Reasoning patterns found in Galileo’s treatise on machines, On Mechanics, are compared with patterns identified in case studies of scientifically trained experts thinking aloud, and many similarities are found. At one level the primary patterns identified are ordered analogy sequences and special diagrammatic techniques to support them. At a deeper level I develop constructs to describe patterns that can support embodied, imagistic, mental simulations as a central underlying process. Additionally, a larger hypothesized pattern of ‘progressive imagistic generalization’—Galileo’s development of a (...) model or mechanism that becomes more and more general with each machine while still being imagistically projectable into many machines—provides a way to think about his progress toward a modern explanatory model of torque. By unpacking his arguments, we gain an appreciation of his skillful ability to foster imagistic processes underlying scientific thinking. (shrink)

Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. It is opposed to an externalist explanatory strategy, which takes its departure from observations about external function and mind-environment interactions, and infers and rationalizes internal organismic structure from that. This paper addresses the origins of truth, a basic ingredient in the human conceptual scheme. I suggest (...) the necessity of pursuing an internalist line of explanation for it, as adopted in the biolinguistic program and generative grammar at large. According to this view, the concept of truth is a presupposition for the way language is used in relation to the world, rather than a function of that use or a consequence of language-world relations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to take Galileo's mathematization of nature as a springboard for contrasting the time-honoured empiricist conception of phenomena, exemplified by Pierre Duhem's analysis in To Save the Phenomena , with Immanuel Kant's. Hence the purpose of this paper is twofold. I) On the philosophical side, I want to draw attention to Kant's more robust conception of phenomena compared to the one we have inherited from Duhem and contemporary empiricism. II) On the historical side, I want (...) to show what particular aspects of Galileo's mathematization of nature find a counterpart in Kant's conception of phenomena.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------. (shrink)

We argue that Isaac Newton really is best understood as being in the tradition of the Mechanical Philosophy and, further, that Newton saw himself as being in this tradition. But the tradition as Newton understands it is not that of Robert Boyle and many others, for whom the Mechanical Philosophy was defined by contact action and a corpuscularean theory of matter. Instead, as we argue in this paper, Newton interpreted and extended the Mechanical Philosophy's slogan “matter and motion” in reference (...) to the long and distinguished tradition of mixed mathematics and the study of simple machines. (shrink)

Understanding and explanation are usually considered in the context of continental philosophy in Ukraine, based on Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between understanding and explanation as the opposite methods for humanities and natural science respectively as well as relying heavily on hermeneutical philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer when it comes to understanding. However, this is not an exclusive feature of continental philosophy, and this article aims to show that the terms are actively used in English-speaking philosophy. This is done by (...) focusing on philosophy of history and philosophy of science which are the areas that actively use such terms. Considering the number of works within these areas helps to outline the general situation in the English-speaking philosophy and demonstrates that the opposition of explanation and understanding is quite artificial now. The first part of the article regards the two-sidedness of the English-speaking philosophy of history, which means that history seeks to be both science and art. The second part of the article analyses understanding and explanation as they are used in philosophy of science. Particularly, it has been shown that such a classic of analytical philosophy as Georg von Wright considered understanding of the humanities to be a continuation of a teleological explanation as well as explanation within natural science to be a different type of explanation: a causal one. It is also shown that a contemporary researcher Kareem Khalifa introduces an important term ‘explanatory understanding’ which appears in the case of a correct scientific explanation within natural science. Based on the materials involved, the author of the article demonstrates that both areas of contemporary English-language philosophy view explanation and understanding not as antipodes but as co-dependent notions.Manuscript received 10.08.2020. (shrink)

Many prominent arguments for epistemic relativism take their departure from the observation that a certain kind of epistemic symmetry is present in particular empirical cases. In this paper, we seek to attain further clarity about the kind of symmetry at issue, and the sort of relativism to which such symmetry can reasonably be taken to give rise. The need for such an investigation is made apparent, we believe, by the fact that prominent anti-relativist arguments such as that advanced by Boghossian (...) in his influential book Fear of Knowledge (2006) yield distorted pictures of the matter. Following Boghossian, we present our argument through a detailed consideration of the dispute between Bellarmine and Galileo concerning heliocentrism. Contrary to what Boghossian claims, the relevant sort of symmetry does not concern a difference in fundamental epistemic principles between Bellarmine and Galileo, but rather a much more localized difference in procedures for adjudication between shared principles in the novel epistemic circumstances generated by Galileo's telescopic observations. Bellarmine and Galileo advance fundamentally different procedures of adjudication that are nevertheless equally rational. The upshot is not so much the denial that there are absolute epistemic facts as such, as Boghossian thinks, but rather the denial that there is an absolute fact of the matter as to which was the most rational way to proceed: Bellarmine's or Galileo's. What this gives us, is the denial that there is a certain kind of absolute epistemic fact. (shrink)

Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accounts work with unreasonably high levels (...) of idealization. We defend two claims. First, philosophical discussions of disagreement need to be de-idealized. Second, once a less idealized account of disagreement is available, both our conception of judgement and our understanding of relativism need to be revised. Our example is a case study in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump. This case study gives a less idealized account of disagreement that conceptualizes judgements as situated. We argue that this conception can and should be applied to cases of gustatory and epistemic disagreement. The payoff will be a reformulation of relativism in terms of rationally resolvable yet contingent disagreements. (shrink)

Don Ihde has recently launched a sweeping attack against Husserl’s late philosophy of science. Ihde takes particular exception to Husserl’s portrayal of Galileo and to the results Husserl draws from his understanding of Galilean science. Ihde’s main point is that Husserl paints an overly intellectualistic picture of the “father of modern science”, neglecting Galileo’s engagement with scientific instruments such as, most notably, the telescope. According to Ihde, this omission is not merely a historiographical shortcoming. On Ihde’s view, it is only (...) on the basis of a distorted picture of Galileo that Husserl can “create“ the division between Lifeworld and the “world of science“, a division that is indeed fundamental for Husserl’s overall position. Hence, if successful, Ihde’s argument effectively undermines Husserl’s late philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to show that Ihde’s criticism does not stand up to closer historical or philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyré 1957 , From the closed world to the infinite universe , 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was (...) a deliberate project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums. These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder, and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions: for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy, capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature’s and artificial mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice. (shrink)