Scientific Revolution refers to the period, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century in Europe, when new ideas in physics, astronomy, biology, human anatomy, chemistry, and other sciences led to the rejection of doctrines that had prevailed from ancient Greece through the middle Ages. It has been described as the movement which was forged by Johannes Kepler (1571- 1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642), developed by René Descartes (1596- 1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646- 1716), and completed by Isaac Newton (1642- 1727).1 The unprecedented advancements in science during the early modern period yielded to enormous transformation of man´s thought and way of looking at the world, and laid the foundation of modern science.
The success of the early modern science was orchestrated by historical rise of mechanism and materialism, the mathematization of natural philosophy and the emergence of profound experimentalism. According to Richard Westfall, its victory, over the prevailing Aristotelian doctrine at the time, started with the acceptance of Copernican astronomy, the rise of the mechanical philosophy, the decline of astrology and transmutational alchemy, and the acceptance of Newtonian physics.2 The synthesis of ´mechanic-corpuscularism´ (see section 2.11.7) with mathematics culminated the scientific revolution. This materialistic perception of reality precipitated the scientific experimentation and observation of the 17th century science, which have been defined as the processes that guaranteed the rise of modern science. The scientific processes allowed the scientists to conduct objective investigation and reach conclusions based on the results. Most importantly, the synthesis of the ´mechanic-corpuscularism´ with mathematics proved quite fertile that the human mind exploited various cognitive
1 Peter Hanns Reill, ¨The legacy of the ´Scientific Revolution´ : Science and the Enlightenment,¨ in The Cambridge History of Science: Eighteenth-century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) vol. 4, p. 23
2 Richard S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (New York:
John Wiley pub., 1971) pp. 30-31
frontiers never known before. These exploits aroused the euphoria of progress and imbued the modern man with strong optimism.
Modern science became the major force behind the development of the idea of progress.
Interestingly, the progress or growth of scientific knowledge has been one of the central issues in the epistemology of science. It is an issue that has engaged not only philosophers; even ¨scientists and laymen similarly agree that one of the striking features of the diachronic development of science is the progress that it exhibits.¨3 From the origins of modern science in the work of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until the logical empiricists of the twentieth century, scientific progress has been viewed as an evolutionary process of uncovering truth in the physical world.
Traditionally, scientific progress was viewed as a cumulative process moving steadily toward the truth. But though the combination of mathematical science and corpuscularian conception of nature proved quite fertile, ´neither the mathematical exactitude of Kepler´ s laws of planetary motion nor the quantitative rigor of Galileo´s laws of falling bodies proved derivable by means of the explanatory tools accepted in the corpuscularian world-view.4 This suggests that the scientific knowledge which ensued from the activities of these scientists did not strictly flow from those processes and norms which have been acclaimed as the principal factors that distinguished the science of the early modern period from its predecessors. Hence, the controversy has been on whether or not there was a ´Scientific Revolution´?
Various historiographies of the scientific revolution have sought to find answer to the questions of its periodization, personalities, content and context, motive, relevance and epistemological implications. These historiographies are represented in the positivist, antipositivist and sociologists views which tend to identify the structure, scope and constituents of the scientific revolution. But while some of them view Scientific Revolution as a concept that is ´philosophically general´, others see it as ´historically unique´. The former defines the changes in science as a continual process while the
3Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) p. 2
4 H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 512
latter designate them, particularly, as the ´upheaval´ which took place during the early modern period.
Until the historiographical revolution of the early 1960´s the scientific processes or method of the 16th and 17th centuries were seen as functional parameter for the justification of the objectivity, truth, realism and rationality of the scientific knowledge.
Before this time, positivism had reigned supreme for a century, from Auguste Comte to Rudolf Carnap. With respect to scientific authority, this philosophical account typically vindicated the acceptance of scientific claims or research programs as rationally warranted or reliable. For the logical empiricists and logical positivists the feature of science that make it scientific are formal relations between theories and data, whether through the rational construction of theoretical structures on top of empirical data or the rational dismissal of theories on the basis of empirical data. This feature of science illustrates the validity of its claims. It shows that if science demonstrates the formal relations between theories and data it is certain that its claims will be rational, true, real and objective. The progressiveness of science was viewed as the mechanism that certifies such feature. Consequently, we see in these philosophical accounts the conscious intertwinement of the progress of science with its realism, rationality, truth and objectivity.
Nevertheless, the early 1960´s witnessed unreserved criticisms and reactions to this unique feature of science that has been painted by the logical positivists and logical empiricists. The reactions consisted in demonstrating the stimulus given to (and the limitation placed upon) discovery and invention, in the early modern period, by industry, hermeticism, religion, capitalism and social structures, and conversely the ways in which science has altered economic, social, and political beliefs and practices.
The concern was for a shift from the traditional ways of relying solely on the content of scientific beliefs and methods for the justification of scientific claims, to the veritable consideration of the context of their development. This move reiterated the need to reevaluate the scientific claims by discussing the scientific procedures of the early modern period within the context of their development. It was shown that the actual method used by scientists differed dramatically from the then-espoused method. The observations of science practice are described as essentially sociological and do not speak to how science is or can be practiced in other times and other cultures.