at rest nor in uniform straight motion is subject to perturbing impressed forces. It does not state there are any bodies not subject to such forces amd thereby assert there is some interminable uniform motion in the real world.

To be continued...

Logicus 14:36, 17 September 2006 (UTC)


Truth, authority, and the NOR Policy

At 16:10, 15 September 2006, Logicus (User:80.6.94.131) said " you apparently prefer 'authority' rather than reason in determining the truth." This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the encyclopedic nature of Wikipedia and its No Original Research policy.
Let's try to get at the heart of the No Original Research policy by tracing its origins. It began with an e-mail on the wikien-l where Jimbo Wales expressed his reaction to an editor who was advocating an unorthodox criticism of special relativity on the article by that name. That view was generalized to cover topics other than physics and became the original version of the No Original Research policy and is still included in the much larger current version.
Here's Jimbo's view, transposed from physics to history:
The specific factual content of the article is, in a sense, none of my business. My sole interest here is that the wiki process be followed and respected. Talking to me about [history] is pointless, because it misses the point.
What do mainstream [history] texts say on the matter? What do the majority of prominent [historians] say on the matter? Is there significant debate one way or the other within the mainstream [historical] community on this point?
If your viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts.
If your viewpoint is held by a significant [minority of historians], then it should be easy to name prominent adherents, and the article should certainly address the controversy without taking sides.
If your viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, then whether it's true or not, whether you can prove it or not, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, except perhaps in some ancilliary article. Wikipedia is not the place for original research.
Remember, I'm not much interested in "is it true or not" in this context. We could talk about that forever and get nowhere. I'm only interested in the much more tractable question "is it encyclopedic and NPOV or not"? And this question can be answered in the fashion I outlined above.
--Jimbo
Since this is the official Wikipedia framework, we have to live with it and work within it. We cannot determine whether a view belongs in Wikipedia by debating whether it's true that Aristotle maintained a theory of inertia (or that seventeenth-century natural philosophers believed that Aristotle held a theory of inertia). Instead, our goal is to determine whether these views are held by a majority, a significant minority, or an extremely small minority of historians. To do that, we need to identify specific passages in which historians state these views and similar passages where historians state alternative views (such as that Aristotle believed that bodies are moved by some motive cause or that Galileo, Descartes, or Newton believed that their concepts of inertia or impetus contradicted the views of Aristotle).
If this means we must engage in what Logicus called "mindless authoritarian rituals of the academic discipline form, quoting 'authorities' and displaying supposed learning," so be it. --SteveMcCluskey 16:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: Thanks for this information about Wikipedia policy and your strictures. But what is their logical relevance ? What currently relevant proposition do you think they establish ? That in Wikipedia verifying or refuting whether scientist X held the theory Y must not be established by direct reference to X's writings, but only by reference to whether third parties say they did? That some particular view is held by too small a minority to be included in the article ? Perhaps this will be clarified in response to my Proposed Edits below ?

  • Your comments are apparently directed to my saying you apparently prefer 'authority' to reason in determining the truth. But you omit the context of my remark, which was contesting your claim that 'Galileo's KEY concept was inertia', whereas I claimed he had no concept of inertia and his key concept was 'impetus'. So I just cited your Newton authority Westfall's correct opinion that Galileo never used the word 'inertia' to help persuade you of this more easily, instead of asking you for verification, which would have involved reasoning about Galileo's texts, including the production of evidence. Or would you have just claimed some majority view that Galileo's key concept was inertia, even if refuted by Galileo's texts ? Anyway, fortunately you have now withdrawn this mistaken claim. But you still claim he had a concept of inertia. But I claim he did not have a concept of inertia, neither in Kepler's nor in Newton's meaning of the term 'inertia' as an inherent resistance to forms of motion (it was Kepler who invented the general concept of inertia and introduced that term into physics). On the contrary, like Buridan who thought "prime matter does not resist motion", as Moody pointed out when refuting Maier's thesis that scholastic physics (Buridan and Oresme) presumed inertia, it seems Galileo held the same opinion and had no concept of inertia. I suspect what you probably have in mind here is the 'principle of the continuation of unresisted and externally unforced motion' as embodied in Galileo's concept of impetus. So unless you can verify Galileo had a concept of inertia, please accept the change of 'inertia' to 'impetus' and stop repeatedly restoring 'inertia' every time I change it to 'impetus'.
  • You conclude Wikipedia policy may mean we must engage in what I called 'mindless authoritarian academic rituals', but again overlook the context of my remarks. I was objecting to your just listing lots of names of alleged ancient influences on Copernicus, Kepler and Newton in the 'Significance' section without explaining their theories to readers and as though everybody knows who those people were. Do you claim Wikipedia policy excludes explaining who people were, what theories they held and the relevant nature of their theories?
  • As your weblink reference to the current NOR policy reveals, it is not in fact that policy you are quoting, but rather the NPOV policy and its doctrine of what constitutes a sufficiently large minority viewpoint to require mention in Wikipedia articles. Comparing this with NOR policy, there would appear to be some logical confusion here about whether some source-based research must be excluded because it is original research because it advances a novel viewpoint, or rather because, although not novel, the viewpoint is that of too small a minority to be included.
  • The aspect of the NPOV policy you cite raises the simple question on which official Wikipedia policy apparently gives no operable guidance, namely what proportion of the relevant community constitutes "an extremely small minority" ? More or less than 10% ? Some effective criterion must surely be given before the conclusions you draw, which reduce Wikipedia to statistical surveys of opinions as opposed to establishing truth by reason and evidence, can be validated. And the following question surely also arises. Even if the minority were a minority of just one person, what if that person happened to be Albert Einstein, say, or even that even greater scientist Sir Isaac Newton ? Would their viewpoint still have to be excluded under the 'extremely small minority rule ?

But thanks again for the education about Wikipedia ! Logicus 17:22, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Dating the alleged 'scientific revolution' requires NPOV

The current first paragraph of the article is concerned with dating the alleged scientific revolution as follows:

"Many historians of science who maintain there was a scientific revolution date it roughly as having begun in 1543, the year in which Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) and Andreas Vesalius published his De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human body). But they agree less about its closing date, although many would agree that the Scientific Revolution had come to a close by the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727. As with many historical demarcations, historians of science disagree about these boundaries, ..."

Thus without even telling us what a scientific revolution is and in which sciences there were revolutions and why, this current first paragraph of the article immediately launches into the complex issue of dating 'the scientific revolution', which it dates as 1543 to 1727 but without telling us why. (Why should the publication of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Vesalius's book be the beginning and why should the death of Newton be the end ?) But the previous pre-McCluskey Wikipedia first paragraph dated the scientific revolution 1600-1687 (i.e. from 'revolutionary' works of Galileo & Kepler to Newton's Principia E1). And McCluskey's mentor Butterfield dated it 1300-1800 in his book listed in the References, around the same time Rupert Hall's dated it 1500-1800. And Peter Dear's 2001 book as kindly reported by Ragesoss dates it 1500-1700.

Clearly there are some significant differences here whereby an explanatory NPOV approach is required rather than just one dating point of view being favoured - the astronomy/mechanics view - with others being implicitly marginally covered just by an admission of disagreements about boundaries apparently about the same thing, when in fact the disagreement is a deeper conceptual differences about what the alleged revolution consisted of and which sciences had revolutions. The current Wikipedia article (Section 5, last para) seems to claim there were revolutions in astronomy, mechanics, optics, chemistry, biology and some other unspecified sciences, and whatever science Vesalius practiced (human physiology ?). That's at least 6 revolutions. But in the current 'conceptually mindless' approach of the article, nowhere are we told what they consisted of (except Vesalius?), what old principles were replaced by what new principles, and why that constituted a revolution rather than a reform or revision of existing theory.

The truth of the matter seems to be that McCluskey's 1543-1727 admitted 'fudge dating' is based on the by now well-outdated original narrower conception of the scientifc revolution as just a revolution in astronomy and mechanics that excluded revolutions in any other sciences, and moreover in its pre-Duhem conception before its backdating to 1300 that the Duhemian Butterfield adheres to. But Butterfield dates the end of the scientific revolution as 1800 because he widens the original astronomy/mechanics conception of the scientific revolution to include an alleged revolution in another science, namely Chemistry. Thus we get the dating 1300-1800 (i.e. Duhem + Chemistry). But because Hall rejected 14th century impetus dynamics as the origin of the revolution because it was part of Aristotelian physics and he saw the essence of the revolution as a break with ancient Greek science, he chose 1500 as the beginning.

Now the overall lesson here is that historians' datings of the scientific revolution mainly depend upon how they conceive what a scientific revolution in science is and in what sciences they claim there were such revolutions, and it is these things we really need to know in an educational article on the scientific revolution rather than be told some specific dating without the reason why. The apparent reason for the current 1543-1727 dating is basically that McCluskey conceives the scientific revolution as the alleged astronomy/mechanics revolution, and apparently regards Copernicus's astronomy as revolutionary rather than the failed last stand of the ancient celestial spheres astronomy, thus rejecting the previous 1600-1687 Wikipedia dating. But by virtue of excluding such as the Butterfield dating from mention and even from implicit consideration, the first paragraph's claim that 'historians agree more about the starting date and less about the closing date' is in fact nonsense. In the particular case of Butterfield versus McCluskey datings, the difference of starting dates is about 250 years, whereas that between closing dates is only about 70 years. And in general as in this case, the literature on the scientific revolution shows much greater disagreement about its alleged starting point than about its finishing point, contrary to what McCluskey claims in the first paragraph.

In conclusion, clearly the current first paragraph must be radically revised or entirely removed, and if it is to be concerned with dating the boundaries of the alleged scientific revolution, then given the wide disagreement between historians of science due to their widely different conceptions of it, it must adopt an NPOV approach and somehow explain the different datings of different historians, perhaps with summary categories of the main different approaches if possible. A leading difference is differences about what sciences had revolutions that are to be included within 'the scientific revolution'. The current article's initial 1543-1727 dating conflicts with the dating that would follow from its later claim in the last paragraph of its Section 5 'Theoretical developments' that there were revolutions in astronomy, mechanics, optics, chemistry biology and other sciences by dating the first and last of these. However, in none of these sciences are we told what the alleged revolution was. And in the only science in which we are told something of that ilk, human physiology, we are told the ancient 'Galen maintained the heart is the centre of the arterial system which disseminates arterial blood', but the revolutionary Vesalius found that "the circulation of blood resolved[sic!] from pumping of the heart". Some revolution ! Logicus 16:44, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I somewhat agree with you regarding the dates in the introduction, but I also think that because the idea of the Scientific Revolution (as opposed to a generic scientific revolution a la Kuhn) is most often associated primarily with astronomy and mechanics, that that should be the focus of most of the body of the article (i.e., presenting the traditional idea of a Scientific Revolution per Koyre and his intellectual successors). We may soon need a separate article on Historiography of the Scientific Revolution.--ragesoss 00:50, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Ragesoss and Logicus -- I tweaked the discussion of dates in the opening paragraph to reflect the ambiguities brought by the question of Medieval influences / anticipations at the beginning and what, as I recall, Butterfield called "the delayed revolution in Chemistry" at the end. BTW, I prefer the early 18th century ending; when I used Butterfield as a text I skipped his latter chapters.
I hope Ragesoss isn't suggesting there's no place for biology and chemistry in this article. It's interesting that although Allen Debus wrote Man and Nature in the Renaissance, centered on those sciences, to complement Westfall's discussion of the revolution in astronomy and mechanics in his Construction of Modern Science, Debus began by commenting that "Few events in world history have been more momentous than the Scientific Revolution."
I like the Historiography of the Scientific Revolution idea, but perhaps it should be started as a section in the Historiography of science article and then carved off if necessary. A specific example like that might make the Historiography of Science article more robust. --SteveMcCluskey 03:20, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Of course, I didn't mean to imply there is no place for biology and chemistry. I like the outline you've created, which includes those area, but emphasizes mechanics and astronomy. And beginning with section of historiography of science is a sensible suggestion.--ragesoss 10:47, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Problems of Verification: Some Proposed Edits

These proposed edits hopefully both improve the article by removing some gross errors and also assist in clarifying the issues of Wikipedia policy raised by Steve McCluskey in 'Truth, Authority and the NOR Policy' above.

In the current first paragraph delete "A closing date is less easily established, although most historians would agree that the Scientific Revolution had come to a close by the death of Sir Isaac Newton in 1727" UNVERIFIED. The logic of the arithmetic evidence presented in this paragraph suggests the contrary, that it is easier for revolutionists to agree a closing date than an opening date, with an opening date disagreement of some 250 years.


In 3rd Para of 'Significance' delete "the replacement of the Aristotelian idea that heavy and light bodies moved naturally straight down or up toward their natural places and heavenly bodies moved naturally in unchanging circular motions by the idea that all bodies move according to the same physical laws including the law of gravity,..." because it is a multiple logical muddle and its claims unverifiable: UNVERIFIED. Just a few brief illustrative points: (i) In Aristotelian celestial dynamics not all heavenly bodies move naturally in unchanging circular motions. The nested celestial spheres each revolve uniformly in themselves but not absolutely, for only the fixed stars embedded in the stellar sphere move in unchanging circular motions. For the planets embedded in some of the spheres move in non-circular and non-uniform compounded resultant curvilinear motions, very similar to those in Kepler's and Newton's dynamics. But in Newton's simple astronomical model as in Galileo's the planets moved in circles, as in the simple (pre-)Aristotelina model. And in the Dialogo Galileo obviously conceived himself to be developing Aristotelian dynamics by demonstrating the universality of circular motion in nature and denying sublunar rectilinear motion (trajectory of projectiles from a tower is a semi-circle, refuted by Fermat). Overall the distinction attempted here fails. (ii) In Newton's physics bodies do not move according to the same physical laws as claimed because it posited different laws of repulsion and attraction for different bodies in different domains such as macro-dynamics, optics, chemistry and electricity. Also the inverse-square 'law of gravity' does not hold within celestial bodies.


In same para delete "and the replacement of the Aristotelian concept that all motions require the continued action of a cause by the inertial concept that motion is a state that, once started, continues indefinetely without the need for any further action of a cause." Verification required. This is a logical muddle. (i) Nobody, not even historians when in their right minds, denies all actual motions are accelerated and subject to gravitational forces and so require the continued actions of a cause/force, unless perhaps they try to get cute with GTR, but which also fails. So this claimed distinction between Aristotelian dynamics and some alleged replacement fails. In the 17th and 18th century neither Galileo's, Descartes', Newton's nor Leibniz's cosmologies denied this principle. (ii) Re the case of purely hypothetical 'inertial' motion - i.e. unresisted and externally unforced motion - in modern 'post-positivist' times at least since Westfall's 1970 Force in Newton's Physics and the discrediting of its Machian positivist interpretation, the claim that it is unforced and uncaused has been highly disputable because in Newton's dynamics 'inertial' motion is caused by the inherent force of inertia, whereby in 1999 in his Guide to Newton's Principia the world leading Newton 'expert' Bernard Cohen at long last finally admitted that by virtue of his concept of the force of inertia, Newton had not abandoned the principle of Aristotelian physics that 'all motion requires a mover'. (Thus at least Cohen must be removed from McCluskey's list of 8 secondary sources who are said to have claimed a fundamental discontinuity between Aristotelian and Newtonian dynamics like Butterfield.) (iii) it is simply false to say the inertial concept is that motion is a state that once started continues without need for further action of a cause, since this is false of orbital motions of planets (iv) the perpetual rotations of the celestial spheres are states in Aristotelian dynamics, contra Koyre's manifestly mistaken claim that motion is not a state but a process in Aristotle's dynamics, but which only applies to sublunar natural motion. Nor is the perpetual circular violent motion of the sublunar fire belt a process, but a permanent state.


In the 5th para of this section, delete "While few historians have found demonstrable infuence from these ancient sources, ..." unless and until it is VERIFIED that most historians have denied any such influences, because this claim misrepresents the burden of proof. If a scientist cites previous propounders of their theories and has adopted the same theory, what further proof of influence is required ? How on earth is 'no demonstrable influence' to be demonstrated in such circumstances ? By proof that they had no knowledge of the older theory or its proponent before propounding it ? But even that would fail because people may be unaware of the original source of their influences, just as modern scientists who believe in the Aristotelian philosophy that the world is composed of a plurality of different things (pluralism), that there are laws of nature (nomologicism) governing the behaviour of these many things, and that these laws can be derived from experience (empiricism), may be unaware they are therefore deeply influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, as are educators who maintain 'children should achieve their full potential'. For example, even if Newton himself had been unaware of the ancient origins of his theory of gravity in Plato's 'mutual attraction of cognates' theory that replaced Aristotle's in 14th century Parisian scholastic physics in order to accomodate a plurality of worlds contra Aristotle after the 1277 Condemnation, and subsequently adopted by such as Kepler and Galileo, nevertheless as Duhem pointed out in his 'Aim and Structure of Physical Theory', it was an evolutionary development of it.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS: It seems a key problem here is the logico-literacy problem of formulating factually true propositions about physics, which requires training, careful thought and systematic coherent logico-semantic analysis. When we have supposed 'authorities' such as Copleston and Lloyd reportedly positing 'Newtonian levitation' as Steve reported (i.e. that violent motion does not require the action of a force in Newton's dynamics) in their efforts to find fundamental discontinuitues between Aristotle's and Newton's physics, then clearly we have a very serious problem of understanding or exposition that should not be promulgated in an encyclopedia nor endorsed by its rules. Perhaps Steve McClusky can kindly explain what Wikipedia policy rules would exclude such blunders, or say exclude the blunder of a Wikipedia artice claiming that Newton's law of gravity says gravitational attraction is inversely proportional to the distance CUBED ? Logicus 18:08, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Disruptive Editing ?

I'm tired from trying to repair the latest changes to this article.

I think all involved could benefit from reading the Guideline on Disruptive editing.

I'm going to bed. --SteveMcCluskey 03:15, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: Thank you for accepting 2 of my above 4 proposed edits of 21 September that I then executed two days later, and also the ‘inertia’ corrections. I shall explain later why I think you must also accept the other two edits because your subsequent redrafts do not solve the problem.
Meanwhile, re Koyre’s untenable distinction between motion being a process in Aristotelian dynamics versus a state in Newton’s, repeated by Westfall on page 19 of his unfortunate book you cite, you Koyre admirers (Ragesoss and yourself) might like to reflect on the fact that an intelligent critical attitude to Koyre surfaced in America in 1957 in Wisconsin in the Dutch Duhemian Dijksterhuis’s comments on this alleged antithesis as follows:

"...the antithesis in question between the two conceptions of motion exists only so long as uniform rectilinear motions are considered; all other motions are processes in classical mechanics as well, that is to say, they equally require the constant action of an external force,…” [p175 'The Origins of Classical Mechanics from Aristotle to Newton' M. Clagett ed 'Critical Problems in the History of Science' 1959 pp163-184 University of Wisconsin Proceedings 1957]

  • Re your advice for people to read about Disruptive Editing, from past experience of your failed efforts to identify breaches of Wikipedia policy, why don’t you save us the trouble of trying to work out what you have in mind and just state those sentences that you imagine are being breached ?

Meanwhile, do beware of breaching the following principle yourself:

"It introduces an analysis or synthesis of established facts, ideas, opinions, or arguments in a way that builds a particular case favored by the editor, without attributing that analysis or synthesis to a reputable source." Logicus 18:47, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

I have not accepted your edits; I just haven't gotten around to cleaning up all of your changes. I see no reason to continue cleaning up your editing until this matter is resolved.
For you to criticize anyone for failure to cite reliable sources is so ironic that it doesn't deserve comment.
I am asking for comment by other editors involved in this page in accordance with the Disruptive Edting guideline.
--SteveMcCluskey 19:24, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
I concur with SteveMcCluskey; the interpretations Logicus is trying to introduce are, with respect to modern scholarship related to the Scientific Revolution, original research by Wikipedia's standards, even if they rely to some extent on (quite old) secondary material.--ragesoss 22:36, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
But the issue here raised by Steve is not whether my 4 edits breach NOR policy (which they do not, and nor has Steve proven nor claimed they do), but rather whether they satisfy the criteria of Disruptive Editing. As it happens none of my four proposed edits were original research by current Wikipedia policy. And none rely on any old secondary material. For example, re my third edit, it was in 1999 that Bernard Cohen finally admitted Newton's notion of inertia did not break with the Aristotelian principle that all motion requires a cause, as I have already explained, but to which Steve has notably not responded. It seems as though he discounts 'expert' opinion that contradicts his point of view. And re my second edit, who else maintains the planets or all the celestial spheres move in unchanging uniform circular motion in Aristotelian celestial dynamics as Steve mistakenly claimed? The whole point of the complicated system of scores of nested eccentric celestial spheres introduced by Eudoxus and Aristotle was to provide a mechanical model that explained the non-uniform non-circular eccentric motions of the planets. And my first edit boiled down to an apparent logico-arithmetic error about the range of disagreements about when the SR started, and the fourth to no sources having been provided for Steve's obviously mistaken claim that the scientists mentioned were not influenced by any of the influences they cited. And since Steve has obviously made some effort to reduce the falsity levels of his claims, my proposals were surely productive rather than disruptive. Moreover, Steve was given 2 days to say whether he thought they were mistaken, but did not. I hope this information enables you to withdraw your support for Steve's Disruptive Editing claim. Re NOR policy by the way, there is currently no age restriction on the admissible secondary material, so if you want to try and hang me on that policy presumably you will need to first get it revised to exclude old secondary material ? Logicus 00:52, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
While the arguments Logicus was making earlier were original research, and he was being rather disruptive about it, his most recent edits need not be interpreted as such. He seems willing to work toward a consensus, and accept that mainstream historical interpretations will be the focus of the article; demanding citations for what he feels are unjustified claims is fair, and providing those citations will ultimately strengthen the article.
Logicus, keep in mind, however, that it is outside a Wikipedia article's scope to make explicit judgment's about what scholarship is right and what is wrong; the things I've read are consonant with SteveMclusky's interpretation of Aristotelian physics. You've not given much context for the Cohen reference you provided; it's hard to judge how relevant it is in the overall context of the article. In any case, the correct interpretation of Aristotle's physics, (or more appropriately, whatever passed for Aristotle's physics by Newton's time) is only a small part of the traditional view of the scientific revolution (the gist of which this article needs to convey to the reader, concisely). The system of Eudoxus and Aristotle is usually described as one in which uniform circular motion is the central feature; for example, from Olaf Pederson's Early Physics and Astronomy (1974, revised 1993), regarding the tradition of Eudoxus and Plato (which in this respect, he elsewhere extends to the Aristotelian tradition): "In modern phraseology, it could be said that the task of the astronomer is to formulate a mathematical theory which, from certain presuppositions (in this case a number of uniform circular motions) makes possible a deduction of the more irregular movements which the planets are seen to perform." (p. 25). As it is described in everything I've read (including Pederson, p. 81, well as in Michael Crowe's 1990 Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution), Ptolemy's addition of the equant point (not deferents and epicycles) is the only thing, up until Kepler, that violates the requirement of uniform circular motion. Even so, Ptolemy claimed allegiance to the principle that all celestial motion was uniform circular motion; others up to (and perhaps including) Copernicus attempted to "save Ptolemy from himself," which was eventually done by replacing the equant with the Tusi couple.
(Aside: Perhaps we should step back and try to lay out the differences between the significant authors of Sci Rev historiography; maybe you two (Steve and Logicus) feel comfortable about assigning weight to these conflicting narratives without explicit discussion, but I do not. That said, I don't anticipate having significant time to devote to research for this article for a while; I'm going on wikibreak as I read for qualifiers.)--ragesoss 02:41, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS REPLIES TO RAGESOSS: I am most grateful for your reconsideration and withdrawal of your support for Steve McCluskey's charge of Disruptive Editing re my recent proposed edits. However, re your accusation that I have previously made original research arguments and also been rather disruptive in editing, I would be even more grateful if you would also kindly either produce some logically valid evidence for this charge or else kindly withdraw it, since I have never breached NOR policy nor DE policy so far as I am aware. As you may appreciate, I would prefer not to have previous convictions automatically presumed when these charges have never been verified. In my opinion on Wikipedia policy breaches, the situation is rather that others have radically breached Good Faith policy against myself.

I would also be grateful if you could let me know how the Wikipedia Disruptive Editing process McCluskey says he has initiated may be terminated.

Re the procedural matters you raise, I am indeed willing to work towards a consensus, and am amenable to your suggestion that we step back and maybe have that discussion about the McCluskey proposals that Steve apparently invited but never honoured. But the problem here would appear to be Steve, not me. The basic procedural problem is that Steve originally just marched in on 30 August as though he owned the article and Wikipedia and his opinions about the article and the SR were authoritative, proposed an outline for a complete rewrite supposedly for discussion, claimed he had copied the existing article to his User Talk page and invited its radical revision there, but didn't. Instead he then started making radical changes to the article before there was any discussion, and which he invited everybody to have fun with, but which disrupted revisions I was gradually making to make it more historically accurate and interesting re debate and more coherent. Then when I edited his changes to challenge Butterfield's view with Newton's and so create an interesting antinomy, he responded with untenable charges of original research and insultingly implied a primary source was being used in a particular manner by somebody untrained to do such, and he then removed the edit.

Perhaps further article edits can be put on hold whilst issues are discussed/resolved in Talk and you have time for the research you require ? I certainly have much evidence to bear against McCluskey's view that I have not yet had time to muster in Talk, especially against his alleged array of secondary sources in support of Butterfield's interpretation. And if you could possibly provide a list of all those books on your bookshelf of which a quick glance confirmed McCluskey's view for you it would be helpful, especially since as we have seen here, it seems at least two of them (Pederson and Crowe) do not, but rather confirm mine, yet again revealing a logico-literacy problem, probably stemming from insufficient time to read what has been said carefully.

Re the many substantive points you raise and have raised previously in Talk forums that I have not yet responded to, for which I apologise, in my view they are all mistaken and I shall explain why asap. Now I just respond to three points you make here that are pertinent to rebutting the Disruptive Editing charge:

  • Your astronomical information in the section 'The system…...Tusi couple' clearly supports my proposed edit rather than McCluskey's as you wrongly imply. This is because your sources clearly confirm my point that the planets “move irregularly” in Aristotelian celestial dynamics and hence that McCluskey's edit that “heavenly bodies move in unchanging circular motions in Aristotelian dynamics” was indeed thereby FALSE as attested by secondary sources. As I said, only the fixed stars do. The import is that one of the sillier traditional distinctions made, that Kepler replaced Aristotelian circular planetary orbits with ellipitical orbits, thereby fails. Thanks for these further secondary source justifications for my edit, which was therefore justified and productive. QED.
  • Your claim that “the correct interpretation of Aristotle's physics is only a small part of the traditional view of the scientific revolution” is surely mistaken and contradicts your own 21 September advocacy of Koyre's view as the traditional view, since that view was wholly based on the much older traditional 'total overthrow of Aristotelian physics' positivist thesis, to whose validity the interpretation of Aristotelian physics is therefore fundamental, and on which Newton's commentary is therefore a most valuable secondary source. (Koyre was involved in a particular debate within this whole positivist tradition dating from Mach's 1883 'Science of Mechanics' and then Duhem's massive critique of Mach's claim that Galileo invented dynamics, to which Koyre was responding.) QED.
  • Your claim “You've not given much context for the Cohen reference you provided; it's hard to judge how relevant it is in the overall context of the article.” is surely mistaken. The reference is given twice in the Talk with full context, and as I have explained it is centrally relevant to refuting the claim of McCluskey and Westfall that the Aristotelian principle that 'all motions require the action of a cause' was overthrown by Newton's dynamics, even in the case of purely ideal nonexistent externally unforced uniform rectilinear motion. But maybe the good news from Harvard of Cohen's recantation of his 'Birth of a New Physics' error has not yet reached West Virginia ? And as Dijksterhuis pointed out , as I have quoted above, that principle is anyway true for actual motions. Thus another alleged revolutionary distinction between Aristotle's and Newton's dynamics, this one first introduced by Duhem, fails. And as I have also pointed out in Talk on 13 September, the Halls' 1962 secondary source shows Newton maintained 'force is the causal principle of all motion', contra McCluskey and Westfall. Thus my proposed edit was justified, and McCluskey's edit needs to take this alternative viewpoint of Newton and Cohen into account. QED?

But thanks again for your considerate and relatively more humane intervention. Logicus 16:18, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Ground Rules 11:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

When editing the Talk page, might we adhere to the following guidelines:

  1. Please do not alter another editor's contribution.
  2. Please add to the bottom of a thread, and not interpolate directly into the thread of another editor.
  3. Please demarcate your own contribution with markup such as quote, indentation, numbering, bold, bracket, etc.
  4. Please timestamp your contribution thus ~~~~
  5. This behavior is common knowledge in the community. It is a sign of trouble when this protocol is not followed.
  6. The talk page should be archived (i.e., it is 170K, and should be placed in storage). But might the contributors suggest just what be retained to give context for the discussion to be continued. Ancheta Wis 11:25, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
LOGICUS ASKS: Has anybody been breaching these important rules lately ? May we take non-response to this query to indicate they have not been ? I would much appreciate your reply to my reply to your previous comments as requested on your UserTalk page. Logicus 16:36, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Archiving discussion

A useful breakpoint for the archive for now would be the start of the recent discussion, initiated as I understand it by my comments that "This article really needs focus and improvement." To the extent that the earlier discussions may be relevant, they can be consulted in the archive as necessary.

I'll let this recommendation sit for comments for a while.

As I don't know how to set up an archive, if anyone does (Ancheta?), feel free to do so.

Like Ragesoss, I'm trying to get things done in my real life (see the Wikibreak note on my talk page). I proposed using the procedure outlined in the new Tendentious Editing guideline since it was developed as a fast and non-bureaucratic way to deal with problems like this. I don't have that much time to spend debating minutiae in the philosophy and history of science or acting as a prosecuting or defense attorney in a legal case. I'd like to get on with writing an article that reflects the best scholarship in the history of science. --SteveMcCluskey 14:31, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

LOGICUS COMMENTS: I agree with Steve's suggestion for an apposite Archiving breakpoint. As for his other many personal snotty remarks, I do not. Yet again he is in breach of Good Faith policy.Logicus 16:36, 27 September 2006 (UTC)