Newton's methodology is richer than the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific inference that was the focus of many philosophers of science in the last century. These enrichments focus on theory-mediated measurements of theoretical parameters by phenomena. It is argued that this richer methodology of Newton's informs a pre-relativity response to the Mercury perihelion problem, endorses the transition from Newton's theory to Einstein's, and continues to inform the testing frameworks for relativistic gravity theories today. On this rich methodology of Newton's, science is very informative about the world, without any commitment to progress toward an ideal limit of a final theory of everything.
Newton's scientific methodology is much richer than the models of scientific inference that have been studied by philosophers of science. I will be explaining several salient features that make this richer methodology more informative about the world than, even, quite sophisticated Bayesian models of scientific inference of the sort Abner Shimony has developed in his classic papers [23, 24]. Abner, Wayne Myrvold and I have begun a program of joint research designed to enrich the Bayesian model with resources to accommodate Newton's richer methodology. This paper will characterize some features that I shall argue ought to be accommodated in order to do justice to Newton's methodology. The job of how to enrich the Bayesian framework to do justice to these features will left to be addressed in future work.1
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Harper, W. (2009). Newton's Methodology. In: Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle. The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 73. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9107-0_3
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