Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2013 9:24 am Post subject: Galileo
Actively read Galileo: “The Assayer” pp. 52-57. Post: According to Galileo,what is the role of experience and “authorities”? how are we able to know what we know? (and please respond to other's ideas)
Galileo seems to be almost the opposite of Aristotle in many ways. He preaches strongly against the blind following of what we think is known, specifically against many Aristotelian ideas. I found his example of horses to be quite apt: thinking is like racing, not pulling. A hundred slow horses will out pull a single fast one, but the fast horse will win the race. Galileo urges readers not to believe something because many other people believe it, but to find out the thing on your own.
To deduce and discover on one's own he seems to be in favor of experimentation. Repeated experimentation, in many environments with many factors: very similar to today's scientific method. He also seems to indirectly urge against the Aristotelian desire to fit rules to all aspects of reality: a commit may burn in the air, but that does not mean that all things do. First hand experience is important for Galileo, but he also uses quite a bit of logical thinking that may be grounded in experience. He talks about the Aristotelian idea of forms and tears it down based on physical and relatable experiences, using the sensation of tickling as an example.
In general I found Galileo very "easy going" and a pleasure to read. He seemed to make an attempt to use examples and ways of explaining his ideas that the common man would be able to understand, which explains his use of Italian instead of Latin. I also found it interesting how atomist views seemed to be slipping into his arguments, though he didn't quite seem to fully grasp or integrate the idea of the atom, it was present in his descriptions of senses and heat.
I believe the role of authority and experience are not always valued because it is possible to be proven wrong in the future. Those two things are also diminished when put besides Nature, "which remains deaf and inexorable to our wishes"(54.) It also goes on to talk more about experience which says that it is more important to rely on the experiences that we experience, instead of rely on the experiences that philosophers, poets, etc. experienced thousands of years ago.
I think the beginning part of the reading was very interesting to see how people learn what they do, such that, in order to learn we must ask questions, however the more we know, we learn that we know even less than we began with . The story of the man trying to find all of the ways to make a noise like a bird showed this idea very well. I believe the one quote that summed up the whole story very well was on page 53 (258 on the top), "And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but unimaginable."
Question: With now knowing that it is impossible to know everything, should Herodotus still be criticized for his "inaccurate" writing even though it is shown that people don't always know the answer?
Sorry, I didn't see Ben ask a question, so I will reply to one later in the day
Similarly to Ben, I really enjoyed reading Galileo, his ideas are just as ground breaking and intelligent as Aristotle but he doesn’t seem as caught up in himself as previous philosophers. (But I am not writing just to say that, because I can only pass my judgement on this small tidbit of his writing.)
Anyways relating to Ben saying that he urges people to sense and experience for themselves, he even mentions that it is their (his) obligation to, since God and Nature provided us with the tools and the things to observe we have to think for ourselves and continue rethinking. I like that part, it is not only an option but, a sort of duty.
That being his role of experience, which goes along with thinking and theory to create new ideas, his role of “authorities” is really interesting. “How much force human authority had upon facts of nature” so powerful. This makes me think about Truth, truth in relation to right and correct which has a lot to do with belief and fact. It is like truth (what has been “proven” before, and what is beleieved now like Sarsi believing Aristotle) continues or acts as an outhority, which is given its power by belief, which can limit, or hide Truth (which is more like fact, or maybe fact of everything). So I think that what Aristotle and Galilieo and all others are searching for or to explain is of course Truth, but one cannot attain all of that, but Truth is broken into parts of right(ness) and correct(ness) that explain what is happening.
(lot to think about, alters my idea of Truth).
To Lexi’s point I very much argree Galileo is pointing out the more we learn the less we know we know. To her question, I would say he should not be criticized, he simply knew what he knew. Maybe he thought to himself, as I do, that you can know what you know and you can know that you don’t know, but you cannot know what you don’t know. So if he wrote he would be partially wrong, if he wrote more he still would be, the only way he wouldn’t be is if he didn’t write at all, but that does no good. This is true of all writer and thinkers, of everyone, so I say no criticism should be had.
Question: Galileo acknowledges when trying to prove to Sarsi about the air and fire, that chance makes experiments useless (funny Aristotle said experiments didn’t matter for another reason). So how do you think he dealt with this thought, since then even if you proved something 100% is still could be brought back to this point. Do you think he gave up or do you think he reasoned through this, and how?
I think tonight’s reading can be summed up in it’s first paragraph, where Galileo states: “The less people know and understand about (matters requiring thought), the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.” (52) This sentence made the most sense of the reading to me, but I definitely understood most of the rest.
Galileo considers first hand experience the primary way to gain knowledge, saying he can’t believe “any man would put the testimony of writers ahead of what experience shows him.” (54) I think Galileo says people’s first hand experience gives them the authority to come to their own conclusions. However, he also says many peoples’ opinions only clout his judgment, because people are just as prone to making logical mistakes as he is.
He emphasizes the importance of sense experience as the basis for knowledge. “Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never” reach the conclusions humans can reach.
Responding to Lex’s question, Herodotus was not only inaccurate, but some scholars say he may have fabricated sections of his works. I wouldn’t criticize him for not knowing everything – no historian could – but I don’t trust him because of his reported dishonesty, whereas this wasn’t a big issue with Thucydides or certainly Aristotle.
Question: Footnote #19 on p. 56 say “Galileo was no philosophical empiricist.” I think we talked about what a philosophical empiricist was in class, but I’ve forgotten and didn’t find any help in the reading. Can anyone give me a definition/ point out where in the reading it talks about philosophical empiricism?
Galileo made clear that despite many people's inclination to rely on the word of intellectual authorities, this was a counterproductive practice. To but someone's word over evidence backed by frequent and varied experimentation, or even one's first-hand experience of a phenomenon, is detrimental to scientific progress. (In many ways his more conservative and skeptical approach more closely mirrors today's scientific methodology.) Just like Ben mentioned the Horse metaphor is a nicely applicable one. Its not a pulling contest, where the more believers you have the truer something becomes, its the faster horse, (or the more fleshed-out claim that is more likely to withstand the test of time.)
(Though when I think about this more it's seems that in some cases there is the potential for lies to become truth, not Truth I suppose, but truth. It would be worth-while to look at pieces by George Orwell and the general idea of revisionist history, but I'm sure wel'll get to that in this class.
Since Galileo was so concerned with the accuracy of his assertions he had no shame in admitting when he didn't fully understand the nature of a phenomenon and waiting to comment on it. To prescribe reasoning behind something he didn't truly understand would be harmful to scientific process, after all. He also made clear both in his first metaphor and his following criticism of Sarsi that many things can produce a recognizable, tangible, and easily citable effect, while their actual cause is still concealed. Similarly to Aristotle he valued experiential knowledge, which in his eyes far outweighed authority's views on a theory.
Galileo was also quite a bit easier to read than the others, providing an interesting- while pretty openly sarcastic and critical voice.
I was wondering how he had come to such accurate conclusions about the nature of taste smell and sound. (Relying on the geometry of tiny particles and wave frequencies, respectively.) The fact he came to this conclusions absolutely baffled me.
I shared Sam's curiosity in what 'empiricist philosopher" is, so I looked it up.
"The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge."(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/)
From what I learned about Galileo from this short reading, I thought he was pretty much like an empiricist philosopher (although the editor said he was not) because he advocated for first-hand experience rather than "believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am"(55). The multiple senses explained by Galileo in this excerpt are viewed by him crucial in experiencing the fuller version of the world. Although tastes, orders or sounds are never parts of our physical bodies (they are only in our consciousness instead), they are nothing if our organs haven't detected them. The combination of our bodies and the abstract things our there makes up "sensations", which is to be experienced and not told to believe by anyone else. This reminded me of Aristotle's theory on form and matter. I can't point out exactly, but I see some similarities. Did anyone else feel the same?
There are some reference to Aristotle such as when Galileo said "and as these four senses are related to the four elements."(57) I think he used "authorities" to help himself reason. You can't always claim you know what the authority knew, but maybe you can borrow what he knew and apply it in your own process of experimenting and knowing.
The editor explained that Galileo was not a philosophical empiricist because of his emphasis on reasoning.
What role do you think reason played in knowing what he knew?
I guess pure sense experience and witness isn't sufficient to know what we know. We need to transform what's on the surface to something deeper. Yes that's vague and I really don't have an answer.
And do you think seeing something can prove its existence?
Galileo, as others have mentioned was very interested in experience, believing that experience is the only guide to what we can define as truth. And while I agree with Ben in the fact the Aristotle and Galileo seem polar opposites, it is clear that Galileo respected the man; he is quick to defend his position on Aristotle, saying "But it is wrong to say, as Sarsi does, that Guiducci and I would laugh and joke at the experiences adduced by Aristotle. We merely do not believe..." (54). Galileo disliked the blind idolatry of Aristotle, not the man himself, as his supporters were unspecific and lacking in cogent argument.
It's also important to note Galileo's humility in regards to his science; he readily admits in his story at the beginning that the more we know, the more we begin to doubt what we know. I think this is the answer to zoey's question, on how Galileo dealt with chance in his experiments. I think Galileo always expected his experiments to be infallible, like Aristotle. I think his philosophy and his humility shows that he was merely trying to provide an answer. He must have believed that part of science was inevitably to be wrong, and that no one person could ever know everything. It was up to future generations to continue his work and expand upon it in the hopes of reducing what we don't know to as little as possible.
Question: Between Galileo and Aristotle, who is the father of science?
Replying to Who do you think the is the Father of Science?
I personally believe Galileo is the Father of Science. I think this because he discovered that everything revolves around the Sun not the Earth. I believe this was one of the most riveting discoveries for that time, since it was believed for so long that the Earth was the center of the Universe.
I read this yesterday and I’m exhausted right now but I’ll try my best to remember
Responding to Zoey: good question! I really liked it! I think yes, it is true that even if you proved something as 100% right at one time there’s always a chance that it might not work another time. I guess it’s more or less like choosing between the majority and minority. Galileo said that if in order to refute a point everyone had to not believe it then this point would never be refuted because out of all humans on this planet there would always be at least one person believing it, and vise versa. So I guess in the case of experimenting, it 99% times it worked and that 1% it didn’t then it would still be considered true, because the majority of the result said so.
Like a lot of people, I also found the reading easier to comprehend. About Galileo’s view on the process of gainning knowledge, I agree with what Lex and Sam said, which basically states “the more one knows, the more he doesn’t know”. This is how I think of the pattern of learning as a cycle. You begin with nothing to knowing something which makes you feel confident and comfortable; then suddenly you realize there is more and so you keep learning and find many beliefs you have had aren’t 100% true anymore, which makes you more careful (or maybe even timid) when presenting your points. “That’s why so many scientists would later trun to religion for explanation” is what my mom always says. “Because they realize Science can’t explain everyhting anymore.” But this also, I think, shows Galileo’s view towards learning from authorities. To him first hand experience is alway better.
Question: Ben mentioned that he thought Aritstotle and Galileo are very different, but it seems like Galileo also believed learning from experience was important (though his method was experimenting) and that things cannot be separated from their qualities. So are they really different? Why or why not?
Mr. Galilee refutes that one should follow popularly held belief but instead what you can experience yourself, "I say that the testimony of many has little more value than that of the few" here is were he refutes common belief as true. later he says if reasoning were like pushing a cart then he would agree the more pushers the better, i think this is interesting as it seems like a snipe at the church, the church is made up of many pushers pushing the wagon of their beliefs and as we learned at assembly (never thought id mention that acursed institution) that when the majority is behind something most follow. as for the senses he is very clear that one should experience for themselves these phenomena and that it is okay not to know how the universe works which is highly contrary to Aristotle.
question:from his writings what does it seem Mr. Galilee's position on religion and the church may be?
they were berry different in their thoughts and approaches it seems. while Aristotle did believe in learning from experience that experience was gained through observation and dissection rather than experiments. on a whole veiw of their thinking for Galilee it was ok to not know everything as he says about comets, but when Aristotle did not know something it seems as though he would make something up that would fit his writings.
For Galileo experience was the most effective way of determining something's validity. Galileo thought that testimonies of an event, no matter how many, were not true unless the event could be recreated "at any time by means of an experiment" (p. 271). One would be able to trust their own experience of an event, even if it contradicts others' testimonies. Galileo believed that experience was also the only way to understand nature, because the world was full of things no one could have imagined without experiencing.
Galileo writes that people are only able to know things that they have either experienced or made conclusions about through experimentation. For Galileo a valid experiment, one that information can be derived from, must be re-creatable, so that anyone can experience it, and must have only one variable. This allows for the observer to determine the event's cause.
In response to Sam, an empiricist is someone who believes knowledge can only be found from sensory experience. Empiricists think most information can be found via experiments using human senses. The footnotes suggests that Galileo "attached no less importance to reason than to experiment." (274).
Gahhh different from everyone I found this reading super hard to understand but I will try my best...........
In terms of how do we know what we know, I think Galileo had a very strong standpoint on the importance of experience from senses rather than authority: "it is news to me that any man would actually put the testimony of writers ahead of what experience shows him" (54) I think Galileo is super funny yet contradicting his malevolent attitude towards Aristotle here. Similar to Yiwei's opinion, I found Galileo's similar to Aristotle's in terms of their belief in sense experience, aka the empirical practice. Galileo's claims that the more one knows the more he will find himself ignorant and that logical reasoning then has to enter here to prove them real, are also very similar to Aristotle's view that "what we learn by the "inductive" process does not acquire the status of true knowledge until put into deductive form" (5) Thus, I would argue that both Galileo and Aristotle suggest to use empirical and rational methods at the same time to reach the truth.
I am very interested in the way Galileo separated the universal and the particular (I am so unsure about my usage of these terms) which was similar to the way Aristotle separated form and matter. It seems like he viewed information received from senses other than vision as a pure subjective thing that's only existing in our consciousness and cannot be true existence, while he viewed "material or corporeal substances" (56) that are perceived by vision more "real". This distinction between the tangible object and its qualities thus results in his claim that "nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers and movements". (57) While I see this separation similar to Aristotle's, their difference that I am a little confused about is that shapes and numbers are probably also qualities of matters that depend on the object, and they are as well universal instead of particular, why would they be viewed as part of reality according to Galileo?
My question is: do you think Galileo's reliance on visual input as a source of knowledge is also a reliable way for us to acquire knowledge? Or I guess I'm asking if we can truly abandon those qualities received from other sense as part of reality.
Last edited by mijiawang on Thu Jan 10, 2013 11:11 pm; edited 2 times in total
And do you think seeing something can prove its existence?
This question reminds me of Plato's cave story, in which he pictured how prisoners being chained in a cave were disguised into believing appearances as reality.
Unable to move or turn their chained necks, they could not see the puppets behind them that were casting shadow and were conceived that the shadows those puppets casts were reality.
I would say there is a difference between illusion and belief: the former being the existence we claim to see and the latter being the truth. Seeing is not the end product of truth of knowledge and according to Aristotle, we cannot acquire the status of true knowledge without reasoning, which put the knowledge into deductive form. (5)
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