From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

Abstract

This chapter looks into the transition from the Cartesian natural philosophy to the Newtonian one, and then to the Einsteinian science, making the following key point: though the shift from Descartes’s theory to Newton’s amounted to a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s theory, in the second shift, a great deal was retained; Newton’s theory of universal gravitation gave rise to a research program that informed and constrained Einstein’s theory. Newton’s theory was a lot more supported by the evidence than Descartes’s and this made it imperative for the successor theory to accommodate within it as much as possible of Newton’s theory: evidence for Newton’s theory became evidence for Einstein’s. This double case study motivates a rebranding of the “divide et impera” strategy against the pessimistic induction introduced in the book Scientific Realism, which shifts attention from the (crude) evidence of the history of science to the (refined) history of evidence for scientific theories.