Talk:Scientific revolution
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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.
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.