Scientific Explanation from Formal Causes to Laws of Nature

Abstract

The story of the changing forms of explanation adopted in the early modern sciences is too often told as a story of the wholesale rejection of the systematic Aristotelian treatment of causal questions that flourished in medieval as well as ancient science. Narratives of this sort have ignored a promising alternative way of understanding the multifaceted transformation that occurred in early modern natural philosophers’ beliefs about causality. By focusing instead on the Aristotelian tradition’s contributions to the development of rival forms of explanation, it becomes possible to characterize these new sorts of explanations against a rich conceptual background. Of course, scientific innovators in the period 1500–1800 did widely reject Aristotle’s account of the four kinds of causes as a source of acceptable theories in the specific sciences. But a more tempered view of this rejection may better reveal how the new sorts of explanations were actually conceived by their originators. THREE NOTABLE CHANGES IN EARLY MODERN SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS This chapter considers three notable changes in early modern scientific explanations. The first was a change in the overall purpose of scientific research that was initiated by those critics of Aristotelianism who relinquished Aristotle’s goal of understanding the form of each natural substance. Rather than trying to elucidate each substance’s form, early modern innovators in the specific sciences, as well as natural philosophy, sought to determine the fundamental constituent parts – whether elements or atoms – of each kind of material body and also to identify the lawlike regularities exhibited in the organization and motions of these fundamental elements or atoms.