Abstract
Modern science began as natural philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. It was then killed off by Newton, as a result of his claim to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction. But this post-Newtonian conception of science, which holds that theories are accepted on the basis of evidence, is untenable, as the long-standing insolubility of the problem of induction indicates. Persistent acceptance of unified theories only in physics, when endless equally empirically successful disunified rivals are available, means that physics makes a persistent, problematic metaphysical assumption about the universe: that all disunified theories are false. This assumption, precisely because it is problematic, needs to be explicitly articulated within physics, so that it can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. The outcome is a new conception of science—aim-oriented empiricism—that puts science and philosophy together again, and amounts to a modern version of natural philosophy. Furthermore, aim-oriented empiricism leads to the solution to the problem of induction. Natural philosophy pursued within the methodological framework of aim-oriented empiricism is shown to meet standards of intellectual rigour that science without metaphysics cannot meet.
Highlights
It was killed off by Newton, as a result of his claim to have derived his law of gravitation from the phenomena by induction
He knew his law of gravitation was profoundly controversial, so he doctored subsequent editions of his Principia to hide the hypothetical, metaphysical and natural philosophy elements of the work, and make it seem that the law of gravitation had been derived, entirely uncontroversially, from the phenomena by induction
We need to recreate the vision of science of Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Huygens, and above all of Newton of the first edition of the Principia, a vision that sees science wedded to problematic metaphysical speculations about the ultimate nature of the physical universe
Summary
Modern science began as natural philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. Today, we think of Galileo, Johannes Kepler, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Edmond Halley, and Isaac Newton as trailblazing scientists, while we think of Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz as philosophers. He knew his law of gravitation was profoundly controversial, so he doctored subsequent editions of his Principia to hide the hypothetical, metaphysical and natural philosophy elements of the work, and make it seem that the law of gravitation had been derived, entirely uncontroversially, from the phenomena by induction. Newton bequeathed to philosophy a fundamental problem about the nature of science that, for most philosophers, remains unsolved today. It is the problem of induction, brilliantly articulated by David Hume.. Reason demands that we push through a revolution in our whole understanding of the nature of science
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