Hmm, interesting. It doesn’t discuss the Galileo affair, which seems like the most important case where the distinction is relevant. Nevertheless, in light of this, “geocentric models with epicycles had always been in the former category” is too strong and I’ll amend it accordingly.
Oh, I totally buy that it was relevant in the Galileo affair; indeed, the post does discuss Copernicus. But that was after the controversy had become politicized and so people had incentives to come up with weird forms of anti-epistemology. Absent that, I would not expect such a distinction to come up.
Irresponsible and probably wrong narrative: Ptolemy and Simplicius and other pre-modern scientists generally believed in something like naive realism, i.e., that the models (as we now call them) that they were building were supposed to be the way things really worked, because this is the normal way for humans to think about things when they aren’t suffering from hypoxia from going up too many meta-levels, so to speak. Then Copernicus came along, kickstarting the Scientific Revolution and with it the beginnings of science-vs.-religion conflict, spurring many politically-motivated clever arguments about Deep Philosophical Issues. Somewhere during that process somebody came up with scientific anti-realism, and it gained traction because it was politically workable as a compromise position, being sufficiently nonthreatening to both sides that they were content to let it be. Except for Galileo, who thought it was bullshit and refused to play along, which (in conjunction with his general penchant for pissing people off, plus the political environment having changed since Copernicus due to the Counter-Reformation) got him locked up.
Hmm, interesting. It doesn’t discuss the Galileo affair, which seems like the most important case where the distinction is relevant. Nevertheless, in light of this, “geocentric models with epicycles had always been in the former category” is too strong and I’ll amend it accordingly.
Oh, I totally buy that it was relevant in the Galileo affair; indeed, the post does discuss Copernicus. But that was after the controversy had become politicized and so people had incentives to come up with weird forms of anti-epistemology. Absent that, I would not expect such a distinction to come up.
I’m not sure I parsed this comment thread, wondering if you could explain in a bit more detail what you think happened?
Irresponsible and probably wrong narrative: Ptolemy and Simplicius and other pre-modern scientists generally believed in something like naive realism, i.e., that the models (as we now call them) that they were building were supposed to be the way things really worked, because this is the normal way for humans to think about things when they aren’t suffering from hypoxia from going up too many meta-levels, so to speak. Then Copernicus came along, kickstarting the Scientific Revolution and with it the beginnings of science-vs.-religion conflict, spurring many politically-motivated clever arguments about Deep Philosophical Issues. Somewhere during that process somebody came up with scientific anti-realism, and it gained traction because it was politically workable as a compromise position, being sufficiently nonthreatening to both sides that they were content to let it be. Except for Galileo, who thought it was bullshit and refused to play along, which (in conjunction with his general penchant for pissing people off, plus the political environment having changed since Copernicus due to the Counter-Reformation) got him locked up.
Thanks, that at least sounds like a plausible narrative and I understand what you meant better.