PHIL 0610 Philosophy and Science Handout #1
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PHIL 0610
Philosophy and Science
Handout #1
The Scientific Revolution
I. Our goal
Our goal in this part of the course is to investigate what science is. We want to figure out what exactly we mean by “science” . In particular,
- Where does science begin and end?
- What kinds of activities count as science?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of interconnected issues that make it difficult to state in advance precisely how we should answer these questions. The philosophers we will be studying offer different and often conflicting responses to these questions. But we have to start somewhere! So, let’s start with language. Let’s start with our word “science” .
II. The word “science”
Our English word “science” comes from the Latin word “scientia” . The Latin word “scientia” did not have the same meaning as our word “science” . “Scientia” roughly translates as “knowledge,” but it referred particularly to the results of logical demonstrations such as proofs within mathematics. During the period of the Scientific Revolution, fields that we now think of as part of science were classified as follows:
1. Natural Philosophy: physics, astronomy and other inquiries into the causes of things.
2. Natural History: botany, zoology and other descriptions of the contents of the world.
Over time, “science” came to refer to work that involved observation and experiment (rather than mathematical proofs). Scientific knowledge under this newer conception could be reliable without being provable or certain. This is a pretty recent development, though. The word “scientist” didn’t exist until the nineteenth century!
III. The Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that occurred in Europe between roughly 1550 and 1700, which resulted in the emergence of modern science. It is marked by significant developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry. There was a transformation in commonly held beliefs about nature.
i. Scholastic worldview
Prior to the Scientific Revolution, the Scholastic worldview was the dominant picture of the world. It was made up of a combination of Christianity and the ideas of Ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. It included the following ideas:
• A geocentric worldview: The Earth was viewed as a stationary sphere positioned at the center of the universe with the sun, moon, stars, and planets revolving around it.
• A classical view of elements: Everything on Earth was considered to be made up of mixtures of the four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
• Natural teleology: According to this way of thinking, natural things have a kind of purpose, end or goal (a “telos”). An acorn’s telos, for example, is to become an oak tree. That is its purpose and provides an explanation for events.
ii. Copernicus
In 1543, the Polish astronomer Copernicus (1473– 1543) published De Revolutionibus in which he proposed a heliocentric theory of the movement of the planets. The placement of the sun, moon and Earth in Copernicus’s system is roughly the same as our modern view, but the movements were more complicated. Copernicus thought that the motion of the planets was made up of complex compounds of circles rather than a single ellipse. Copernicus’s work was presented as a useful calculating tool rather than the literal truth.
iii. Galileo
Galileo (1564— 1642), using observation with telescopes, concluded that the Copernican system was literally true and not merely useful. He used mathematics and experiments to formulate a new science of motion that would explain the movement or dropped objects on a rotating planet. One reason the Copernican system had not been taken very seriously was that it seemed to conflict with ordinary experience. If Earth was moving, why did a dropped object land near the point at which it was dropped? Galileo’s system was able to explain answer this question.
Galileo was eventually forced to recant his claims about the Copernican system by the Roman Inquisition and lived under house arrest for the rest of his life.
iv. Kepler and Newton
Kepler (1571— 1630) proposed a model of the universe in which planets followed elliptical orbits around the sun. In 1687, Newton published his Principia which gave a unified mathematical treatment of the motion of the Earth and the planets.
v. The new worldview
By the end of the seventeenth century, the Scholastic worldview had been replaced. The dominant view at the conclusion of the Scientific Revolution included the following ideas:
• Copernicanism: A heliocentric picture of the universe.
• Mechanism: the view that the world is made up of tiny “corpuscules” of matter that interact only by local physical contact.
• Some version of a scientific method: The view that inquiries in science are most fruitfully pursued using a combination of mathematics and experimentation.
IV. Science?
The Scientific Revolution narrows the subject of our investigation. The kinds of inquiries we want to understand are the heirs to the kinds of investigation that developed during the Scientific Revolution. Developments during the Scientific Revolution led to extraordinary advances in chemistry (e.g., the periodic table of elements in the nineteenth century), biology (Darwin’s theory of evolution, theory of cells, and the germ theory of disease in the nineteenth century), and physics (e.g., theory of electromagnetism in the nineteenth century). By the turn of the nineteenth century, Newtonian physics, which was considered one of our clearest and most certain scientific achievements, was upended by Einstein’s theories of relativity. This upheaval in physics was an astonishing development for scientists and those who think about science. It is in the aftermath of this development that the first approach to science that we will examine arose: Logical Positivism.
V. Guide for the next reading: Ayer “The elimination of metaphysics”
In this paper, Ayer is attacking what he calls “metaphysics” . It is hard to quickly summarize what he means by that, but we can use his example to help. He describes one metaphysical thesis as the claim that philosophy gives us knowledge ‘of a reality that transcending the world of science and common sense’ (p.6). Ayer claims that some statements that (bad) philosophers make (i.e., the metaphysicians) are actual nonsense. These are the statements that aim at something supposedly more profound than those about our ordinary experience. Ayer proposes a criterion of meaningfulness to figure out what is sense and what is nonsense.
Reading question 2: What is the criterion of verifiability?
2023-02-18
The Scientific Revolution