Abstract
Throughout his “scientific” career, extending from the mid-1660’s until his death sixty years later, Newton insisted on a sharp distinction between propositions that were firmly established by reasoning from experiment and propositions that he regarded as mere conjectures ot hypotheses. Of course, it is one thing to insist on such a distinction and quite another to claim to have way of empirically establishing any truly notable propositions. What made Newton’s views on methodology idiosyncratic in his own time aand perhaps in ours as well was not so much the distinction itself as the propositions that he was prepared to say either had been, or could in principle be, established empirically. Hence, the first questions that need to be answered are, what propositions did he think could be established and by what process did he think they were to be established? These are the questions we willl attempt to answer in this paper.
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Harper, W., Smith, G.E. (1995). Newton's New Way of Inquiry. In: Leplin, J. (eds) The Creation of Ideas in Physics. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0037-3_7
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