The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

Compare Aristotle with Newton. Both were aiming for the same goal, a grand theory that explained the way things move and change. Their methods, however, were quite different. Aristotle but not Newton subjected his hypotheses to stringent philosophical tests. Newton but not Aristotle subjected his hypotheses to stringent quantitative tests, demanding they explain not only the qualities of motion—circular versus straight, up versus down—but also the finest details, such as the precise trajectories of the planets captured by Kepler’s laws. The quantitative tests, it turned out, were far more important. Although Aristotle carefully scrutinized all manner of natural phenomena and cared deeply about the power of his hypotheses to explain what he saw, he was typically content with accounting for broad patterns and not matters of particular detail. It is on those small facts, however, that much of science’s truth-finding power hinges. It is extraordinarily difficult, as Kuhn saw, for human beings to maintain any kind of prolonged interest in the all-important small facts. Minutiae are seldom intrinsically interesting; to transcribe them from nature is often tremendously hard work; and grand intellectual endeavors—conceptual, philosophical, systematizing—are always beckoning, luring the empirical investigator away from the lab bench or the observation post to the glittering land of ideas. Most scientific work is more like bookkeeping or long division than it is like poetic self-exp...