Abstract
Mechanism is an ancient metaphysical doctrine modernized. The main problem it was meant to solve is that of change. This is how Descartes understood and applied it, and this is what made Boyle advocate it. Mechanism comes in diverse versions, and it is not clear whether the systems of Newton and of Leibniz qualify as variants of mechanism or are too remote from the original for that. At times a few theories appear that are fairly similar to each other, yet they belong to different groupings or families of theories and it is not always clear where to draw the line between families of theories: it is often difficult to judge when two similar theories are variants of each other and when they belong to different families of theories. Thus, some consider the theories of Newton and of Leibniz mechanical and others deem them too different from Descartes’ theory to count as mechanical and they call Newton’s and Leibniz’ theories variants of dynamism (Čapek 1961, 96). As long as there is no measure of proximity of ideas, any answer to this question may count as reasonable. Much later, Faraday, Maxwell, and Einstein suggested a new metaphysical system, according to which atoms are not material but characteristics of fields of force. This surely is dynamism proper.
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Notes
- 1.
Marie Boas Hall rightly found here a problem (1952): it is as theoretical as they come, yet it was viewed as factual. She explains—rightly—that this was the anti-scholastic aspect of mechanism. We must add a no less important aspect of it, namely, anti-occultism. Newton’s opposition to all assumptions of occult qualities blurs the difference between the Aristotelian and the Neo-Platonist traditions between which Harry A. Wolfson was at pains to distinguish. Galileo declared his aim to be the denuding of the latter tradition of its murkiness, i. e., its magic (opening of his first dialogue).
- 2.
Leibniz objected to Newton’s system because it is not mechanical. Leading historian of science Dijksterhuis declared it mechanical, refusing to discuss what the mechanical world picture is (Dijksterhuis 1969, 4, note 2).
- 3.
Milton (1981, 175) declared that the ancients had no concept of a law of nature, so that Popper was in error translating “aitiologia” to mean causal law. Milton viewed Newton’s idea of laws of motion as a neologism. To the extent that this is right, obviously, Boyle’s discussion of the role of the laws of motion was far from trivial to his readers. This Milton also noticed (182, 195).
- 4.
Boyle’s influence on Newton occupies an extensive literature. The relevance of Boyle to it is still unstudied. For more details see Ben-Chaim (2001) and Wojcik (2000).
- 5.
A superficial examination of the remnants of Boyle’s correspondence and some of his work would undermine the currently popular view that he was mathematically illiterate. See also (Anstey 2000 Introduction).
- 6.
All this is too fuzzy; since Leibniz’s atoms are points, abstract set theory plays havoc with it.
- 7.
Descartes implied that geometry is reduced to arithmetic and arithmetic to logic, so that it is given for free.
- 8.
The most forceful discussion of this is in Boyle’s Defence and in his Things above Reason. One may suggest that his discussion of continuity shows him uncertain about his atomism. Not so. Of course, he was skeptical about all of his principles, but he had no second thoughts on atoms; he challenged the Cartesians to use their principle of continuity instead of arguing that it is possibly true. Which move is a priori valid, of course.
- 9.
This is a good example of a theory that is so commonsense that it is unnoticed or taken as facts. Today the supposition behind the Hebrew alphabet and its derivatives and its shortcoming are all too obvious. It does not even take account of the diversity of dialects and of pronunciations—especially by non-native speakers. The discarded idea is that all sounds are either consonants (stops, voiced and unvoiced) or vowels, and that it is possible to enrich the alphabet by adding to its list of consonants and vowels—with diphthongs as pairs of vowels. Today we view some sounds as gliding, as between consonants and vowels, so that not all diphthongs are combined vowels. The difference between consonants is insufficient as it does not distinguish between the explosive and the implosive (as in d and dt) and that it does not allow for intonations and for the tonality that is so characteristic of all Chinese dialects. And it is debatable whether the southern African clicks are consonants.
- 10.
Thus, Newton presented the calculus as a part of traditional geometry and covered his tracks, as Laplace noted.
- 11.
Not Ernst Mach. He saw that the abolition of forces requires a reinterpretation of the first law. So he declared it a rule of coordinating motions with the system of the fixed stars, whatever this is. This demolishes all statics; it also leaves the third law still unchanged and so quite problematic for him.
- 12.
In his famous letters to Bentley, Newton endorsed Descartes’ or Boyle’s program. His wording of his first law makes it a hybrid. Alexandre Koyré’s view (Koyré 1965, 66) that he was in debt to Descartes for all of his laws of motion wants a reassessment.
- 13.
This is contrary to Koyré’s, “… the principle of inertia … holds a special place in classical mechanics. It is its fundamental law of motion; it implicitly pervades Galilean physics and quite explicitly that of Descartes and of Newton” (loc. cit.). It is also possibly contrary to Feynman’s “The First Law was a mere restatement of the Galilean principle of inertia” (Feynman 1963, 1, 9/1).
- 14.
Duhem and Poincaré discussed at length the absence of inertial motion. This never brought anybody to think of the difference between the inertia in the systems of Descartes and of Newton. Planck hinted at this in his discussion of the law of energy that never holds strictly due to the non-existence of strictly closed systems.
- 15.
What makes this easy to discern is Einstein’s theory of gravity that abides by Newton’s first law in a generalized version (as straight lines become geodesics) and absorbs forces into the geometry, so that the first law stands alone. Einstein went further than that: he viewed invariance to some sets of transformation as a key characteristic of any good theory, and he took Newton’s first law to be the corollary from Newton’s theories being invariant to Galileo transformations (Einstein 1921, Chapter 1).
- 16.
Electromagnetic forces, it is well-known, abide by these only globally not locally.
- 17.
“I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy” (Koyré 1952).
- 18.
The idea is not exclusively Rutherford’s; we learn from Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography that he had heard it from Einstein. This signifies, even though we should ascribe its precise wording to some benevolent copy editor.
- 19.
By Locke’s theory of observation, force is not observable; modern perception theory allows for perceptions that Locke would have rejected as he was determined to reject reports of observation of the motion of celestial bodies, declaring them theoretical. In any case, no one has reported having observed Newtonian forces, yet Laplace spoke of Newton’s law of gravity a general fact.
- 20.
Degrees of certainty signify, according to Einstein, in that they comprise default ordering of hypotheses as candidates for modification. Yet he considered the law of entropy more certain in this sense than the law of gravity.
- 21.
Degrees of generality increase with degrees of testability (Popper 1959, §18).
- 22.
Kant seems to have rejected the ladder since his concept of matter was Cartesian (Prolegomena, §15); he did argue (§38) that Newton’s law of gravity is a priori valid since the area of an expanding sphere grows by the square of its growing radius. This idea makes sense only by the postulate of the conservation of force that appeared after his death.
- 23.
This is Kant’s solution to the problem of observation: subjective experience becomes scientific, i. e., certain when worded mathematically. His example is Kepler’s first law that is a proper generalization of astronomical observations made possible by the concept of ellipse (§38). The irregularities reported in Newton’s Principia refute Kant’s solution together with his philosophy of science. His criticism of empiricism, however, is valid.
- 24.
“… after its appearance the Principia was more admired than studied” (Whewell 1859, addition to Ch. 3, 431).
- 25.
There is no presentation of Ohm’s theory as a theory of electric fluid, nor of its predecessors, the fluid theories of Fourier and of Carnot. The discussion of Poisson’s magnetic fluid theory and Ampère’s electric fluid theory likewise await proper discussion.
- 26.
Of course, ordinary mater is heavy; within the Newtonian program this is agreeable; not within that of Einstein, who found it irksome until he succeeded in developing his general relativity (Einstein 1949, 65).
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Agassi, J. (2013). Mechanism. In: The Very Idea of Modern Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 298. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5351-8_15
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