2.6 ALFRED RUPERT HALL—HALL THESIS
2.6.1 SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AS MAINSTREAM OF RATIONAL SCIENTIFIC
The course of the scientific revolution was marked by what Hall illustrated as the organized, conscious and rational response to the ubiquitous challenge of Nature.155 In From Galileo to Newton, 1630—1720 (1981), the revolution in physics initiated by Galileo and culminated in Newton´s achievements was not recounted as mere narrative.
Hall, rather, sought to characterise the nature of the changes initiated into the spirit and ideas of science by these scientists. The distinguishing feature of the Scientific Revolution, he argues, is its rational character. It was during the first quarter of the seventeenth century that the force of scientific ideas began to act. With the appearance of the Galileo´s Dialogues on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632) a new structure of thought was established. Hall argued that it is no exaggeration to describe [Galileo´s mechanics]...as the beginnings of exact science which consciously set itself to proceed by other ways than those of the past.156
The new scientific tradition would act as process of purification of all forms of mysticism, magic and superstition from nature. This true scientific tradition ´invariably opposed the magical view of nature, the view that events are governed by spirits or demons or other unknowable forces not obeying the normal laws of cause and effect.157 In fact, the critical feature of seventeenth-century science was that it embraced new or revived ideas, and this was achieved by such academic professionals like Galileo,
155 A. Rupert Hall. The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800: The Formation of the Modern Scientific Attitude, p.365
156Ibid., p.91
157 A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton (New York: Dover, 1981[1963]) p.25
Kepler, Cavalieri, Wallis, Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, Huygens, and other like Harvey, Fermat, Descartes, or Hevelius.158 Hall´s abhorrence to the irrationality of metaphysics ascribes to the vicious generalization that all of primitive science was to be found wholly in the realm of the occult, or , more specifically, in magical activities. In fact, Hall is just one of a small army of science historians who abhor the irrationality of metaphysics mixed up with modern science. Kant´s Critique of Pure Reason had illustrated that such ´corrupt nature´ of metaphysics has to be purified before it could turn into science.
However, historians like Barnes have demonstrated the generic relation of religion and magic, and revealed the origins of science as proceeding primarily from everyday secular and common place activities.159 E.A Burtt´s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1924) and Frances Yates´ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) also illustrated in a very analytical way the metaphysical underpinnings and implications of the scientific accomplishments of such figures like Kepler, Galileo and Newton. Maybe it was Hall´s objection to such tendency in introducing ´irrationality´ to the scientific realm, as these works have insinuated, that made him to make no mention of Burtt or The Metaphysical Foundation in his The Scientific Revolution, 1500-1800.
The enormous controversies that the rationality of science has generated, often, have to do with the identification of rationalism with `mathematical realism´160 in the early part of the twentieth century by philosophers of science. It also later came to mean same for the historians of science. However, the historians conflated empiricism and Baconian experiment with mathematical realism, which they traced to Plato, the Pythagorean tradition, the Mertonian scholastic tradition, or something arising for the first time with
158Ibid., p.28
159 Harry Elmer Barnes, ¨The Historian and the History of Science¨, in The Scientific Monthly Vol II.
(1919), p.113 quoted in Diane Elizabeth Davis Villemaire, E. A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: A Study of the Author of the Metaphysical foundations of Modern Physical Science. (Dordrecht: Kluwer 2002) p.169
160 Mathematical realism is a modern version of what in traditional philosophy is sometimes called transcendental realism—the view that there is no essential distinction to be drawn between reality in itself and the ensemble of phenomena. This concept gained popularity at least in the epistemological circles where Karl Popper´s influence was dominant. However, when considered in the light of recent findings in physics, this kind of realism proves difficult to sustain, even in its fallibilist form. Cf. Bernard D´Espagnat, Reality and the Physicist, trans., J. C. Whitehouse. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, 1990 [1982]) p. 18. It was originally published in French as Une incertaine réalité in 1985. See Chapters 4-6 of the book.
Galileo.161 The insistence by some historians in identifying rationality with science has been somehow prompted by the ´concept of the Scientific Revolution´ itself and its mechanism of interpreting the past scientific heroes as if their thought patterns were basically like our own, even when they did not see their achievements the way we do.
Betty J. Dobbs writes
I think the problem arises somewhat in this fashion: we choose for praise the thinkers that seem to us to have contributed to modernity, but we unconsciously assume that their thought patterns were fundamentally just like ours. Then we look at them a little more closely and discover to our astonishment that our intellectual ancestors are not like us at all: they do not see the full implications of their own work: they refuse to believe things that are now so obviously true; they have metaphysical and religious commitments that they should have known were unnecessary for a study of nature.162
Dobbs demonstrated that judging the achievements of the 16th and 17th century scientist based the standard of the rationality created by the modern mind will not offer us a clear view of the nature of the science those scientists practised. Our understanding of the scientific revolution has been fed with such mix between rationalism and mathematical realism that we might be tempted to think that the scientifically rational is that which is mathematically real. This tendency explains why authors like Thomas Kuhn and Frances Yates has been criticized as propagating irrationalism in science with the former´s treatment of the interplay of sociological factors in the scientific progress and the latter linkage of alchemy to Newton physics.
161 Diane Elizabeth Davis Villemaire, E. A. Burtt, Historian and Philosopher: A Study of the Author of the Metaphysical foundations of Modern Physical Science. p.172
162 B.J. Dobbs lecture at the 1993 Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society quoted in B. J.
Dobbs, Newton as Final Cause and First Mover, Isis, 1994, 85: 640-41