lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (02/02/84)
I recently browsed through, THE SOCIAL BASIS OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES, by Augustine Brannigan. I'm in sympathy with the sociological perspective on science, but I ran into trouble literally on page one with this author: Socrates spoke of the Protagorean concept of truth as the 'aithesis', the directly knowable world - we have translated this as 'sense perception'. Centuries later, Galileo again raised the spectre of 'sense perception'; he claimed that the senses were 'subjective', and hence were untrustworthy and unreliable. The true field of nature was something out of the ordinary, and consequently the scientists explored a quasi-physical or metaphysical realm to determine 'structure' of 'form' of the laws which underlay the directly percieved world. Common sense was no longer valid, and traditional thought about the world became the subject of studied scepticism. WOW! This is exactly the opposite of the way I think of Galileo's significance. Galileo championed "common sense" and despised metaphysics. He extended common sense by applying mathematical analysis to observations. Perhaps Brannigan is thinking of Galileo's remarks that 'truth is written in this great book the universe, and the language it is written in is mathematics' (paraphrased) But I think Galileo means the observable universe, not some hidden ideal. In DIALOGUES CONCERNING TWO NEW SCIENCES, Salviatti says, "Please observe, gentleman, how facts which at first seem obscure will, with a little reflection, stand forth in naked and simple beauty." (again paraphrased) The significant point here is that the facts to which he is referring are utterly prosaic. He is discussing scaling and the beauty consists in the ordering of simple facts into a comprehensible pattern. I don't see how anyone who reads Galileo's dialogues can come away thinking that he is retreating from the world of common sense into a "quasi-physical or metaphysical realm". Well, I'm a dilettante at best in this area, so I wonder if anyone with a little more background would care to comment. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew
colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (George Sicherman) (02/05/84)
Doesn't common sense tell you that heavy objects fall faster than light ones? As the "naive physics" school of A.I. points out, many physical truths are counterintuitive. What Galileo was saying is that you can learn [and unlearn, I might add] a lot about the physical world from a well-designed experiment. Col. G. L. Sicherman ...seismo!rochester!rocksvax!sunybcs!colonel