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Objective evidence and rules of strategy: Achinstein on method

Peter Achinstein: Evidence and method: Scientific strategies of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 177pp, $24.95 HB

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Notes

  1. For more on this, see my review of Achinstein’s book in Philosophy of Science.

  2. In the inference for Jupiter’s moons, Newton also cites Proposition 3 of book 1. This generalizes the results to central bodies moving in any way whatever (Newton 1999, 448). Having the rate at which the orbiting moon describes areas about Jupiter be constant carries the information that the moon is urged by a force compounded of the centripetal force toward Jupiter, together with the whole of the accelerative force by which Jupiter is urged. Newton (1999, 449) cites corollaries according to which if the area rate is very nearly constant, the remaining force will be very nearly centripetal and, conversely, if the remaining force is very nearly centripetal, the area rate will be very nearly constant.

  3. Achinstein leaves out Newton’s (1999, 802) assertion that “the second part of this proposition (the inverse-square variation) is proved with the greatest exactness from the fact that the aphelia are at rest.” This claim is very strongly backed up by Newton’s cited precession theorem (corollary 1 of proposition 45 book 1), which makes absence of precession not accounted by perturbations actually measure the inverse-square variation of the centripetal force maintaining any given planet in its orbit of the sun (see Harper 2011, 121–122).

  4. He suggests that Newton makes the simplifying assumption that the moon’s orbit does not precess.

  5. Newton counts the sun as a planet.

  6. If in addition h is true, then e is veridical evidence for h. He provides accounts of two further concepts, subjective evidence and epistemic situation (ES) evidence. I will not discuss these concepts here, but see Staley (2011) for a discussion of the latter.

  7. In his (1983, 191–192), Achinstein criticizes “modelists” who want to formulate specific non-illocutionary standards of explanation (e.g., deductive-nomological or causal connection). This appears to be in line with the interpretation presented below of his reasoning in Evidence and Method.

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Harper, W.L., Staley, K.W., de Regt, H.W. et al. Objective evidence and rules of strategy: Achinstein on method. Metascience 23, 413–442 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-014-9902-y

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