Skip to main content

A "Copernican Revolution" revolution

Some view Copernicus' theory as the paradigmatic example of the replacement of the common sense understanding of nature with a science-based understanding.  They need to consider what really happened:  Copernicus gave a new, heliocentric description to the movement of the sun and planets across the sky;  later, Newton offered an explanation of that movement, replacing an Aristotelian/Ptolemaic understanding of the spheres with the Newtonian understanding of force and momentum.  Both the older and the newer description of the movement of these bodies presuppose the veracity of our perception, and both the older and the newer explanations of these movements presuppose the veracity of our common sense notion of causality (even Galilean relativity is a matter of common sense -- for anyone who has ridden in a vehicle).  Common sense is not utterly overturned by science: rather, common sense serves as the basis for explanation.  When there is a correction of one common sense interpretation, it is always on the basis of other common sense convictions, and it is always with the goal of discovering how reality itself, as accessed through both our common sense and scientific convictions, forms coherent whole.

Inseparable from our common sense convictions is our awareness of our own activity and passivity in the world.  Hence one who treats our common sense beliefs about ourselves as just another theory (i.e., as folk psychology) renders his own theory vacuous, for without a genuine acquaintance with our own causality we are left with no acquaintance with any causality at all.  One who supposes that so-called folk psychology can be replaced with another theory render his own philosophy of science incoherent.  He is climbing a ladder and then kicking it out from beneath himself.

Without human agency there is no scientist.  One cannot get rid of the scientist without getting rid of science itself.

Comments

Tim D said…
Good point. "The Copernican principle" in some contexts has come to mean that humanity is not noticeably different from anything else. Whereas the premise of science from the Renaissance onwards has been - there is a order behind the universe, mediated through the language of symbols we can understand.

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....