Natural philosophers were beginning to have a special interest in the nature of words and their meaning. They needed better than they had. When Galileo pointed his first telescope skyward and discovered sunspots in 1611, he immediately anticipated controversy—traditionally the sun was an epitome of purity—and he sensed that science could not proceed without first solving a problem of language: So long as men were in fact obliged to call the sun “most pure and most lucid,” no shadows or impurities whatever had been perceived in it; but now that it shows itself to us as partly impure and spotty;
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