Galileo: Causation, Representation, Intervention

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Author: David WoottonDavid Wootton
Affiliation: University of York
Source: Causation 1500-2000, 2008
Keywords: causation, science, history, Galileo  [edit]

@inbook{wootton2008g,
    author = "Wootton, David",
    title = {Galileo: Causation, Representation, Intervention},
    booktitle = "Causation 1500-2000",
    year = "2008"}

Synopsis

Scholastic natural philosophy was addicted to causation: “We have scientific knowledge when we know the cause,” said Aristotle. Galileo in his early work De MotuDe Motu shares this assumption: experience alone never constitutes scientific knowledge, and knowledge of causation often allows us to dismiss experience as irrelevant because shaped by accidental features. (Mathematics is not science because it does not deal with causation.)

Galileo did not abandon arguments about causes – his account of bodies floating in water (1612) and his tidal theory (1616, 1632) are both presented as causal arguments. But his accounts of falling bodies and of projectiles are accounts of mathematical patterns, of laws not causes: this is scientific knowledge without knowledge of the cause. It so happens that Galileo’s most successful science is law-science not cause-science, which has led some commentators to see Galileo as having escaped from the idea of causation. This is a mistake: but Galileo does think there is science without knowledge of causation; his theory of science is, we might say, cause-independent rather than cause-dependent.

Does Galileo have a consistent idea of scientific knowledge that unites his different (causal and non-causal) types of scientific enquiry? I will argue that science for Galileo involves representation (the building of models) and intervention (the demonstration that variations in the model produce predictable effects). Scientific knowledge for Galileo depends on having models which are both realistic and variable: this places him firmly in the maker’s knowledge tradition. For Galileo scientific knowledge is inseparable from experimental knowledge.

Where does Galileo get his non-scholastic idea of science from? In 1600 Galileo read Gilbert’s De MagneteDe Magnete. The importance of De Magnete is underestimated in recent scholarship. Here was a book grounded in experiments which produced a new type of philosophical knowledge – and yet the cause of magnetism was occult: this new knowledge was not knowledge of causation. It was however knowledge based on representation, variation, prediction – on experimentation. In arguing that Galileo’s idea of scientific knowledge derives from Gilbert, I will be arguing that it does not derive from the other most likely candidate: Alhacen, Alhazen, or Ibn al-Haytham (965–1039), whose experimental optics was available to Galileo in the 1572 edition. Gilbert, and Galileo following Gilbert, transformed the relationship between science and causation.