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Newton called his method the '''experimental philosophy''', because theories about the behavior of empirical objects can only be refuted via experimental procedures.[[CiteRef::Smith (2002)]] The generality of Newton's rejection of hypotheses in natural philosophy is unclear since, in the ''Opticks'' he did discuss hypotheses about light, and did raise the possibility of an invisible aether responsible for gravitational attraction. [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016) |pp. 25-26]] His epistemological beliefs were similar to those of his contemporary and friend, [[John Locke]] (1632-1704) who maintained that all knowledge came from experience. [[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]] Newton called his methodology the '''experimental philosophy''', because theories about the behavior of empirical objects can only be refuted via experimental procedures.[[CiteRef::Smith (2002)]] Newton He expressed the its core beliefs from which he derived his method in a set of four “rules for the study of natural philosophy,” which he stated in book III of The ''Principia'' as follows:
Historical research indicates that More than two centuries after Newton published the scientific community did not use Newton's own criteria in evaluating his work. Newton's theories did not become accepted outside Principia'', a new theory of England until after its prediction of the oblate spheroid shape of the Earth motion and gravitation was formulated by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who was confirmed inspired by expeditions to Lapland new developments in non-Euclidean geometry and Peruby problems with James Clerk Maxwell's (1831-1879) theory of electromagnetic radiation. Thus, The new theory replaced Newton's theories became theory as the accepted via a '''hypothetico-deductive method''' based on confirmed novel predictions that distinguished it from the rival Cartesian vortices, rather than via Newtontheory of motion and gravitation by about 1920. Einstein's own '''inductive methodologyGeneral Theory of Relativity'''. [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 48-49]][[CiteRef::Terrall (1992)]][[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]] According to McMullin, Newton's methodology ran contrary to explained the consensus success of its predecessor by showing that had been emerging among natural philosophers its equations reduce to those of his time, Newton in favor the limit of hypothesis. [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]] Christiaan Huygens weak gravitational fields and John Locke velocities that are known to have taken the experimental philosophy, if not necessarily the full content an insignificant fraction of Newton’s theories, to heart.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]]|Criticism=To proponents that of the mechanical philosophy, it was methodologically important that all motion in the universe be given a cause involving direct physical contact, even if this amounted to a larger gap between theory and experimental evidencelight. Many of NewtonEinstein's contemporaries, in particular Leibniz and Huygens, strongly objected to theory eliminated the idea that forces could act problem of action at a distance. Leibniz regarded by postulating that the theory mass of gravitation as a regression in natural philosophy an object warps space-time, and accused Newton of treating gravity as an 'occult quality' beyond philosophical understanding. The topic was that the subject local manifestation of intense debate in the early eighteenth centurythis curvature influences distant bodies. [[CiteRef::Janiak Barseghyan (20162015) pp|p. 27-28125]][[CiteRef::Isaacson (2007)]]
Although many By the mid-eighteenth century natural philosophers in were beginning to realize that many successful theories violated the 17th strictures of Newton's inductive experimental philosophy. The eighteenth century were convinced by Newton’s views on saw the acceptance of a variety of theories that posited unobservable entities, including Benjamin Franklin's (1706-1790) theory of electricity, which posited the existence of an unobservable electric fluid, the phlogiston theory of combustion and rust, which likewise posited an unobservable substance, and Augustin-Jean Fresnel's (1788-1827) wave theory of light which posited an unobservable fluid ether as the medium of light, and Herman Boerhaave's (1668-1738) vibratory theory of heat. [[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)|pp. 56-57]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 54]] The methodologists of the proper method early nineteenth century, William Whewell (1794-1866) and John Hershel (1792-1871) recognized that the actual practice of conducting science, many were did not willing conform to abandon the Cartesian mechanical philosophyprescribed Newtonian methodology and openly advocated the hypothetico-deductive method. [[CiteRef::Laudan (1984a)|pp.56-60]]
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|Brief=an English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist/natural philosopher who is widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists of all time
|Summary=Newton’s most notable contributions were made to the fields of physics, mathematics, and scientific method, which were so groundbreaking that he is currently considered to be one of the most important physicists in modern Western history.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Philosophers of science credit Newton’s revolutionary theory of gravity and his experimental approach to conducting natural philosophy as outlined in his major work, ''Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' (''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'' or simply the [[Newton (1687)|''Principia'']]), whose principles became central to the mosaic of late 18th and 19th century science.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Some consider the ''Principia'' to be the work that initially created physics as its own scientific field separate from the umbrella of metaphysics and philosophy. [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]]
|Historical Context=When Isaac Newton began his studies at Cambridge University's prestigious Trinity College in 1661, more than a century had passed since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) had proposed a '''heliocentric cosmology''' in his 1543 ''De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium'' (''On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres''). It had been fifty years since Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) had published his observations with the telescope in 1610, which uncovered dramatic evidence favoring for the Copernican system. Around At about the same time, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) had published his laws of planetary motion, indicating that the planets revolved around the sun on elliptical paths, replacing the circular motion and complex epicycles of Copernicus and Claudius Ptolemy(c. 100-170).[[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|pp. 1-7]] According to Westfall, "by 1661 the debate on the heliocentric universe had been settled; those who mattered had surrendered to the irresistible elegance of Kepler's unencumbered ellipses, supported by the striking testimony of the telescope, whatever the ambiguities might be. For Newton, the heliocentric universe was never a matter in question".[[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|p. 6]] A planetary Earth that rotated on its axis and revolved around the sun was incompatible with the accepted physics of [[Aristotle]] (384-322 BCE). The community of the time was engaged with the question of how it could be that the Earth itself was in motion through space, and with the question of how one could hope to gain reliable knowledge in the face of the failure of Aristotelian scholastic knowledge accepted for centuries.
Newton’s education at Cambridge was classical, focusing on Aristotelian rhetoric, logic, ethics, and physics. Bound to '''Aristotelian scholasticism''' by statutory rules,the curriculum had changed little in decades.[[CiteRef::Christianson (1984)|p. 33]][[CiteRef::Westfall (1980)|pp. 81-90]][[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] Like many of the more ambitious students, Newton distanced himself from classical metaphysics and instead studied the works of the French natural philosopher [[René Descartes]](1596-1650) on his own. By 1664, Newton is known to have read the 1656 Latin edition of Descartes' ''Opera Philosophica'', a one volume compilation of Descartes' major works.[[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]] Newton is known to have been profoundly influenced by Descartes views of space, matter, and God, and by commentaries on Descartes by Henry More (1614-1687). [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Descartes had died just over a decade earlier, and his works had first been published within the preceding thirty years. They were gaining in popularity and by about 1680 would become the [[Theory Acceptance|accepted]] centerpiece of the Cambridge curriculum, as they also would in Paris by 1700.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 190]] When Newton published his magnum opus, the ''Principia'' in 1687, he was challenging a Cartesian orthodoxy. The full title of Newton's work suggests he intended it to be in dialog with Descartes' ''Principia Philosophiae'' (''Principles of Philosophy'') published in 1644.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]]
Descartes was the most prominent member of a community of '''corpuscularist''' thinkers, who maintained that visible objects were made of unobservably tiny particles, whose relations and arrangement were responsible for the properties of visible bodies. In this '''mechanical natural philosophy''', particles influenced one another only by direct physical contact, which was the cause of all motion, and ultimately all change.[[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]] One of the attractions of these ideas is that, unlike Aristotle's, they allowed for a movable planetary Earth, and celestial motions weren't different in kind from terrestrial motions. They explained gravity, in qualitative terms, as due to a swirling vortex of particles around the Earth, which pushed things towards its centercentre. In accord with Copernican heliocentrism, Descartes posited that a larger vortex surrounded the sun, with the smaller planetary vorticies caught in a larger solar vortex.[[CiteRef::Garber (1992)]][[CiteRef::Disalle (2004)]] In Newton's time, major champions of the mechanical natural philosophy included Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who was to become a major rival of Newton's.
For Descartes, the ultimate justification of knowledge claims lie with human reason and the absence of doubt. He relied on classical methods of theorizing and conjectured hypotheses in order to construct scientific propositions.[[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] Such a '''rationalist''' approach to knowledge was also championed by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.[[CiteRef::Lennon and Dea (2014)]] But, by the early 17th century, experimental researchers like Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle (1627-1691) had begun to elaborate and practice a very different approach to knowledge based on experimentation and extensive use of mathematics. Following the '''inductive methodology''' advocated by [[Francis Bacon]](1561-1626), they maintained that theoretical principles emerged from experimental data by a process of '''inductive generalization'''. However, there were also dissenters like Newton's contemporary Christiaan Huygens, who believed that most experimental work involved formulating hypotheses about unobservable entities, which were tested by their observable consequences. This was an early form of '''hypothetico-deductivism'''. Newton rejected Cartesian rationalism, and argued that the Cartesians did not sufficiently employ mathematics and experimentation in their work. He rejected the method of hypotheses outright. [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]][[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] He supported '''inductivism''', and held epistemological views similar to those of his contemporary and friend [[John Locke]](1632-1704), who maintained that all knowledge came from experience.[[CiteRef::Rogers (1982)]]|Major Contributions={{#evt:service=youtube|id=ELbm5KUYMLM|alignment=right|description=Hakob Barseghyan's lecture on Newtonian Worldview|container=frame }}=== Newton on Mathematics and Natural Philosophy ===
Newton's two most important works of natural philosophy were the ''Principia'', published in 1687 [[CiteRef::Newton (1687)]], which dealt with his theories of motion and universal gravitation, and ''Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions, and Colours of Light'' [[CiteRef::Newton (1704)]] which was published in 1704 and dealt with his theories of light and color. [[CiteRef::Westfall (1999)]] Newton made mathematics much more central to the conduct of natural philosophy than Descartes, by producing a general mathematical theory of the motion of bodies. [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] He posited three mathematical '''laws of motion''', together with a '''law of universal gravitation'''. Changes in the state of motion of objects were caused by '''forces''' acting on them. Quantities of force and amounts of matter were measurable. The laws specified the mathematical relationship between the acceleration experienced by an object, the quantity of matter composing it, and the magnitude of the forces acting on it. [[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]]
=== Newton on Methodology ===
Prior to the publication of The ''Principia'', the philosophy of motion and change in the universe was largely a theoretical and non-mathematical enterprise. The dominating methodological approach both in the Aristotelian-scholastic and Cartesian natural philosophy, was one in which truths about the natural world were proposed as conjectural hypotheses. They were often deduced Cartesian '''rationalism'''sought to deduce such hypotheses from fundamental metaphysical principles that were deemed evidently true by human reason . [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]][[CiteRef::Lennon and Dea (2014)]]. Influenced by the more experimental and mathematically oriented methodologies of Bacon, Galileo, and Boyle, Newton drew a distinction between a conclusion drawn from observation or experimental evidence and one that was merely a speculative 'hypothesis'. He explicitly rejected the method of hypotheses, and instead demanded that all propositions be deduced from the observed phenomena and then converted into general principles via '''induction''' . [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]][[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]][[CiteRef::Smith (2002)]]. In the second edition of the ''Principia'', Newton states:
<blockquote>I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this experimental philosophy, propositions are deduced from the phenomena and are made general by induction. The impenetrability, mobility, and impetus of bodies and the laws of motion and law of gravity have been found by this method. And it is enough that gravity should really exist and should act according to the laws that we have set forth and should suffice for all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.[[CiteRef::Newton (1999)| p. 276]]</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Out of these four rules a new, engaged method for conducting science emerged that stood in stark contrast to the previous passive and theoretical Cartesian and Aristotelian-scholastic methods. Propositions formulated based on observations of the natural world and placed back into the natural world to be tested empirically.[[CiteRef::Smith (2002)]] The calculus became deeply incorporated into the experimental method, as it was used to mathematically calculate empirical predictions from natural laws, and then evaluate how exactly the prediction matched the observed reality. Newton claimed to have derived his law of universal gravitation using this method as applied to Kepler's laws of planetary motion. In the Cartesian natural philosophy, centripetal force had already been defined as the agent that pulled the moon towards the Earth, keeping its orbit circular rather than linear. Newton appealed to rules 1) and 2) to claim that the centripetal force, and the force that compelled objects to move downwards towards the Earth, were merely two different expressions of the same thing. Newton then went on to apply the third rule, and argue that this force, which he called gravity, must be a universal property of all material objects. From here, he went on to argue for the unification of superlunary and sublunary phenomena, which Aristotle had deemed to be distinct realms.[[CiteRef::Harper (2002)|pp. 183-184]]
|Criticism=Newton's theories provoked immediate and wide interest in Britain, and became accepted there by the first decade of the eighteenth century. [[CiteRef::Smith (2009)]][[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 210]] In continental Europe, acceptance came more slowly. To proponents of the mechanical philosophy, it was methodologically necessary that all motion be given a cause involving direct physical contact of bodies. Many of Newton's continental contemporaries, in particular Leibniz and Huygens, strongly objected to the idea that forces could act at a distance. Leibniz regarded the theory of gravitation as a regression in natural philosophy and accused Newton of treating gravity as an 'occult quality' beyond philosophical understanding. After an intense debate, Newtonian gravitation theory became accepted through much of continental Europe by the middle of the eighteenth century. [[CiteRef::Janiak (2016)]] [[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|pp. 211-212]][[CiteRef::Aiton (1958)|p. 172]][[CiteRef::Frangsmyr (1974)|p. 35]]
Newton's contemporaryexperimental philosophy shaped accepted claims about scientific methodology, influencing the methodological pronouncements of George Berkeley (1685-1753), LeibnizDavid Hume, in particular was concerned Thomas Reid (1710-1796), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]] However, according to McMullin, Newton's methodology ran contrary to the consensus that the theory had been emerging among natural philosophers of gravity as a regression his time, in natural philosophy, favor of what we now recognize as the '''hypothetico-deductive method'''. [[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]] Historical research shows that the scientific community did not use Newton could 's own criteria in evaluating his work. His theories did not give a mechanistic account become accepted outside of England until after their prediction of the source oblate spheroid shape of gravitythe Earth was confirmed by expeditions to Lapland and Peru. Newton's own theories became accepted based on confirmed novel predictions that distinguished them from the rival theory of Cartesian vortices, rather than by Newton's own '''inductive methodology'''. Further, Newton's theory, in fact, posited unobservable hypothetical entities, including gravitational attraction, absolute space, and absolute time.[[CiteRef::Barseghyan (2015)|p. 48-49]][[CiteRef::Terrall (1992)]][[CiteRef::McMullin (2001)]]
|Related Topics=Methodology,
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