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From: hexis@netcom.com (James C. Harrison)
Subject: Re: Heidegger
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Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 04:36:03 GMT
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Michael Tobis (tobis@scram.ssec.wisc.edu) wrote:
: David Swanson (dcs2e@darwin.clas.virginia.edu) wrote:

: : Telling the truth is telling what one believes ("to be true").  What
: : one believes are a series of notions one finds useful.

: For what it's worth, this makes more sense to me than what Wiener
: is saying. (I agree that repeating lies without checking is irresponsible,
: but it surely isn't "lying" in any sense I'd like to base the argument
: on.)

: However, this is surely not complete. It would be *useful* to me if I
: could walk off a twentieth story windowsill (ah, the window again) without
: any unfortunate consequences. There is something besides mere utility that
: affects my belief, which is an empirical observation of what actually
: happens when heavy objects are found stationary above the earth.

: To get back to my point about Galileo (which got lost in the shuffle
: abou the tower of Pisa) it was surely not a matter of convenience for
: him to observe moons of Jupiter, but he did so anyway, at enormous cost
: to himself due to his reluctance to submit to the standard social
: construction which held such a thing impossible. Why did Galileo
: believe in those things if they were inconvenient?

: Could it be an inconvenient _fact_ that Jupiter has moons?

The moons of Jupiter were anything but inconvenient for Galileo who named 
'em the Medicean stars in order to ingratiate himself with Cosimo, 
Grandduke of Tuscany. The move was a huge success. Galileo got the 
diplomatic corps at Florence to spread his book about the moons all over 
Europe and also to present various foreign rulers with telescopes to look 
at the moons. As a result of these moves that tied the astronomer's 
prestige to that of the Medicis, Galileo was made court 
philosopher with the then enormous salary of 1000 scudis a year.

It is true that the coup of discovering the moons led indirectly to 
Galileo getting in hot water with the papacy by incouraging him to 
venture a nonhypothetical version of Copernicanism. The hot water came 
later, however.

It might not hurt if somebody posting to one of these threads bothered to 
pick up at least a few particles of actual history. Scientists have a 
long tradition of making up stories after the fact to present the march 
of science as a far more straightforward operation than it evidentally 
was--the name for this sort of propaganda is Whig History and some 
gold-standard scientists have noticed that it is pretty hard to defend 
(Feynman's Lectures on Physics includes a brief discussion of this 
point.) Of course the more superficial POMO types don't contaminate their 
discussions of science with historical research either, prefering to turn 
the actual thinking of guys like Heidegger, Foucault, Bruno Latour, or 
Nelson Goodman into an abstract and banal social relativism that bears 
very little resemblance to the original.

By the way, anybody interested in the real story of the Medicean stars 
can find an exhaustive treatment of their discovery in Galileo Courtier 
by Mario Biagioli, Chicago, 1993.

hexis

