Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-03T16:54:36.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Newton: From Certainty to Probability?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Kirsten Walsh
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Newton’s earliest publications contained scandalous epistemological claims: not only did he aim for certainty; he also claimed success. Some commentators argue that Newton ultimately gave up claims of certainty in favor of a high degree of probability. I argue that no such shift occurred. I examine the evidence of a probabilistic shift: a passage from query 23/31 of the Opticks and rule 4 of the Principia. Neither passage supports a probabilistic approach to natural philosophy. The aim of certainty, then, was an enduring feature of Newton’s methodology.

Type
Evidence and Inference
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 5 , December 2017 , pp. 866 - 878
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

For valuable comments on previous versions of this article I would like to thank Adrian Currie, Niccolò Guicciardini, Craig Fox, and Alan Shapiro. The article also benefited from helpful discussions at a 2015 workshop titled “Natural History, Mathematics, and Metaphysics in the Seventeenth Century” and held at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest.

References

Achinstein, Peter. 2013. Evidence and Method: Scientific Strategies of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ducheyne, Steffen. 2005. “Bacon’s Idea and Newton’s Practice of Induction.” Philosophica 76:115–28.Google Scholar
Ducheyne, Steffen 2012. The Main Business of Natural Philosophy: Isaac Newton’s Natural-Philosophical Methodology. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunlop, Katherine. 2012. “What Geometry Postulates: Newton and Barrow on the Relationship of Mathematics to Nature.” In Interpreting Newton, ed. Janiak, Andrew and Schliesser, Eric, 69–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guicciardini, Niccolò. 2011. Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Harper, William L. 2011. Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method: Turning Data into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooke, Robert. 1665/1665. Micrographia; or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London. Repr. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1690/1690. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. ed. Woolhouse, Roger. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac. 1672. “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors: Sent by the Author to the Publisher from Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; In Order to be Communicated to the R. Society.” Philosophical Transactions, no. 80:3075–87.Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac 1726/1726. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica: The Third Edition (1726) with Variant Readings. Vol. 2, ed. Alexandre Koyré and I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Originally published as Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London).Google Scholar
Newton, Isaac 1726/1726. The “Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” Trans. from the 3rd ed. by Bernard Cohen, I. and Whitman, Anne Miller. Berkeley: University of California Press. Originally published as Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (London).Google Scholar
Whitman, Anne Miller 1730/1730. Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light. London. Repr. Minneola, NY: Dover.Google Scholar
Whitman, Anne Miller 1959–77. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. ed. Turnbull, H. W., Scott, J. F., Hall, A. R., and Tilling, Laura. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Turnbull, H. W., Scott, J. F., Hall, A. R., and Tilling, Laura. 7 vols 1984. The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1, The Optical Lectures, 1670–1672, ed. Shapiro, Alan E. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Alan E. 2004. Isaac Newton: Philosophical Writings. ed. Janiak, Andrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Alan E. 1989. “Huygens’ Traité de la lumière and Newton’s Opticks: Pursuing and Eschewing Hypotheses.” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 43:223–47.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Alan E. 1993. Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics, Method, and Chemistry and Newton’s Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Barbara J. 1983. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, George E. 2002. “The Methodology of the Principia.” In The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. Cohen, I. B. and Smith, George E., 138–73. Cambridge: Cambride University Press.Google Scholar
Walsh, Kirsten. 2011. “The Aims of Newton’s Natural Philosophy.” Early Modern Experimental Philosophy (blog), November 7. https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/emxphi/2011/11/the-aims-of-newton’s-natural-philosophy/.Google Scholar
Walsh, Kirsten 2017. “‘Quick Wit and Good Understanding’: Newtonian Certainty and ‘Compelled Assent.’” Unpublished manuscript, University of Nottingham.Google Scholar