• DOI:10.1086/353480
• Corpus ID: 145410913

Galileo and the Process of Scientific Creation

@article{Wisan1984GalileoAT,
  title={Galileo and the Process of Scientific Creation},
  author={Winifred Lovell Wisan},
  journal={Isis},
  year={1984},
  volume={75},
  pages={269 - 286}
}

• W. Wisan
• Published 1 June 1984
• Physics
• Isis

FOR TWO CENTURIES following his death in 1642, Galileo was hailed for his pioneering discoveries in astronomy and mechanics. In astronomy, his telescopic observations were taken as strong evidence for the Copernican system. In mechanics, he was widely regarded as the discoverer of the principal laws that many said were simply generalized later by Newton. By the midnineteenth century, the Tuscan scientist had also acquired a reputation as the reformer of natural philosophy, which he was supposed to have reestablished more or less single-handledly from observation and experience. Some even found that he introduced a new geometrical spirit into the sciences. Mainly, though, he was seen as the archetypal empiricist who proceeded without philosophical presuppositions and grounded his results in experience and experiment alone. This was much the standard view until 1939, when Alexandre Koyre persuasively set forth the view that the basis of Galileo's work and thought was rationalism and Platonic metaphysics. In short, Galileo was (and still is) the paradigmatic scientist. Through the centuries his texts have influenced our views of what science and scientific method should be. At the same time, however, changing ideas about the nature of science and scientific method have affected historical interpretations of his work. In general, these interpretations were based on rather narrow selections from Galileo's writings, a tendency that facilitated the finding of conclusions according to taste: whatever a writer thought the essence of science to be, that is what he found in Galileo. A fresh approach to Galileo studies, however, has developed during the past twenty years, stimulated primarily by the research of Thomas B. Settle.' Settle is the Thor Heyerdahl of Galileo studies. Dissatisfied with the scholastic nature of most arguments about Galileo's empiricism versus his rationalism, he set out to reproduce Galileo's actual procedures. Thus he focused on such questions as how Galileo actually constructed his equipment, what it was made of, exactly how it worked, and how reliable it was. Settle built and operated replicas of the original equipment to find out what the early modern scientist actually saw before him. This approach marked the beginning of a shift in Galileo studies from conjectures based on selected bits of evidence to more extensive and more detailed study of Galileo's work and writings.