more Biagioli

This has some relevance to what I’ve been saying about arguments. This comes from page 204 of Biagioli, and Feyerabend is footnoted:

“By assuming a presentist point of view, we would say that Galileo (or Copernicus) were ‘basically right’ in the sense that their claims are genealogically connected to those we hold today. However, at the stage of articulation at which they were published, Copernicus’s and Galileo’s theories contained anomalies and unanswered questions which problematized their acceptance. Delle Colombe’s experiment [placing a floating piece of ebony on the surface of water to refute Galileo’s theory of buoyancy] could be construed as a refutation of Galileo’s views even after Galileo had tried –with mid success– to introduce auxiliary hypotheses (like the magnetic virtue of air) to bypass that anomaly. I would say that the danger of early mortality (a common one among new and yet unarticulated paradigms) cannot be countered by dialoguing with adversaries but rather through a range of tactics aimed at gaining time so as to allow for the further articulation of one’s claim.”

“In fact, it is not at all evident that Galileo tried to dialogue with the Aristotelians– and certainly not on their own grounds. Rather, he tried to raise the stakes of the discussion by attaching all sorts of philosophical, methodological, and cosmological issues to his initial treatment of buoyancy. In doing so, he did not quite hope to convince his adversaries but to present and establish his own alternative philosophical package.”

These passages are certainly an apt summation of Galileo’s behavior during this controversy, at least as presented by Biagioli. (Presumably like most readers, I’ve never studied the primary source documents on that particular controversy.) And it does sound like Feyerabend a bit!

Concerning the latter passage, I have always been struck at how seldom either of two parties in a debate is convinced by the other. The spectators to the debate are generally the real target for convincing.