The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Science Culture) - Hardcover

Dear, Peter Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226139484 ISBN 13: 9780226139487

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

<div>Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe. <br><br>In <i>The Intelligibility of Nature</i>, Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends&#8212;doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has&#160;survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. <br><br>Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science&#8212;mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory&#8212;Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.&#160;<br><br>Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, <i>The Intelligibility of Nature</i> will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike.</div>

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<div><div><b>Peter Dear</b> is professor of science and technology studies and history at Cornell University. He is the author of <i>Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500&#8211;1700</i> and <i>Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution</i>, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.</div></div>

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THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF NATURE

How Science Makes Sense of the WorldBy Peter Dear

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-13948-7

Contents

List of Illustrations.......................................................................ixAcknowledgments.............................................................................xiIntroduction: Science as Natural Philosophy, Science as Instrumentality.....................11. The Mechanical Universe from Galileo to Newton...........................................152. A Place for Everything: The Classification of the World..................................393. The Chemical Revolution Thwarted by Atoms................................................674. Design and Disorder: The Origin of Species...............................................915. Dynamical Explanation: The Aether and Victorian Machines.................................1156. How to Understand Nature? Einstein, Bohr, and the Quantum Universe.......................141Conclusion: Making Sense in Science.........................................................173Notes.......................................................................................197Bibliographical Essay.......................................................................207Index.......................................................................................235

Chapter One

The Mechanical Universe from Galileo to Newton

I. The World as a Machine

The seventeenth century is often described as the period in which the enterprise of modern science was born. The so-called Scientific Revolution, on this view, saw the birth in western Europe of many of the characteristic features of science as we know it today: intellectual, social, and institutional. But those latter two categories, the social and the institutional, probably owe their typical modern forms (especially the conduct of scientific research in universities) to precedents set in the nineteenth rather than the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, in the intellectual arena the importance of what happened in the seventeenth century is undeniable, because this period saw the emergence of one of the most dominant metaphors in subsequent science: the metaphor of the world as a machine.

There is nothing inevitable about seeing the world as a kind of machine. On the contrary, in cultures the world over, including most of earlier European history, the commonest way of seeing the natural world has been in terms of living organisms. In the learned culture of premodern Europe-the culture of universities and of books-the most influential version of this view derived from the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle based his approach to nature on the ways in which we tend to make sense of living processes around us. Plants and animals, as well as people, are born, grow, become old, and die. Aristotle found it natural to model his understanding of all processes in the world on these kinds of experiences. For him, therefore, behaviors in the natural world were made intelligible by understanding them as processes, directed towards a goal. An acorn sprouts, sets roots, and grows. Why? Because it is on its way to becoming an oak tree. A dog runs towards a piece of meat. Why? Because it wants to eat it. Purpose, goals, make sense of all kinds of processes in the world, just as they do in explaining the behavior of human beings, and for Aristotle these goals did not even have to rely on conscious intentions. The acorn growing towards becoming an oak tree is not conscious of an intention to do so; it just does it. But we still explain what happens in terms of how the process will usually (barring accidents) end up. This form of explanation is known in English as teleological, from the Greek word telos, meaning goal.

Teleology characterized all of Aristotle's universe. It even explained such things as why stones fall to the ground: they do so because they are seeking the center of the universe (where Aristotle located the earth itself ). This was the way in which the world of late medieval Europe, with Aristotelian philosophy entrenched in its universities, organized its natural philosophy and made sense of the world. Things and occurrences were intelligible when they could be understood in terms of processes that aimed at some purpose.

This was the natural philosophy that many educated Europeans in the seventeenth century rebelled against. The major names in philosophy and the sciences in that period, such as Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, began to criticize the idea that teleological explanations were appropriate for understanding nature, and advocated in their place explanations that privileged mechanical causation. The model would no longer be a growing organism, but a clock. By knowing the arrangement of the clock's component parts and the ways in which they pushed against each other, one could understand the characteristic movements displayed by the clock's hands. To explain the movements of the hands by reference to their purpose of displaying the right time seemed to be ridiculous. In fact, an Aristotelian philosopher would not have disagreed on that point. He would simply have regarded it as inappropriate to use a clock as the model for explaining natural phenomena. But for people like Descartes, even the growth of a plant was something to be understood in terms of inert matter in motion, analogous to clockwork.

The seventeenth-century conflict between Aristotelian philosophers and the new proponents of what was called the "mechanical philosophy" is an excellent example of radically differing views of scientific intelligibility in conflict. Each group (despite wide differences among individuals in the same camp) sought natural-philosophical understanding, but they could scarcely agree on what true understanding meant. For one group, explanations of natural phenomena in terms of mechanical interactions failed to make sense of the very processes supposedly being explained, whereas for the other group, explanations of natural phenomena in terms of teleology themselves failed to make sense. Were inanimate objects to be ascribed souls that could have desires and intentions? Aristotelians did not believe that nonliving things required souls or minds in order for their behaviors to be explained teleologically, but mechanists claimed not to understand how goal-directed behavior made any sense without them.

One of the clearest ways to see the difficulties faced by both sides is to look at how they criticized one another. The rules of engagement in this dispute were not set out clearly in advance, and the victory of one side or the other could not be determined to everyone's satisfaction by the application of formal logic. Furthermore, what was at issue had nothing to do with disagreements over what phenomena there were in the world to be explained; empirical investigation would not settle matters. In that sense, this was a fundamentally philosophical debate, and specifically a natural-philosophical one. It deeply concerned the nature of the universe, rather than resting on the affirmation or denial of controversial physical phenomena.

So a typical procedure in attacking a philosophical opponent in the seventeenth century was to ridicule him. Here is an example from one of the writings of Ren Descartes (1596-1650), one of the most influential of all the mechanical philosophers of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226139484
• ISBN 13: 9780226139487
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 242
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar