Customer Reviews

The Nature of Scientific Discovery: A Symposium Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus (Smithsonian international symposia series)

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I am commenting only on Westman's article on the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus.

"The principal tenet of the Wittenberg viewpoint was that the new theory could only be trusted within the domain where it made predictions about the angular position of a planet ... Beyond this basic attitude, some members of the Wittenberg Circle believed certain Copernican models, such as that which replaced the Ptolemaic equant with epicylic devices, were to be preferred. An important plank of the Wittenberg program ... was the goal of translating these equantless devices into a geostatic reference frame." (p. 395). "A second basic feature ... was the conspicuous absence of urgency about the issue of cosmological choice." (p. 408)

Now here is where I disagree: "The effect of this informal scientific group on the early reception of the Copernican theory cannot be underestimated [sic]. Thanks to its efforts, the realist and cosmological claims of Copernicus' great discovery failed to be given full consideration." (p. 397).

Well, I think it can be overestimated, namely by assuming that this reception of Copernicus was a matter of contingency, that it could have been otherwise. Resistance to innovation is the natural state of affairs, not something unique about the case of Copernicus to be explained in terms of the social peculiarities and dispositions of the institutions and persons of the time. (Cf. Rosen's note on p. 437.) I find it unbecoming that Westman fancies himself to be exposing problematic assumptions made by others when he himself makes this rather prejudiced assumption that the history of science is highly indeterministic.

And here I disagree again: "If we were to look at the early reception of Copernican astronomy at Wittenberg through Kuhnian spectacles, therefore, we should have to make the paradoxical statement that it had been welcomed respectfully into the fold of Ptolemaic normal science---a situation which should never occur by Kuhn's reckoning." (p. 420)

Westman has it completely backwards. The Wittenberg interpretation fit Kuhn's theory perfectly: the Wittenberg astronomers interpreted Copernicus in terms of their paradigm, embracing those parts that made sense to them (just as, e.g., Priestley interpreted Lavosier's results from a phlogistonian point of view) and refusing to see the rest.