CHAPTER FIVE
The Scientific Revolution
History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.
—Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1996, p. 1)
Having studied the basics of philosophy, we now turn to the other part of our study: science. As with philosophy, among the general public many misconceptions exist regarding the meaning of science. And even many scholars who study science do not wholly agree on what science is and means. So it is similarly valuable to begin with an exploration of what science is. In this chapter, we identify the Scientific Revolution, a period of time roughly from the 16th to 17th centuries in which radical new developments and changes regarding the study of the natural world occurred as central to understanding what science is. So in studying what science is, we first change the question a little.
WHAT IS SCIENCE? HOW ABOUT WHEN IS SCIENCE?
When “science” actually began is itself a question of some historical and philosophical significance and debate. One view, sometimes called the continuist view, holds that science has developed over millennia stretching back to ancient Greece. Continuists look to the earliest Western philosophers in the sixth century BCE as the beginning of science (Lindberg, 2007). Thales (ca. 624–546 BCE), who is traditionally identified as the first Western philosopher, was interested in the question of the basic structure of the universe. He theorized that everything was in fact a form of water. As unusual as that claim may sound to our ears, the basic concept is common in theoretical physics today. Theoretical physicists search for that (particle, energy, etc.) which is most basic, that composes everything else, that all else can be explained through. The philosophers who followed Thales (often called pre-Socratic philosophers) pursued much the same question while reaching different answers. Anaximenes (ca. 585–525 BCE) argued that the most basic element, of which all else was made, was air. He explained that air took different shapes and forms due to the relative contraction and expansion of the particles of air. Heraclitus (535–475 BCE) maintained that fire was most basic, though his meaning was largely metaphoric, expressing the view that the universe was at one and the same time stable and constantly changing as fire itself is. The philosophers Leucippus (500–450 BCE) and Democritus (460–370 BCE) composed in part an ancient school of philosophy known as atomism, which held that everything was composed of tiny, irreducible bits of matter called atoms (a word that means, literally, indivisible). Although we still use the word atom today, our concept is very different from that of the Greek atomists. By far the most “scientific” of the philosophers of the ancient world was Aristotle (384–322 BCE). His famous teacher, Plato (428–347 BCE), was much more interested in ideal metaphysical worlds, and Plato’s teacher, Socrates (460–399 BCE), was more interested in morality and the human soul. Aristotle studied and categorized plants and animals, theorized on the motion of matter, and composed the original laws of logic from which warranted knowledge could be drawn. Aristotle’s physical laws dominated the study of the natural world until superseded by the mechanistic physics of Newton 2000 years later. His zoological and botanical categories structured the biological sciences until Darwin revolutionized that field in the 19th century. His logical system defined logic until the development of propositional logic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).
An opposing view, a discontinuist view, identifies science as a modern development part of a larger cultural movement called the Enlightenment (Lindberg, 2007). In this view, “science” marks a change from the past, from ways of thinking identified with the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The Enlightenment itself is typically identified as marking a conceptual and cultural change. Most historical eras are named later by historians looking back. The Enlightenment is rare in that it is a historical era that named itself. If you think about it, that seems to reveal a bit of hubris. The implication is that we are “enlightened.” Those in the past were merely living in darkness and ignorance. As amusing or half-joking as that characterization may seem to be, there is more than a hint of truth to it. The Enlightenment is traditionally understood as a time in which old ways of thinking are shed. Tradition, ritual, superstition, and even religion to an extent are rejected as standards or guarantors of knowledge. Instead, the Enlightenment view advocates rationality, empirical observation, and personal autonomy and judgment in asserting and certifying knowledge claims. Whether one accepts the continuist or the discontinuist view, the Enlightenment marks an important moment in the development of human society and knowledge in the West. Under the continuist view, the advancements in science were especially productive during this period. Under the discontinuist view, the Enlightenment brought a Scientific Revolution that fundamentally changed the way in which we understand the world, the way in which we look at and investigate the world. One possible way around this conflict is to refer to the science that followed the Scientific Revolution as “modern science.” From either perspective, the Scientific Revolution seems an important era in understanding the nature and development of what we know as science today.
MODERN SCIENCE
Temporally speaking, the term Scientific Revolution refers primarily to the 17th century, although some proto-revolutionary events can be identified in the 16th century and many of the changes did not fully coalesce until the 18th or even 19th century. Even people of this period noted a radical difference or even break in thought, as indicated by the use of the word new in the titles of many works: Francis Bacon’s New Organon (1620), Johannes Kepler’s A New Astronomy (1609), and Galileo Galilei’s Two New Sciences (1638). It may also be worth noting that the word science was not coined until the 19th century. So from a linguistic point of view, there was no such thing as science until the 1800s, until well into this new way of thinking. Prior to this coinage, much of what we would call “science” today was called natural philosophy. Also, much of what we would call science today (specific fields such as demography, statistics, information science, etc.) did not exist at all.
To see the causes of the Scientific Revolution, we must look to the wider cultural changes that took place during the Renaissance (roughly 14th–16th centuries). The Renaissance was a period of great geographic discovery made possible by the invention of the magnetic compass. Two other influential inventions of this period were gunpowder and the movable-type printing press (Henry, 2002). These technological advances influenced the religious changes of the Reformation and changes in economic and political structures—the development from feudalism and aristocracy to a burgeoning of capitalism and democracy. These cultural changes together can be seen as establishing an increasing sense of personal and social identity, which led intellectuals to an increasing concern with history and interest in locating oneself as an intellectual heir to ancient Rome and Greece. Thus, the Renaissance “man” was working “his” way out of the overarching rule of the Church and the self-effacement and self-renunciation of a strict Christian worldview. The intellectual side of this working out manifested itself in the development of what was called studia humanitas, a group of studies that, influenced by the long-neglected Greeks and Romans, concentrated on the achievements and potentialities of mankind (Henry, 2002). Humanists, as these new intellectuals came to be called, emphasized the importance of the active life lived for the public good, which they held as superior to the contemplative life, indicative of the outlook of the Scholastics—the leading school of thought of the late Middle Ages. The Scholastics (or Schoolmen as they were sometimes also called) also expressed an almost religious devotion to the work of Aristotle. The Humanists questioned the authority of Aristotle and recognized the importance and contributions of other Greek philosophers. This questioning of Aristotle and recognition of other ancient intellects led further to a renewed interest in mathematics and magic (Henry, 2002). And authority as a form of knowledge came to be seen as misleading and unreliable, leading to an increasing emphasis on discovering truth for oneself. A dramatic example of this questioning authority and thinking for oneself is when physician Paracelsus (1493–1541)—sometimes referred to as the Copernicus of medicine—threw Avicenna’s Canon (the accepted book of medicine of the time) into the fire to protest the unquestioned acceptance of this book. A broader example would be the Reformation. What Martin Luther championed was individual and direct relationships to God, as opposed to the model of the Catholic Church in which one’s relationship to God was mediated by the hierarchical structure of the Church (Davis & Winship, 2002). In Luther’s view of Christianity, every person is an authority on religion, not just priests and above. This idea is reflected in the early Protestant encouragement of “regular people” to read the Bible.
Although the Reformation was a questioning of the Church, religion was not critically questioned much itself. Rather, the view of religion expanded in many ways to include more often a consideration of this world. It became common, for example, to refer to nature as “God’s other book.” This is a notion clearly similar to the view of nature held in the Scientific Revolution and in the Enlightenment in general. Copernicus, Newton, Galileo, and most other great intellects of the Scientific Revolution saw science as almost a divine study, in that in studying the universe one may commune with God’s creation and even come closer to God. These changes ultimately set the stage for the development of a new experiential or empiricist approach to the understanding of the physical world.
The development and establishment of what is usually taken to be the characteristic methodology of science (the scientific method) has always been regarded as constitutive of the Scientific Revolution. The two main elements of this scientific method are the use of mathematics and measurement to give precise determinations of how the world and its parts work, and the use of observation, experience, and, where necessary, artificially constructed experiments to gain understanding of nature.
MATHEMATIZATION
The mathematization of nature indicates a fundamental change in all concepts of the physical world, introducing a Platonic or Pythagorean way of looking at the world, replacing the Aristotelian metaphysics of medieval natural philosophy. Certainly, the medieval world knew of and studied mathematics. However, the conception of mathematics in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance was one that saw mathematics as an isolated, insular study. This mathematical view is now known as instrumentalism: mathematics is an interesting study of its own, but it has no connection or relation to the real world or anything deeper and more significant. The Scientific Revolution developed a “realist” view of mathematics in which it is believed that mathematical analysis reveals deeper truths about the world. If a calculation works, it must work because the broader theory from which it springs must also be true and reflects a truth about the world. This realist view can be seen in the work of Copernicus. No matter how contrary to natural philosophy the motion of the earth around the sun (rather than the reverse) may seem, Copernicus insisted, it must be true because the mathematics demands it. This was revolutionary. Johannes Kepler too assumed a connection between mathematics and reality in his discovery that the orbits of the planets comprised ellipses, not circles. No one could directly observe the orbits of the planets. It had been accepted since the time of Aristotle that the planets moved in circular orbits, as the circle was considered the most perfect and divine two-dimensional shape. The Scholatics accepted this claim and its “reasoning” from Aristotle without question. Kepler saw that the claim did not fit the numbers and reached the (still accepted) elliptical conclusion that did fit the numbers. René Descartes, in his Discourse on Method (1637), developed a new metaphysics that provided the basis of a new, more mathematical system of physics. Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) can be seen as the culminating point in the mathematization of the world picture. It was even believed by some scientists of the time that a mathematical view, given its precision, rigor, and possible mirroring of nature, “could also improve works on politics, morals, literary criticism, even public speaking” (Hankins, 1985, p. 2).
EXPERIMENTATION
One of the characterizing features of the Scientific Revolution is the replacement of the self-evident “experience,” which formed the basis of scholastic natural philosophy, with a notion of knowledge demonstrated by experiments specifically designed for the purpose. This new approach to observation emphasized measurement and quantification. Previous natural philosophy, influenced by an Aristotelian worldview, was concerned with qualities rather than quantities. For example, the nature of specific things was determined in part by their “natural” location in space. Those things naturally of the earth were qualitatively different from celestial bodies (planets, stars, etc.) or even those things naturally existing in the sky (clouds, atmosphere, etc.). The Scientific Revolution emphasized, rather, quantities: Objects are defined by the many ways in which they can be objectively measured. Qualitative descriptions came to be seen as subjective and unreliable from an epistemological and scientific point of view. This emphasis on measurement moved forward the integration of observation and mathematics in science and led to the invention of more precise and sophisticated instruments for objective, mathematical observation in the 16th and 17th centuries: the telescope, the microscope, the barometer, the air pump, and the thermometer.
It may sound strange to contemporary ears but alchemy and magic both had significant influences on the development of experimentation in modern science. Bear in mind that alchemy (largely concerned with the attempt to transform baser metals into gold) had always been experimental in nature. The underlying assumptions many alchemists were working with may have been mistaken and even unfounded, but their methodology was always experimental. As for magic, what magic means in this context is not merely supernatural but also refers to aspects of nature. The medieval and Renaissance understanding of the term magic was the study of occult forces. Again, occult is a term that in modern usage has taken on merely supernatural meanings, but what “occult” referred to in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was the power of natural things to move or affect other natural things at a distance. The most obvious example of this is magnetism. A magnet can draw metal to itself and cause it to move without appearing to touch it. Based on the belief that certain things have hidden, occult powers, natural magicians needed knowledge of physical bodies and how they act on one another. During the Scientific Revolution, the naturalistic elements of magic were separated from other aspects of magic. Our understanding of magic today is what is left over with those naturalistic aspects removed. For us magic deals with the supernatural. For natural magicians only God could bring about supernatural events. The natural elements of magic were absorbed into natural philosophy. The use of magic to affect the natural world also closely connected magic to technology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
In the most general terms, the Scientific Revolution introduced a completely different worldview, replacing a medieval/Renaissance teleological world with a modern mechanistic world. The medieval worldview, again influenced by Aristotle, was one in which (a) space is differentiated; (b) all natural objects have animate qualities; and (c) phenomena are explained in relation to purposes, ends, or goals (telic). The idea that space is differentiated has been referred to earlier. Those things naturally of the earth are qualitatively and essentially different from those things of the air or of the heavens. Following this differentiation of space is the attribution of seemingly animate qualities to natural objects. The reason solid objects fall to the earth is that they have in them a “desire” (what Aristotle called entelechy, literally “to have one’s end within”) to be in their natural place. The natural place for solid (earth-bound or earth-based) objects is the earth, the center of the universe. Smoke and steam dissipate in air because that is what their entelechy draws them to do, to be with air itself. Flames flicker to the sky because they wish to be with the fire in the heavens. Even two drops of water brought near each other will reach out to one another. The general physical principle here is “like attracts like.” Finally, then, movement is explained in this worldview in terms of ends or purposes, what is called a teleological view from the Greek telos for end, purpose, or goal. Things act to achieve goals. Heavy objects fall to achieve their end of reclaiming their natural place on the earth. The same can be said from the aforementioned regarding the movement of smoke, steam, fire, and water.
The modern worldview, however, is oriented around a mechanical philosophy, not an animate and teleological one. Phenomena are explained in terms of the mathematical discipline of mechanics: shape, size, quantity, and motion. Events (the actions and movements of physical objects) are explained in terms of physical causes through contact with other physical objects. Thus, occult properties (magnetism, light, and gravity) would similarly have to be explained by mechanical principles: the motion and interaction of particles too small to be seen. This leads to another claim of mechanical philosophy: material bodies are composed of invisibly small atoms or corpuscles. The mechanical philosophy of Descartes was the most influential. He defined matter solely in terms of extension (i.e., matter is defined merely as that which extends in, or takes up, space), allowing him to claim that physics could be based on geometrical analysis of extended bodies in motion. He thus relates the whole of the material world to one of his most well-known mathematical creations: analytic geometry. This extreme emphasis on mathematics, though, also reveals a more rationalist than empiricist orientation in his thinking. Descartes’s system was based less on empirical experiment than on the mathematical certainty of an axiomatic structure with supposedly indubitable foundations and careful deduction of phenomena from these foundations. Rather than careful, mathematically precise observation, Cartesian “experiment” tended to look like a report of what must happen, assuming that Descartes’s reasoning is correct.
Mechanical philosophy in England was much more empirically based, as can be seen in the work of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. Mechanical philosophy in England also differed from that on the continent by commonly attributing active powers to particles of matter, whereas Descartes and other philosophers of the continent tended to view matter as completely inert. In the view of Descartes, the only active agents were non-material minds or souls, which acted on inert matter. But in England it was widely believed that particles of matter may be endowed with active principles, which might account for occult phenomena such as magnetism, gravity, and chemical properties, but which could still be dealt with in natural philosophy by means of experimental demonstration. Mechanical philosophy in its widest sense viewed the universe as a giant clock, which worked in a regular, fixed manner due to its organized mechanical structure. But this mechanistic view was thoroughgoing and worked down to other levels of study including the vital processes of living creatures (e.g., the nervous system, respiration, and circulation), leading to a new concept of living creatures as bêtes-machines, which would always act in accordance with the laws of mechanics.
RELIGION, CULTURE, AND POLITICS
It is common today to see religion and science as in conflict. During the Scientific Revolution, there was some conflict but the two were not always in conflict. Certainly, the most well-known conflict between religion and science was the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Copernicans and Galileo. The actual history of the Church’s attitude toward Copernicans and the Church’s dealings with and relationship with Galileo is quite complex and cannot be simply reduced to an issue of knowledge versus ignorance (Blackwell, 2002). One of the major goals and motivations of early modern scientists (including Keller, Gassed, Newton, Boyle, and Descartes) was to show how God interacted with the mechanical world (Osler, 2002). Some saw the universe as a huge clock and God as the clockmaker. Thus, studying science became a means of studying God’s creation and by extension coming closer to God. Some even tried to use their studies to defeat atheism, leading to the rise of natural theology and deism: a rational approach to religion and spirituality that saw (detached) God in the beautiful order and regularity of the universe.
The Scientific Revolution coincided with the beginnings of modern capitalism. Therefore, it seems impossible to dismiss the economic factors that played an important role in the rise of science. Some also argue that some important political developments were influenced by both the evolving method of doing science and new scientific beliefs (Henry, 2002). New political arrangements had to be justified in terms of the arrangement of nature if they were to be seen as natural and feasible. This emphasis on nature can be seen in the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others. Hobbes’s major political work, Leviathan, makes a biological metaphor to build a theory of the state. More explicitly, political philosopher James Harrington’s (1611–1677) Oceana drew heavily on William Harvey’s (1578–1657) discoveries of the functioning of the heart and the circulatory system to construct his view of the proper political state—justified largely because of its mirroring of human physiology (Cohen, 1994).
