 Coming back to history and philosophy of science and medicine, I'm Matt Brown and today we're talking again about Paul Fireabend and his book Against Method. We're talking about part two, which covers roughly chapters eight through fourteen. So I want to remind you a little bit of where we were last time. So Fireabend's overall goal in the book is to criticize philosophical and popular theories of the scientific method and the idea of science as a kind of rational rule-governed pursuit that can be sort of explained with one shared structure across all sciences and all history, right? History of science. He's trying to oppose that. In order to oppose that notion, Fireabend articulates a kind of methodological principle that he thinks no philosophy of science would agree to. He calls it counter-induction. Counter-induction is basically the idea that science should proceed, is a methodological principle according to which you should proceed by positing and pursuing and sticking to theories that go against other well-confirmed theories and go against established empirical data or empirical evidence. So this counter-induction principle is meant to be something that no sort of rationalist account of scientific method would accept. And he attempts to show us that Galileo and Galileo's defense of Copernicanism in particular is engaged in a kind of counter-inductive method. And he ends the discussion that we talked about last week with what's called the Tower Argument, right? So this is an ancient argument against the heliocentric model of the solar system against the idea that the Earth moves rather than being stationary at the center of the universe. And the idea is if you drop a weight or a ball or or anything from the top of a tall tower, it falls straight down. The same distance from the tower is where you dropped it. The tower is, you know, perpendicular to the to the ground. And if the Earth was moving, the Tower Argument goes, you would expect the ball to fall away from the tower at roughly the same rate that the Earth was moving, right? And there, I'll post some video examples of how this works. It's supposed to work. Okay, so that was last time. The Tower Argument is supposed to be evidence against Copernicanism was considered as a refuting evidence against Copernicanism. However, Galileo provided alternative interpretations of that evidence using his new dynamics, his new physical dynamics, and his new theory of what you would call relativity. It's the Galilean theory of relativity of relative motion to show that it actually was consistent with Copernicus, right? So he showed that there was a kind of natural interpretive assumption or natural interpretation packaged with the Tower Argument evidence. And that one could replace that with a speculative theoretical assumption in order to turn the evidence against the theory and evidence for the theory. Okay, so this week, right? Firehubbin continues the argument, but he focuses instead on instead of on the Tower Argument, he focuses on the telescopic evidence, right? So Galileo, of course, was one of the first to build and use a functioning telescope to study the stars, right? And to study the heavens, right? And he did a number of things such as study the surface features of the moon, but it was a planetary body with features much like the features of the earth, mountains and things, right? Mountains and plains and so on. He also discovered satellites around Jupiter, right? They were called the Jovian planets at that time. And these were supposed to be evidence in favor of Copernicanism. He also was able to provide alternative evidence to what seemed to be the case that you would expect when you observe planets like Mars and Venus, which sometimes are very close to the earth and sometimes very far away from the earth on the Copernican model, to vary in size and brightness, much more so than they do in actual observation with the naked eye. And Galileo was able to provide some evidence that using telescopic observations that things were closer than you would expect using naked eye observations to the Copernican model, okay? That's all very technical, complicated, or at least a little bit to explain, but the basic idea is Galileo used the telescope as a source of evidence for Copernicanism. What Fyrovin points out is that that is a really dubious source of evidence for a number of reasons. Number one, because there were good Aristotelian reasons to think that things work very differently in the heavens than they do on the earth, and including observation, right? Number two, because Galileo did not have a very strong understanding of the nature of optics, nor of the nature of the perceptual workings of the human body and mind, right? And so he didn't have very strong reasons for thinking that the telescope produced veritical or true perceptions rather than illusions, right? He didn't have good reasons to think it was more like, that it was more like natural perception magnified than it was like looking through a kaleidoscope or something like that, right? So that's another problem for the telescopic observations. Finally, many of Galileo's peers could not confirm what Galileo claimed to see through the telescope. And they saw different things, or they saw nothing at all. They couldn't make clear images out. They saw double. And even Galileo himself saw things that we now regard as illusory, including, if you look at the diagram in the book on page 97 that he drew of the moon, and you compare that to a photograph of the moon on page 109, you'll see that these are quite different, quite different pictures. Let me see if I can show you here. So on the one hand, right? Note this enormous crater in the middle of the picture towards the bottom. If you look at a similarly matched contemporary photograph of the moon, this is on 109, you know, there are some craters down here, but none of them are nearly as large or as perfectly circular as the one Galileo depicted. So even Galileo's telescopic evidence was not from contemporary standards, very good, right? So here you have a set of evidence. It does seem to support Copernicanism, but it seems to have its own host of problems. And yet there were the mutual fit between the apparently refuted thesis of Copernicanism and the apparently refuted observational technique of the telescope gave mutual support to each other and gave defenders of the view reason to stick with it, right? You combine that with Galileo's dynamics, which also went against common sense in various ways in its theory of relativity. And again, you have this mutual support between these different parts of the theory. One of the things that's going on here is that the Copernicans have to deal with the fact that the Aristotelian system of knowledge is very tightly linked together. So you have Ptolemy's Earth-centered astronomy, and that's what Copernicus is trying to reject. You also have Aristotle's physics, his theory of change and dynamics, which is a much more robust and inclusive theory than the one Galileo posited. It's true that Galileo's theory does help us think about the relationship between the heavens and the Earth, but Aristotle's theory of change is much more comprehensive. It doesn't just concern motions of bodies, but also concerns the generation and growth and decay of animals, the change of mental phenomenon, including perception, and a variety of other processes of qualitative and quantitative change united in one theory. You also have various theories of optics and perception, theories of theological accounts, all of which are mutually supporting system in the Aristotelian worldview. The Copernicans can't develop a robust alternative all at once. The astronomy comes first. It's not great. It doesn't provide a lot of predictive improvement. It does provide some easier calculations here and there as compared to Ptolemy, so it's kind of pragmatically useful, but not so empirically different. The Galileo's dynamics have some benefits, but are also extremely problematic. It would take centuries before you had a fully robust account of all of these things together that was a rival to the Aristotelian approach, but by that time Aristotle was not even alive consideration. Now, Fyroben does not tell us all of this in order to tell us that there was something wrong with Galileo. This is not a criticism of Copernicus, not a criticism of Galileo. This is an argument about the historical development of science, perfectly reasonable in one sense for what Copernicus and Galileo did. In fact, if we agree with most defenders of modern science that Galileo was right, then we also need to preserve the kinds of scientific strategies that Galileo pursued that made him right. Those strategies, Fyroben argues, are ones that go against modern theories of scientific method. Indeed, you can think about it this way. If the modern philosophers of scientific method had their way, Galileo would never have gotten off the ground. The Copernican theory would have been dead in the trade also to speak, and we would all still be Aristotelians. That's the main line of argument in this part of the book. There is also an interesting discussion about the church in chapter 14, and the other aspects of the Copernican Revolution in chapter 14. And so what's happening here towards the end of this is Fyroben starting to explore some of the broader ramifications of his account, including thinking about sort of historical change of standards of rationality, the relationship between ethics and social, the social good and science, and some other aspects like that that we'll get into more in the next two parts of the book. So that's a brief sort of introduction to part two of Against Method, and the main argumentative structures there are lots of details for us to talk about in class or in the chat on Discord or in comments on the video. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about that. Otherwise, I look forward to talking with you. And I'll see you next time.