Newton's God

The following three claims from the General Scholium of Newton's Principia have never made sense to me:

God "is not duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures forever, and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space. ... He is utterly void of all body and bodily figure."

What I cannot understand is how anything could exist always and everywhere, yet be neither body nor space nor time. Is there some further option for Newton? (Additionally, what does it mean that God 'constitutes' space and time?)

One of my students cleverly noted that Newton introduced the notion of a mutually attactive force between every two bodies in the universe; perhaps this can serve as an analogy for a Newton's God, giving me the 'further option' I'm hoping for -- since such a force is neither body nor space nor time? Unfortunately, in that same Scholium, we find an important disanalogy between the universal attractive force and God:
"In him are all things contained and moved, yet neither affects the other: God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance from the omnipresence of God."
Presumably, any supposed force that affects nothing at all is not a force at all.

Are there any other possibilities for helping Newton out?

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p.s. I found the following attempt to save Newton, from my old teacher Ted McGuire, in his "Existence, Actuality and Necessity: Newton on Space and Time," Annals of Science 1978 (how did people do research before the internets?):
"We can plausibly reconstruct the following argument. To say that God is everywhere with respect to space, is to say that one and the same individual exists at each place in extended space. To make such a claim is a contradiction only with respect to the manner in which extended things exist spatially. For they cannot as complete beings exist at once in each "part" of the place they occupy. But there is no contradiction in holding that an essentially non-extended being is capable of so existing. ... God is therefore omnipresent just in the sense that he remains numerically and unalterably the same individual at all places whatsoever. The conception appears paradoxical. However, Newton would claim that it only seems so, if we persist in imagining God's presence in space as we think of bodies individually occupying their determinate places." (p. 506)

But we can't allow ourselves the premise that Newton's God is "an essentially non-extended being," since in the General Scholium, Newton (apparently) says exactly the opposite. (Ted is right that Newton's God is incorporeal, but that isn't the same as non-extended -- think of Newton's absolute space.)

Newton and Wittgenstein -- long lost cousins?

As I was preparing for my History of Scientific Thought class tomorrow, I noticed the following line in Newton's Principia: "the meaning of words is to be determined by their use." (It's in the 14th paragraph of the Scholium to the Definitions, if anyone cares.) This is a revolution in Wittgenstein historiography! We obviously need to re-write all the history textbooks: Wittgenstein should no longer be seen as making a radical break with tradition, but rather advocating a return to orthodox Newtonianism...

But seriously: does anyone else know of other clean expressions of the Wittgensteinian 'meaning is use' slogan in the centuries before Wittgenstein?

Intelligibility in 17th and 20th century scientific philosophy

Should scientific theories be understandable -- or at least, aim at understandability? Of course, the term 'understandable' is vague and/or ambiguous, perhaps so much so that this question is some combination of pointless and unanswerable. But let's suppose the concept of understandability (or, equivalently, intelligibility) is sufficiently determinate.

One might think that understandability is not a standard on scientific claims. Sure, it's nice when we can have it; but as certain physicists say, 'Nobody really understands quantum mechanics.' On this view, evidence can justify a theory to a sufficient degree to motivate acceptance of that theory, even if that theory is (in some sense) not completely intelligible.

I don't know what the answer to this question is. But I was recently struck by a similarity between the mechanical philosophers of the middle 17th C and the logical empiricists of the early 20th C. In The World, Descartes says he will describe a universe that only has properties that everyone, even the dense, can fully understand (viz., the shape, size and motion of matter). In "On the Grounds and Excellency of the Mechanical Hypothesis," Robert Boyle claims that one of the advantages of the mechanical philosophy over that of the Peripatetics and the Paracelsian chemists is that the mechanical philosophy only uses terms understood clearly by everybody. The idea is that the word 'cube' will call up the same idea for everyone, whereas 'substantial form' (Peripatetics) or 'active principle' (Chemists) will not. Just about everyone can agree on whether a particular thing is cubical or not -- we will enjoy less agreement about whether a particular substance contains an active principle or not... or about what an active principle is, exactly.

What I now recognize is that certain aspects of logical empiricism have very much the same spirit. For Carnap, Neurath, and other logical empiricists, one of the primary aims of the language reforms they proposed was to guarantee the intelligibility or understandability of sentences that aim to state facts. Neurath proposed the adoption of a 'Universal Jargon' that was supposed to be a refinement of everyday language; Carnap proposed various types of languages at various points in his career -- the language of sense perception was the most fully developed in the Aufbau, and the language of middle-sized dry goods was preferred after that. Why these languages? Because, in each case, such sentences were supposed to be the most paradigmatically or obviously meaningful sentences; if (e.g.) everyday language is not meaningful, then nothing is. Furthermore, these sentences mean the same thing (or close) to all competant speakers; Philipp Frank, for instance, embraced such language-reform projects in order to counteract the Tower of Babel-esque proliferation of jargons in various scientific sub-disciplines.

I think further parallels between the 17th and early 20th C philosophers can be tied into this issue: both groups want to unify science (though in different ways, I think) and to eliminate the excessive metaphysical speculations of their respective times. I think the impetus toward intelligibility, in both cases, drives (at least in part) these other programs.

Descartes on colors and shapes

As is well known, Descartes argues that the sensation of white in our minds when we look at snow does not resemble whatever it is in the snow that produces this sensation in us. (He puts this point in different ways in different places; e.g., sometimes he says that our sensory awareness of whiteness leaves us "wholly ignorant" of what the snow is like (Principles of Philosophy, I.68).) The same holds for many other sensory qualities: the pain we feel when we put our finger in the fire does not resemble anything in the fire, the sweet scent we have of honey does not resemble anything in honey, and so on.

But what about my sensory awareness of the shape of a snowball, a fireplace, or a honey jar? In these cases, Descartes takes a different line: "We know size, shape, and so forth in quite a different way from the way in which we know colors, pains and the like" (PP, I.69). What is this difference? Descartes writes: "there are many features, such as size, shape, and number which we clearly perceive to be actually or at least possibly present in the in objects in a way exactly corresponding to our sensory perception or understanding" (PP, I.70).

So the obvious question here is: what makes our sensory perception of shape different from our sensory perception of color, so that the former but not the latter can 'correspond to' or resemble the thing represented? Descartes' argument in the final quotation above strikes me as weak. Descartes says that we clearly perceive that our sensory perceptions of shapes either (i) actually resemble or (ii) possibly resemble something in the objects themselves. Regarding (i), I strongly doubt that we can clearly and distinctly perceive anything about the relationship between the ideas in our minds and the objects outside of us -- we would need to be able to 'step outside of our minds,' as it were, to survey and compare both the contents of our minds and objects as they really are. And if we take (ii), then it at least seems possible to me that my sensory awareness of white resembles some property in the object itself. Of course, that would be a fortunate coincidence, but coincidences are not impossible. (Perhaps Descartes' notion of possibility rules out more than our modern one(s)?)

So, is there a way to save Descartes' position that our sensory perceptions of shapes can/do resemble something in the objects themselves, whereas our sensor perceptions of colors can/ do not? Perhaps the piece of wax section in Meditation 2 could be of some help here?

Update: I had forgotten that this very problem also arises, perhaps more expiciltly, in Locke's Essay: Locke says that our ideas of primary qualities (shape, mobility, solidity, extension, and number) really do "resemble" their causes in the objects that we perceive (II.viii.15). And perhaps because this claim is more front-and-center in Locke than Descartes, commentators on the Essay from Berkeley through today have had difficulty making good sense of this claim. Berkeley brings out the problem clearly: is the idea square in my mind actually square-shaped? Is my idea of motion itself moving?

Osiander and Anti-realism

This is another post from the frontlines of the class I'm teaching on Early modern philosophy and the scientific revolution. For those who haven't ever looked at Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the book's first preface is written by a man named Andreas Osiander (though this preface was left unsigned in the original work).

In this preface, Osiander advocates for (what today would be called) an anti-realist conception of astronomy: the aim of astronomy is not to arrive at "true or even probable hypotheses," but rather to construct a mathematical model that will generate accurate predictions of the observed apparent locations of the celestial bodies.*

Osiander has come in for a lot of criticism, both from his contemporaries (like Rheticus, who entrusted the publication of Copernicus's book to him) as well as current commentators. However, I think the justifications Osiander offers for his view that we should not take astronomical models as literally true are not crazy. First, he notes that, if Ptolemy's model is correct, Venus's apparent size in the sky should change a great deal more than it actually does. That is obviously an empirical argument that Ptolemaic models do not reveal the true structure of the cosmos -- even though these models do make accurate predications about the location of Venus in the nighttime sky. Second, Osiander claims that there are genuine incompatible theories that both account equally well for the phenomena: he asserts that the Sun's observed motion can be modelled using an eccentric circle as basis or using an epicycle. (Unfortunately, I don't know anything about the details of this example.) If this is a genuine example of inconsistent but observationally equivalent theories, then Osiander has as good an argument against interpreting astronomical theories as literally (approximately) true as any argument given by an anti-realist motivated by underdetermination arguments.

Finally, note that these reasons for anti-realism are specific to astronomy. Thus we should not take Osiander to be advocating a general anti-realism towards all of science. To borrow the terminology of Magnus and Callander's recent "Realist Ennui" paper in Philosophy of Science, Osiander is not offering a "wholesale" argument for anti-realism, but a "retail" one, i.e., one specific to our pretensions to knowledge of the true physical structure of the universe.

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* Tagging Osiander with various forms of anti-realism has been contested; see Barker and Goldstein's 1998 "Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal," in Perspectives on Science. They do agree, however, that Osiander considers knowledge of the true physical characteristics of the cosmos to be forever beyond human reach -- which strikes me as something a modern anti-realist might say. They also make the last point in the above post -- Osiander's skepticism is restricted to astronomy.

Astrology, Astronomy, and the Scientific Revolution

One of the large-scale questions in academic discussions of the Scientfic Revolution concerns the relationship of the developments we today consider scientific to traditions we today consider pseudo-scientific or mystical, e.g. alchemy, astrology, and magic. People who make pronouncements like "There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution" often justify such a claim by identifying and stressing continuities between mystical/ magical traditions and various new ideas that we now deem 'scientific.'

It is undeniable that significant continuities and similarities exist between pre-revolutionary views of nature and later ones. But I have often had the gut feeling that people sometimes overstate the case. Here is one example, from a brilliant historian of science, Allen Debus:

Some of the scholars, whose work contributed to our modern scientific age, found magic, alchemy, and astrology no less stimulating than the new interests in mathematical abstraction, observation, and experiment. Today we find it easy -- and necessary -- to separate "science" from occult interests, but many could not. (Man and Nature in the Renaissance)

This seemed overblown to me, because from Ptolemy up through Renaissance astrologer-astronomers such as Girolamo Cardano, the distinction between astrology and astronomy is explicitly drawn, and the historical figure often argues for the location of the boundary. So Debus's claim that students of nature during the Scientific Revolution 'could not separate science from occult interests' struck me as demonstrably false -- they could, and they did (at least in the case where the science is astronomy and the occult field is astrology).

But, as I have been working on my Magic, Medicine, and Science class (discussed last post), I've started thinking that there is something very right about Debus's idea, even if I would not couch the matter exactly as he does. What struck me is that, in the Ptolemy-Cardano scheme, astrology is classified as part of physics (in the Aristotelian sense, i.e. the study of nature), for it studies the physical influences of the sun, moon, planets and stars upon the Earth and its inhabitants. (Some astrologers thought the celestial bodies also had non-physical influences on us and our environs.) Astronomy, as mentioned in my last post, was classified as part of mathematics. Ptolemy, for one, states very clearly in Tetrabiblos that astrology studies physical, material causes associated with celestial bodies, whereas astronomy does not. And Cardano writes that astrology, unlike astronomy, studies "how lower things are linked to the higher ones."

So what is right about the Debus quotation? From the point of view of the Ptolemy-to-Cardano distinction between astronomy and astrology, the people working in the 17th C on a new physics of the celestial realm were apparently doing astrology, not astronomy. When Kepler is attempting to discover the physical cause of the planetary orbits, under the older taxonomy, that can't be astronomy, since astronomy does not deal with physical, material affairs. Thus what Kepler is doing (since it's still about the celestial realm) would naturally be classified as astrology. (And perhaps, though this is wild and irresponsible speculation, that partially explains why Kepler's theory, which appeals to entities like the Sun's 'motive soul,' has elements strongly reminiscient of earlier astrology.)

One possible problem with this idea: is there perhaps, in the Ptolemy-to-Cardano classification scheme, a separate heading for works like Aristotle's De Caelo, which does not appear to be straightforwardly astrological? That is, just because the old taxonomy won't count Kepler as astronomy, that doesn't imply that a celestial physics must be astrology: there could be some third category under which De Caelo and Kepler fall. Gentle reader, do you have any information to guide me here?

Galileo:Scholastic natural philosophers :: Carnap:Quine

I'm pretty sure the following has been said before, but I don't know where: Frege (and Russell, et alii) did for the study of language what Galileo (et alii) did for the study of material nature. Galileo 'mathematized' new portions of the physical world -- previous students of nature thought that (most of) nature was too messy, imprecise, or chancey to be susceptible mathematical treatment: how could the unchanging, eternal realm of mathematics model the changing and temporal material world? Analogously, Frege and other founders of modern logic turned language into a mathematical object, by treating (e.g.) subject-predicate assertions in terms of functions and their arguments.

I bring this up because I've been looking at one of Quine's arguments against Carnapian analyticity in the 1940s. This argument appears in the long 1943 letter from Quine to Carnap in Creath's Dear Carnap, Dear Van, and in print in a 1947 article in the Journal of Symbolic Logic ("The Problem of Interpreting Modal Logic"):

The class of analytic statements is broader than that of logical truths, for it contains in addition such statements as 'No bachelor is married.' This example might be assimilated to the logical truths by considering it a definitional abbreviation of 'No unmarried man is unmarried,' which is indeed a logical truth; but I should prefer not to rest analyticity thus on an unrealistic fiction of there being standard definitions of extra-logical expressions in terms of a standard set of extra-logical primitives. What is rather in point, I think, is a relation of synonymy, or sameness of meaning, which holds between expressions of real language, though there be no standard hierarchy of definitions. (p.44, italics Quine's, boldface mine)

Quine puts the point somewhat differently in different places, but the basic idea is always that the 'rational reconstruction' of language, however it is carried out, is an 'unrealistic fiction.'

Now, I can ask the question: is Quine's charge that a 'hierarchy of definitions' is an 'unrealistic fiction' any different from Galileo's scholastic critics' charge that Galileo is somehow 'falsifying' nature by rendering it thoroughly mathematically? The answer to this question will turn on what Good Things the Galilean mathematizing strategy is able to achieve (explanatory power, new predictions, etc.), and whether these Good Things (or analogues of them) also appear in the case of a Carnapian language. It would also be useful to know of other scientific cases where the analogue of the Scholastic triumphed over the analogue of Galileo, i.e., someone tries to mathematize certain phenomena, but this mathematization is rejected for good reasons by workers in the field.