Epistemic Crises: Their Origins and Their Resolutions

Three Case Studies

Larry Laudan

8Larry Laudan 2002

Contents

Acknowledgments ........................................................................................ iii

Prologue ................................................................................................................... 1
The Conventional Wisdom about Epistemic Crises
............................................................................................................................................. 2

Proving Guilt in the Law ................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

The Backdrop: Trial by Ordeal ......................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

The Parting of the Ways ..................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
The Revival of Roman Law ................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
The Curious English Experiment..................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
The Crisis of the Jury and Its Weighing of the Evidence ... Error! Bookmark
not defined.
Guilt Beyond a Reasonable Doubt ................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Postscript .............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Torture, Once Again ............................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Conclusion ............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

Astronomy=s Struggles for Legitimacy and

Ascendancy ........................................................................................................... 8
The Science-Knowledge Equation .......................................................................... 9
The Ancient Version of the Crisis of Astronomy ............................................... 11
The Medieval Interlude ............................................................................................17
The Astronomical Revolution, Properly Speaking .......................................... 19
The Invention of Moral Certainty ......................................................................... 26
Astronomy=s Revenge ............................................................................................. 30
Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 31

The Crisis of Cosmogony, 1770-1900 Error! Bookmark not

defined.
Introduction .......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
The Background: The State of Cosmogony cerca 1800 ...... Error! Bookmark
not defined.
The Critique of Cosmogony ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Cosmogony=s Revival ......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

Epistemic Crises

Acknowledgments
[to be written]

-iii-

Epistemic Crises

Prologue
For the last quarter century, I have been thinking and writing about what I here call
epistemic crises. Progress and Its Problems (1977) was my first foray in print into this
area, although I had been musing on their nature since I first studied with Thomas Kuhn
in the early 1960s. Those of us who have written about such events -and I include here
Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, and myself among othershave sought to make our philosophisizing appear honest toil by alluding to hordes of
historical examples and illustrations that supposedly bear out our respective analyses.
(By my count, Kuhn refers to more than 200 historical episodes in his Structure of
Scientific Revolutions.) This cavalier use of history -frequently alluding to three or four
episodes in every paragraph- lends one=s writing an initial air of authority by suggesting
a mastery of large amounts of historical material. Yet among those of us who engaged in
such rapid-fire conjury of illustration after illustration, there was always the lingering
worry that a detailed analysis of some of the cases cited with such abandon might not in
fact sustain the heavy philosophical load to which they were being subjected.
Unable to speak for the others, I for one have long hoped to be able to leave such
wholesale illustration-mongering to one side and to offer, instead, a detailed analysis of
a few examples of intellectual crises and revolutions to see what light such instances
might shed on our general theories about such events. This book is the fruit of some
free time I have finally found to do precisely that.

Epistemic Crises

1
The Conventional Wisdom about Epistemic Crises
My focus in this book is on changes of epistemic standards, changes that are typically
induced by a broad perception in the relevant community of an epistemic crisis. But
what, precisely, is that? The full answer, or at least a fuller answer, to that question is
what this brief study aims to provide. Being too explicit at this stage would preclude the
open-ended investigation into how such crises function of the sort that this book aims to
exemplify. Still, to a crude, first approximation, simply to get the conversation started,
we can say that an epistemic crisis arises when one of the following situations occurs:
-researchers in some field of investigation begin to suspect that the criteria,
principles, and rules of thumb that they have been using for establishing claims to
knowledge (and this can include everything from explicit criteria of theory evaluation, to
rules for the design of experiments and trials, to the very aims of inquiry) are
unfounded;
-such suspicion about the relevant standards leads inevitably to doubt about the
theories and other beliefs that those standards have aided in selecting, that is, general
skepticism is apt to result;
-theorists in the relevant field(s) of investigation cast about trying to figure out
which elements of the existing epistemic Apackage@ to jettison or modify and,
inevitably, they explore alternative accounts of knowledge and rational belief.
Sometimes a crisis is quickly resolved by tweaking or adjustment of the standards
already in place. When this occurs, the crisis itself is usually quickly forgotten by
everyone except historians. Other times, however, no jiggering around with the current
machinery will provide a strong riposte to the concerns that initiated the crisis in the
first place. When this happens, there are generally only two responses, both radical. One
involves producing a new and more plausible set of standards that enable the
community to preserve all, or at least some, of the beliefs picked out by their previous
standards as sound. Failing that, and this is the second response, skepticism in the
discipline in question becomes endemic. As often as not (consider the cases of astrology
or phrenology), the epistemic community dissolves -save for a few true believers who
persist with the traditional practices even after they have lost their intellectual rationale.
Imagine a simple hypothetical example: an isolated tribe of natives has been
wont to decide the future by consulting the local witch doctor for advice. His procedure
has been to cast 11 stones from a leather pouch onto the table. Each stone has two sides,
one painted red, the other white. If more of the stones turn up white, then the signs are
auspicious; otherwise, they portend danger. Up to now, villagers have been consulting
the stones for deciding whether to take a journey down river by canoe today or to
postpone it, whether to organize a new hunt, whether to plant crops this month or next

Epistemic Crises
month, where to drill for water, and so on. A missionary arrives in the village one day
and sees the villagers consulting the wiseman. Eager to impress the locals (and to
discredit her rival), she goes to him to seek his advice on every aspect of her life. Each
piece of advice she receives, she ignores. His stones say she mustn=t start construction
on her church this week, so she does. They say that using river transport for bringing in
her hymnals by barge this season would be dangerous, so she arranges the shipment
immediately. And so on.
Initially, of course, the villagers think that she is crazy, ignoring, as she is, all the
signs and portents. Nevertheless, in time they conclude that she is none the worse for
that. Her church is now completed. She has suffered no apparent ill effects from
proceeding brazenly against the advice of the stone caster. Soon, several members of
the tribe stop consulting the stones before they embark on important ventures. Some of
their ventures work out, others are failures, but the skeptical villagers are no worse off
than the rest. As this pattern repeats itself, the villagers--including the witch doctor
himself- begin to wonder whether the stones are as good as they used to think they were
about predicting the future.
Here we have all the makings of an epistemic crisis. Traditional tools for the
fixation of belief no longer inspire the confidence (and the awe) they once did. Perhaps
the tradition of consulting the stones will pass into oblivion or, if the stone caster is
lucky, he can salvage his reputation. Whether he triumphs in the end or not, the
villagers have gone through an epistemic crisis.
This book focuses on the conception of an epistemic crisis, a notion that turns out
to be a good deal more complex than our simple and contrived example might lead one
to think. In this first chapter, I will briefly survey some prevalent theories about such
creatures, turning in the rest of the book to see what we can learn by looking closely at a
few specimens. Although scholars disagree about precisely what an epistemic crisis is, a
few things can be said uncontroversially, by way of introduction. For one thing,
epistemic crises are crises of authority, but authority of a particular sort. They arise
when the traditional certifier of beliefs, the doxastic authority--whoever or whatever
that happens to be-- comes under suspicion for being a less than reliable source of
beliefs and an untrustworthy ground for the actions based on those beliefs. Almost
everyone has experienced individual epistemic crises: perhaps the discovery in
childhood that parents and teachers were not always correct, or the discovery that
religious authority often gets things wrong. This book is not about individuals going
through such crises, but will focus rather on what happens when entire disciplines,
communities, cultures, or traditions pass through such a traumatic event.
Not every crisis of belief is an epistemic crisis. Sometimes we discover that a
belief we have long held no longer works, perhaps because it was dramatically refuted or
otherwise failed dismally. We know that we have to cast around for a new belief to
replace the old one, but our implicit epistemology often remains intact (especially if it
happens to be an epistemology that admits its own occasional fallibility). This is
precisely what happened to physicists when Einstein=s theory of relativity was
confirmed. They were obliged to give up many cherished Newtonian beliefs about the
nature of space and time but they were not driven to question whether their core belief-

Epistemic Crises
authenticating mechanisms, the empirical methods of physics, were legitimate. Indeed,
the most frequent pattern, when there is a crisis of belief, is to use the already in-place
epistemology to help us decide what to believe when our older beliefs no longer serve.
Accordingly, most crises of belief are not epistemic crises, in that they do not lead us to
doubt our basic belief-certifying processes. To say as much is already to acknowledge
how acute a genuine epistemic crisis will be when it does occur, for such a crisis
challenges the very tools that we have been using for determining what to believe.
During an epistemic crisis, nearly all our relevant beliefs are in doubt because we have
begun to doubt the very rules that have until now justified those beliefs.
Yet the graveness of the problems caused by an epistemic crisis goes beyond
casting doubts on everything we have previously believed. The nub of the problem is
that, having once decided that the previous epistemic regime is no longer reliable, we
have to find a new set of rules for fixing beliefs. How are those to be settled on? Put so
abstractly, it appears an irresolvable conundrum. If we think of an epistemology as like
the rules of a game (here the deadly serious game of authenticating our beliefs), an
epistemic crisis is akin to discovering that the rules of a familiar game don=t work any
longer. How, in such circumstances, do we settle on new rules? Need we infer that the
new rules are inherently arbitrary, as the rules of games are often thought to be?
The notion of an epistemic crisis is not a new one. For at least half a century,
scholars of various persuasions have been using the idea as a tool for understanding
various important, sometimes wrenching, historical changes. Probably the three bestknown accounts of the general structure of epistemic crisis are associated respectively
with the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, and Alasdair MacIntyre. All three
fastened on the idea of an epistemic crisis to characterize a specific type of intellectual
event that occurs from time to time in the history of many disciplines, communities, and
traditions.
Kuhn and Foucault believed that the answer to our question whether the
adoption of new epistemic rules is arbitrary second question should be affirmative.
Recall that for Kuhn a change of paradigm involves not only new beliefs about the world,
but also new principles (he calls them Astandards@) governing what we should believe:
In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and
standards together, usually in an inextricable mix. Therefore when
paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria
determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions.1
When the old, reigning paradigm is threatened, a Aperiod of crisis@ follows, during
which intellectuals ponder replacing it with an alternative paradigm, one that involves
both new beliefs about the world and new standards. Once a rival is found, the choice
between the old paradigm and its would-be successor(s) takes place outside the usual
rules of the game, since-according to Kuhn--the core beliefs of each paradigm look
strong by its own standards and weak by the standard(s) of its rival(s). Mutual
incomprehension reigns. Advocates on each side of the divide Afail to make complete
contact with each other=s viewpoints.@ Choice of paradigm and choice of standard must
be ultimately subjective and arbitrary in such circumstances. Notoriously, Kuhn insists

Epistemic Crises
that the acceptance of a new set of standards is a Aconversion experience@ rather than a
deliberative act.
Kuhn thinks further that communities, at least scientific communities, have a low
tolerance for the sort of near-anarchy that is often characteristic of epistemic crises;
accordingly, he maintains that crises are invariably short-lived events, punctuating
much longer periods of Anormalcy,@ where nearly all the members of the relevant
community agree on the appropriate standards to use.
If you prefer the Gallic version of matters intellectual to the Anglo-Saxon one, you
can find much the same family of notions in Foucault=s doctrine of an Aepisteme.@2
Foucault was struck by the fact that from time to time, the implicit and explicit
epistemic standards (what he called the Aepisteme@) of a community abruptly
underwent a mighty shift, a Arupture.@ A new episteme ushers in the possibility of new
forms of knowledge, new forms of science, and new forms of discourse, while it
simultaneously closes off or renders unintelligible older forms of discourse and thought.
When such a change occurs, those working within the later episteme are literally
incapable of understanding or communicating with those still wedded to the former.
Such shifts of episteme are obviously profound and far-reaching events, and (like
Kuhn=s paradigm shifts) they are irrational upheavals. No plausible and compelling
story can be given about why the victor triumphed or why the vanquished lost.
Even with only these thumbnail sketches before us, we can already see that we
must be alert to several things in examining the two crises that form the case studies of
this book. We will want to ask, for instance:
$
Are epistemic crises generally brief interludes in an otherwise crisis-free history?
$
Are epistemic crises always associated with changes in all the other elements of
the belief complex of a community or a discipline?
$
Do those on opposite sides of an epistemic crisis fail to grasp the issues at stake,
always or generally talking past one another?
$
Is the adoption of a new epistemic regime, following a crisis, irrational and
subjective?
I said that MacIntyre has also had much to say about epistemic crises. In brief,
what his analysis adds to this mixture is a stress on continuity and tradition from one
paradigm to its successor. His principal argument is that a new paradigm or episteme
cannot succeed unless its advocates can construct what he calls a narrative, a historical
account that ties together past and present into a coherent tale of progress and
development. The resolution of an epistemic crisis requires, in his words, Athe
construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or
she could have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so
drastically misled by them.@3 On this account, the abrupt ruptures of Kuhn and Foucault
give way to a very different picture in which the success and the rationality of a later
paradigm depend upon its being able both to explain why its predecessor once seemed
so plausible and why, despite that plausibility, it ultimately failed. What establishes the
rationality of the replacement of one paradigm or set of epistemic standards by another,
according to MacIntyre, is the ability of the successor to characterize the transition from
the one paradigm to the other as a perfectly natural progression from a good way of

Epistemic Crises
doing things to a better way. For him, changes of paradigm or episteme are not the
Aruptures@ that Kuhn and Foucault took them to be. He denies the radical
incommensurability between successive epistemic regimes (to pick a term neutral as
between paradigms and epistemes) that Kuhn and Foucault took as fundamental. For
our purposes, the chief question we will need to ask of our case studies, relative to
MacIntyre=s analysis, is simply this:
$
Do the proponents of new and successful epistemologies have the resources to
construct the inclusive, face-saving narratives for their predecessors that
MacIntyre regards as so crucial?
Apart from Kuhn, Foucault and MacIntyre, the views of one further thinker
should be mentioned, if only as a warning. I refer to Karl Popper. Both he and his many
disciples tend to the view that epistemic crises, at least as understood here, are
nonexistent. Their position is that, as a species, we humans are all more or less
hardwired to accept the same epistemic rules and principles. Popperians grant that
intellectuals can and often do disagree about their substantive beliefs about the world.
However, when it comes to standards, they hold that these are not up for negotiation
and are never subject to genuine debate.
When Popperians encounter apparent cases of epistemic crisis, that is, of
thinkers who question prevailing epistemic norms, they regard the resulting dispute as a
largely verbal affair with no real substance, a mere querrelle de mots, since deep down
we and our fellow creatures share the same cognitive apparatus and the same epistemic
instincts. Little more will be said directly in this volume about the Popperians (apart
from urging them to look and see), but it is important for the record to stress that many
contemporary thinkers do not share the author=s view that epistemic crises are real. I
invite such readers to regard this book as a test of the hypothesis that disagreements
and debates about epistemic standards do much to drive some of the most important
changes of belief and practice. If, as they insist, there are no important divergences
about epistemic standards within and between disciplines and traditions, then it should
be impossible to construct the sort of stories that I try to tell. If, as I hope, these stories
appear more than a little plausible, it falls to them to devise alternative narratives for the
events described here, narratives that do not hang their central story line on epistemic
disagreement and crisis.
Of course, much, much more needs to be said about epistemic crises than I have
sketched here. Indeed, more will be said in chapter five but to spell out the idea any
further at this point would be to jump the gun. The motive for exploring the detailed
case studies of the next three chapters is to give us ample fodder for speculating about
how epistemic crises arise and how they are resolved.
Before getting down to the details, a brief explanation is in order as to the choice
of case studies included here. There is a wealth of possible examples that could have
been chosen, ranging from the crisis in 19th-century Protestant thinking in the wake of
Darwin s discoveries to the crisis in contemporary psychoanalytic thought in the face of
the failure of Freud=s proposals for the clinical validation of psychoanalytic diagnoses.
Rather than select such timely topics--where we are still very much in media res, and
where the crisis is far from over--I have decided to dredge further back in the historical

Epistemic Crises
record in order to focus on epistemic crises that began, went on, and ended definitively.
My examples come from the criminal law, from astronomy, and from cosmogony and
span the time spectrum from antiquity to the beginning of the 20th century.
I have tried to be mindful of the need to select examples as different from one another as
I could make them, so as to avoid whatever bias might creep in by limiting one s
examples entirely to the natural sciences or to one epoch in history. Another reason for
the seemingly idiosyncratic pairing of examples from science and the law is that both
these intellectual traditions, and their associated institutions, are widely conceived as
epistemological engines, whose primary function is to crank out true beliefs--either
about the guilt of an accused, about the structure of the heavens, or about the history of
the cosmos. Beyond that, these three cases are fascinating in their own right as examples
of the kind of high drama that intellectual life and academic debate can sometimes
provoke. My method will be to describe each largely in its own terms in the next three
chapters, leaving the final chapter for some philosophizing about what these cases might
lead us to conclude about the strengths and weaknesses of the received view of epistemic
crises.

Epistemic Crises

3
Astronomy=s Struggles for Legitimacy and
Ascendancy
Despite Kepler and Galileo, we believe today, with Osiander
and Bellarmine, that the hypotheses of physics are mere
mathematical contrivances devised for the purpose of saving
the phenomena. -Pierre Duhem (1908)4
Astronomy, we like to imagine, is one of the oldest sciences. Remains of protoobservatories dot the globe, according to archeologists. Cultures as diverse as the
Chinese, the Egyptians, the Mayans, and the Druids all had calendars based on
careful observations of changes in the heavens. Our astronomy, that of the West,
is generally dated from the Babylonians, who accumulated several hundred
years= worth of data about the motions of the planets, the Sun and the Moon,
data that were to proof invaluable to Greek astronomers up to and including the
great Claudius Ptolemy in the first century A.D. Along with Euclid=s Geometry,
the Almagest of Ptolemy is nowadays regarded as the most important and
influential scientific work of the ancient world. I rehearse these familiar facts
because they serve to underscore how closely astronomy sits to center stage in
our conception of the early story of scientific progress.
It may, therefore, come as something of a surprise to realize that, through
most of the last two millennia, astronomy=s status as a legitimate, let alone as a
genuine and important, scientific subject has been much in dispute. This second
case study will focus on the shifting epistemic fortunes of astronomy from
antiquity to the early modern era when, finally, mathematical astronomy gained
acceptance as a genuine science, at the very heart of the Scientific Revolution of
the 17th-century. Astronomy=s historical vicissitudes in this period mirror a
broader series of crises about the nature of science and knowledge in the West
that touched most of what we now call the sciences, including areas far afield
from astronomy itself, such as medicine and mathematics. I will focus chiefly on
astronomy, however, because its evolution exhibits those crises in a particularly
stark and salient fashion. But before moving straightaway to the heavens, our
study must begin, for reasons to become clear shortly, with a topic much less
sublime, namely, early Greek medicine.
By the 5th century, B.C., medicine in Greece had already marked itself off
from the healing arts practiced in most other cultures by adopting two postulates:
One was a naturalistic premise to the effect that diseases were not to be
understood as mysterious visitations from the gods, to be cured by exorcisms or

Epistemic Crises
prayers, but as imbalances due to perfectly natural and ordinary causes, such as
diet, exercise, bad water, freak weather, and the like. The second key postulate of
Greek medicine, that of empiricism-- associated especially with the school of
physicians around Hippocrates--insisted that all medical doctrine was to be
grounded in, and scrupulously checked against, the experience of the patient and
his physician. Because of this second doctrine, the followers of Hippocrates
quickly became known as Aempirics,@ or (as we should say) empiricists.
Hippocrates= opponents were the Adogmatists,@ such as Empedocles, who
thought that medical knowledge should begin from certain grand theoretical
posits (such as atoms, or elements, or basic qualities) and proceed, not by the
Hippocratic method of generalization and induction from detailed case histories
of patients, but rather by a firm grasp on the underlying causes and principles of
life and disease. Hippocrates and his school cast themselves as defenders of the
empirical tradition in medicine against these theoretical interlopers who were
keen to integrate medicine within a broader framework of physics and chemistry.
By the fourth century, B.C., the Hippocratic school was facing an even
stiffer challenge. Plato and Aristotle had joined the battle on the side of the
grand theorists, arguing that all genuine science, medicine included, must be
grounded on self-evident first principles. Indeed, it was the upshot of their
analysis that medicine, if done in Hippocratic fashion, could not be considered as
a science at all but simply as a version of superstition.
The Science-Knowledge Equation
Both Plato and Aristotle articulated a sharp distinction between knowledge and
mere opinion (opinion, in those days, was almost always Amere@). Knowledge
was said to consist of those propositions that we know to be true, that could not
be otherwise, that are fully certain. Opinion, by contrast, was more or less all the
rest of our beliefs. It included everything from completely ill-founded speculation
to beliefs that were generally reliable but still fell short of certainty. Plato and
(especially) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) appropriated the knowledge-opinion
dichotomy as a tool for defining what could be genuinely regarded as a science. In
a word, science was knowledge. Or better, science was a special sort of
knowledge, one that was causal and theoretical, that involved finding the
essences of natural objects and then deducing from those essences propositions
about the detailed behavior of things. Because there were certain types of
knowledge that were not part of genuine science (for instance, various forms of
practical knowledge), we must resist any identification of the two. But this much
may be said without qualification: there was, for Aristotle, no authentic science
that was not a part of knowledge.
This doctrine, developed at length in his Posterior Analytics, entailed that
where there was lack of certainty (and thus mere opinion), there could be no
knowledge and hence no science. To say that Aristotle=s view of things was
enormously influential is vastly to understate the case. For almost two millennia,

Epistemic Crises
the prevailing view of the nature of science involved this Peripatetic insistence
that science is knowledge and therefore certain and infallible. (Even now, in
vestigial testimony to the onetime ubiquity of this notion, we speak of Ascientific
knowledge@ rather than Ascientific opinion,@ despite the fact that most of the
central doctrines of the sciences are clearly opinion rather than knowledge.)
It is universally agreed that the philosophers=s paradigm science (for
Plato as much as for Aristotle) was that of geometry. It was, as we would now
say, an axiomatic system, whose axioms or first principles were thought to be
self-evident. The geometer deduced theorems from these axioms and thus
developed a comprehensive account of the properties of lines, planes, and solids.
Given that the axioms of the system were self-evident, all the theorems were
likewise certain, since deduction was truth-preserving. No one who understood
the axioms of geometry could fail to perceive, on due reflection, the truth of the
theorems of the system.
From our perspective, of course, the choice of geometry as the paradigm
science is more than a little curious since there is no room for consulting
experience, let alone doing experiments, in geometry--save possibly at the
beginning when it comes to evaluating the truth of the axioms. For us, geometry
is scarcely a science at all, precisely because it fails to require that its conclusions
be checked against experience. It doubtless is a form of knowledge, but science it
is not, understanding (at least as speakers of English do) that being scientific
requires the empirical confirmation of one=s hypotheses. Greek philosophers saw
things almost exactly in the reverse fashion. They did not say that the empirical
was unscientific per se but, as we will see in detail shortly, they were inclined to
suppose that empirical checking of theoretical doctrines was inevitably
inconclusive and thereby incapable of producing anything at the theoretical level
except opinion.
While the immediate target of Aristotle=s critique of opinion
masquerading as science were the practitioners of medical empiricism, it should
be clear that his analysis of what was necessary for an activity to be genuinely
scientific likewise had profound implications for astronomy. Like the physicians,
most early astronomers had been empiricists of a sort, carefully cataloging the
movements of heavenly bodies and attempting to find in those motions some
general patterns. The astronomers no more began their craft with self-evident
first principles than the physicians did and the astronomer was almost as far
removed from Aristotle=s privileged science, geometry, as the doctor was.
Aristotle thought he could change all that, at least as far as the science of
the superlunary regions were concerned. To that end, he tried his hand at
constructing an astronomy that would be genuinely scientific by his own criteria.
Specifically, in his book on the heavens, De Caelo, he developed the ideas of his
contemporaries Eudoxus and Callipsus into a very elaborate model of the
heavens, generally known as the theory of homocentric spheres. (See diagram 1.)
According to this model, the Earth sits motionlessly at the center of the heavens
while everything revolves in uniform circles about the Earth. The fixed stars, and

Epistemic Crises
everything else, complete one revolution every 24 hours, producing the familiar
diurnal motion of the heavens. Beyond that, each of the planets (including the
Sun and the Moon) engages in more elaborate motions, still uniform and
circular, that compound with the diurnal motion to produce the cosmic dance
that we see in the night sky. Very roughly, the planets (but not the fixed stars)
have a west-to-east motion along the ecliptic, as well as a universal east-to-west
diurnal revolution. The speed of this contrary motion is not the same for all of
the planets. This explains why different planets take different amounts of time to
return to same point on the celestial sphere. According to this model, the
observed motions and positions of heavenly bodies are compounded out of these
individual motions, each of the latter being both geocentric and uniform.
Aristotle=s arguments for the theoretical postulates he makes are
generally a priori and metaphysical: Heavenly bodies move in circles because it is
the essence of the heavenly stuff so to move. Circular orbits have neither
beginning nor end and are thus eternal. The motion of the heavenly bodies must
be uniform because any change in their (orbital) speed would require the
intervention of some other object or force and that is not conceivable in a
changeless heaven.
To a rough, first approximation, the astronomy of Aristotle functioned
well enough. It could, for instance, explain such subtleties as retrograde motion,
when a planet briefly appears to double back on its own path. It likewise made
sense of solar and lunar eclipses and the phases of the Moon. But it was far from
flawless. Most prominently, it could not explain, and appeared to be flatly
refuted by, the fact that both the brightness and the apparent size of many
heavenly bodies change periodically. (For instance, Venus and Mars sometimes
appear five to six times as bright and as large as at other times.) Those
phenomena seem hard to square with the Aristotelian postulate that such planets
always remain at a constant distance from the Earth, especially if we combine it
with another familiar Aristotelian dogma to the effect that, besides motion, there
are no sources of change in the heavens.
These empirical anomalies notwithstanding, Aristotle=s theory of the
cosmos won many adherents, not least because it seemed to be grounded, as
geometry, on a set of self-evident truths, in this case truths about heavenly bodies
rather than points and lines. By the beginning of the Christian era, the received
Ascientific@ picture of the cosmos--except among working astronomers- was that
it was both geostatic and geocentric. That exception, the handful of professional
astronomers, proved to be the source of the crisis we will examine.
The Ancient Version of the Crisis of Astronomy
It was not long after Aristotle developed his model of the heavens before serious
astronomers concluded that Aristotelian cosmology -at least insofar as it involved
homocentric spheres--simply would not do.5 The evidence that planets change
their distance from the Earth, evidence derived especially from observations of

Epistemic Crises
their size and brightness, made Aristotle=s constant-distance-to-the-Earth
postulate simply unacceptable to anyone concerned to Asave the observable
appearances,@ as they were wont to phrase it. Accordingly, astronomers began
exploring models that might offer the resources for explaining such changes in
size and brightness. Above all, these models would have to postulate a variable
earth-to-planet distance in order to accommodate the relevant anomalies.
Most prominent here were the eccentric and the epicycle models. Put
simply, a planet moving along an eccentric was revolving uniformly about a point
that was not the center of the Earth. With such a motion, the planet would
obviously sometimes be closer and sometimes farther away from us, thus
explaining changes in brightness and apparent size. In the epicyclic model, the
planet would be carried uniformly around a circle (the epicycle) whose center
was itself revolving uniformly around the Earth. This system too would allow the
planets=s distance (and thus their apparent sizes and brightnesses) to vary
significantly. Even more exotic was the equant, utilized extensively by Claudius
Ptolemy (fl. 2d cent. A.D.). Here, the planet revolves in a circle about a point
different from the Earth (like an eccentric) but its motion is not uniform with
respect to either its center of revolution or to the Earth. Rather, there is another
point, the so-called equant point; the planet=s motion is uniform only in the
sense that, relative to the equant point, it sweeps out equal angles in equal times.
(Needless so say, this is not what Aristotle and Plato had in mind when they
insisted that heavenly motions be Auniform.@) [LL: diagrams of the three
mechanisms]
Quite clearly, these models of the astronomers disagreed with the
geometry Aristotle had attributed to the heavens: homocentric spheres had been
laid completely to one side. Still worse, they violated certain core principles of
Aristotelian physics regarded as self-evidently true, such as the axiom that the all
heavenly bodies moved about the center of the Earth, and the axiom that
heavenly motions were uniform with respect to their center of revolution. If
these plausible postulates of Aristotle=s physics were right, the newly emerging
astronomical theories simply had to be wrong. The nagging worry was that the
latter fit the facts, saved the phenomena, far better than any known system built
on Aristotelian foundations seemed able to. This conflict between the physics of
Aristotle and the physics implicit in the models of the astronomers was one part
of the epistemic crisis that was to dog astronomy for the next millennium and
more.
But the problem facing the astronomers was not only a clash between a
plausible Aristotelian physics on the one side and an empirically powerful
astronomy on the other. If one accepted the models of the astronomers, one was
in fact and in effect repudiating the very notion of scientific knowledge that Plato,
Aristotle and other Afoundationalists@ had worked so hard to articulate and
defend. This is because astronomy, done as such professional astronomers as
Ptolemy wanted to do it, did not begin from axioms known to be true. On the
contrary, it began with postulates that were, in many cases, implausible,

Epistemic Crises
arbitrary, and theoretically unmotivated. Still worse, the astronomers could not
derive the motions of the heavens from their core axioms. They had to constantly
consult observation and jigger around with the relevant parameters until they
were able to reconstruct the motions of the heavens. Their models of motion
were thus a congeries of core assumptions (themselves not all self-evident) and
other doctrines opportunistically invented to handle some anomaly or other. I
have already mentioned the problem posed by the equant, a core assumption that
utterly lacked theoretical rationale.
An equally acute problem of the second, parameter-fitting sort will
illustrate the conundrum. In designing his models for the Aouter@ planets (Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn)--said to be outer because they were beyond the Sun in the
ancient scheme of things--Ptolemy adopted a curious assumption. It supposes
that the line drawn from an outer planet on the circumference of its epicycle to
the center of that epicycle was always parallel to the moving line between the
Earth and the Sun. (Technically put, that the radius vector of the planet to its
epicycle center always moved as the radius vector between the Sun and the
Earth.) [LL: diagram]
There was no conceivable theoretical or physical motivation for this
assumption in a geostatic astronomy such as Ptolemy=s. Quite the reverse, it
cries out for some theoretical justification as to why there should be any
connection between a planet=s motion around its epicycle and the motion of the
Sun relative to the Earth. Ptolemy had none to offer. Still worse, he lacked any
direct empirical evidence for this presumed connection. He could not observe the
location of the center of an epicycle of an outer planet and note the location of the
planet relative to that center. But neither could he dispense with this postulate.
Without it, he could not fix the parameters of the model of any outer planet.
Yet--thought the philosophically orthodox--what sort of Ascience@ can it
be whose assumptions (such as this) are themselves adopted without rhyme or
reason? This premise of a solar component to the motion of the planets is about
as non-self-evident as any principle one can imagine. One might have expected
that the response from the astronomers to this serious challenge would be
something along these lines: it is true that our core postulates have no initial
justification, but they acquire their plausibility, their scientificity, from their
evident success in explaining and predicting the heavenly motions. That is, one
would expect them to emphasize the empirical credentials of their science in the
face of challenges to its theoretical coherence, saying (as Newton would sixteen
hundred years later, when challenged as to the coherence of his notion of
gravity): Athese are the facts, whether we have a theoretical understanding of
them or not.@
Unfortunately, this response was not open to the astronomers for two
quite distinct reasons. One of them had to do with the Greek understanding of
the nature of logic and inference. The Skeptics aside, the Greeks generally had no
quarrel with the claim that one could use experience to establish the truth of
specific, observable claims about the world (e.g., Athis planet is brighter than that

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one@) or even to establish general laws of nature (e.g., AAll crows are black@).
They were not proto-Humeans, skeptical of every inference from a specific
instance to its generalization. On the contrary, it was in precisely this manner
that Aristotle believed that the first principles or axioms of a science were
established, via the mind grasping Athe universal that inheres in the
particulars.@ What did bother Greek logicians a great deal, however, was any
argument that had the structure:
If this hypothesis H, dealing with unseen things, is true, then we
should expect to observe O.
We do observe O.
Hence H is true.
This was universally recognized by Greek philosophers as a logical fallacy, which
of course it still is. (Logicians call it the fallacy of affirming the consequent.) Now,
Ptolemy=s theory was in trouble because any attempt to ground it empirically
seemed to be an instance of this fallacious argument. Ptolemy might have said,
for instance, that his controversial postulate of a solar component in the motion
of the outer planets is established or made at least probable by the fact that such
a postulate enables him to predict and explain the motions of such planets. Yet
Ptolemy knew too much about ancient logic to suppose that he would be
permitted to argue thus. Similar problems afflicted any Greek scientist who
might seek to ground his theoretical speculations on post hoc, empirical
confirmations. Showing that an hypothesis has true consequences, even many
true consequences, does nothing to establish the truth of that hypothesis, since
false theories can and do have many true consequences. Greek empiricism, as we
might call it, was hobbled by this result. None of the ancient masters of empirical
science -certainly neither Ptolemy nor Galen nor Hippocrates- had a convincing
rejoinder to the claim that the post hoc confirmation of theoretical hypotheses
was inevitably inconclusive and incapable of producing certain, scientific
knowledge.
As if to underscore the acuteness of the problems associated with using
confirmation as a test of the truth of hypotheses, Greek astronomers themselves
made a series of discoveries that chipped away at any pretension of astronomy to
scientific status, and those discoveries collectively provide the second reason why
Greek astronomers could not take the simple empiricist way out. Specifically,
Greek astronomers discovered that they were certain pairs of models of planetary
motion that, although profoundly different in their geometry, were
observationally indistinguishable. Consider but one example among several. [LL:
diagram] Take, on the one hand, a standard epicyclic picture. Call the deferent
radius r and the epicycle radius, R. The motion generated by a planet driven by
these two motors will be exactly the same as that generated by a planet that

Epistemic Crises
moves in a circular path with diameter R around a point that is itself moving
uniformly around the Earth at distance r. Dynamically, these are quite different
pictures: in the first case, a planet=s primary orbit is around a stationary point,
the Earth. In the second, the planet=s primary (or larger) orbit is about a point
that is itself revolving in space. Ptolemy and the other Greek astronomers who
discovered these results insisted that there was no possible observation from the
Earth that could distinguish between these two different models.6
But, if true, that is a body blow to the possibility of grounding astronomy
on some form of empiricism. The latter doctrine, after all, insists that we must
look to experience to decide what theories we should accept. But in examples of
this sort, experience is apparently powerless in principle to drive our choice,
since our observations would fit equally well with either model. This problem of
the underdetermination of theory by observation seemed to foreclose any
attempt to ground one=s choices of astronomical model on experience alone.
To make matters still worse, the empiricism of Ptolemy, like that of
virtually every other ancient thinker except Claudius Galen, was both primitive
and undiscriminating. Driven by the Platonic slogan Ato save the phenomena,@
it failed to distinguish between what a theory explained and what it predicted,
between especially salient facts and largely insignificant ones, and between
confirmations that were powerful and those that were weak. What it aimed to
establish, rather, was a full and complete concordance between the consequences
of a theory and what could be observed.
One particularly telling instance of this failure to grasp the probative force
of certain sorts of data occurs in an intriguing discussion by Ptolemy in his
cosmological tract, Planetary Hypotheses. There, he uses his theory of the
nesting spheres of the planets in order to derive the minimum distance from the
Earth to the Sun.7 He checks this theoretically derived value against the already
known value of that distance (computed by Ptolemy=s predecessors on the basis
of elaborate measurements made during solar eclipses) and discovers that his
theoretical value (1,080 earth radii) differs by only about 7 percent from the
independently ascertained value (1,160 e.r). Instead of regarding this (as we
moderns would) as a stunning confirmation of his theory of nesting spheres,
Ptolemy frets about the fact that the two values -the predicted and the observedare not in perfect accord!8 He proceeds to propose some ad hoc adjustments of
certain parameters of his model (especially the Earth-Moon distance) in hopes of
reducing the discrepancy. The point is that what could have been touted as a
striking empirical success of his system becomes, instead, a mildly embarrassing
anomaly, to be explained away. With such friends, ancient empiricism needed no
enemies.
By late antiquity, the status of astronomy had become thoroughly
confused. Philosophers generally inclined to the view that the a posteriori
methods of proof used by the mathematical astronomers were inherently
inconclusive and that, accordingly, quantitative astronomy could not claim a
legitimate place among the sciences. For their part, astronomers were apt to

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distinguish the cosmological part of their work from their mathematical models.
Prepared to concede that at least some of the latter were indeed underdetermined
by the evidence, they nonetheless insisted that they genuinely Aknew@ many
things about the heavens beyond any reasonable doubt. This cosmological
knowledge would have included the beliefs that the Earth is more or less in the
center of the cosmos; that the cosmos, like the Earth itself, is a sphere; that the
Moon and Sun are closer to the Earth than Jupiter and Saturn; that the source of
the planets= illumination is reflected sunlight; that eclipses of the Moon are
caused by the passing of the Earth between Sun and Moon; and scores of other
doctrines. Beyond this, their mathematical models, scientific or not, had proved
themselves remarkably good at predicting the movements of the stars, the timing
of eclipses, and changes in brightness and apparent size of the planets.
What was at issue was whether these impressive achievements could
justify astronomy=s pretensions to be a genuine science or whether, in the final
analysis, empirical astronomy was simply a pseudoscience, perhaps full of useful
rules of thumb but utterly lacking in conceptual coherence. The dilemma was
obviously acute. Either astronomers had to abandon what they regarded as their
best theories (because those theories didn=t exhibit the credentials demanded by
the prevailing standards) or else they had to replace those epistemic standards
themselves. The only even mildly promising alternative epistemology, some form
of empiricism, was itself undermined by technical arguments mounted by the
astronomers themselves.
Unfortunately, neither ancient astronomers nor ancient philosophers had
the epistemological tools for resolving this conundrum. To the question, ADoes
empirical success constitute a criterion for being scientific?@ no one had any
plausible, positive answers -although there were plenty of plausible denials. As
we will see below, the defense of a theoretically rich, empirical science, replete
with unobservable entities and invisible mechanisms, had to wait until the 17th
century. In the meanwhile, it was a largely a priori physics and a purely a priori
geometry that remained the paradigms for scientific knowledge throughout Late
Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Euclid and Archimedes
invariably took pride of place over Ptolemy in ancient catalogues of the sciences.
Under such circumstances, Ptolemaic Astronomy--in retrospect the crowning
scientific achievement of the ancient world- struggled with only modest success
to secure a place for itself in the scientific scheme of things.
Clearly, empiricist epistemology was in crisis and that crisis infected any
activity -like medicine or astronomy- that depended on an inference from the
empirical success of a theory Abackwards@ to the truth of the postulates which
generated the empirical success. Under such circumstances, astronomy would
remain an activity of dubious credentials until either the crisis of empiricism was
resolved or astronomy was properly axiomatized.
Powerful testimony to the magnitude of the crisis facing astronomy is
provided in a famous passage from the that philosophical commentator of late
antiquity, Simplicius. Paraphrasing an earlier argument from Geminus, he

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writes:
Physics has the power to provide demonstrations concerning the
size, shape and arrangement of [the heavenly] bodies. Astronomy
is not prepared to say anything about this . . . It happens frequently
that the astronomer and the physicist take up the same subject . . .
But they do not proceed in the same way. The physicist must
demonstrate every single one of his propositions by deriving it from
the essence of bodies . . . The astronomer, on the other hand, is not
equipped to contemplate causes, unable to tell us, for instance,
what cause is responsible for the spherical shape of the Earth and
the stars. . . . he fells obliged to posit certain hypothetical modes of
being which are such that, once conceded, the phenomena are
saved. . . .The knowledge of what is by nature at rest and what
properties the things that move have is quite beyond the purview of
the astronomer. He posits, hypothetically, that such and such
bodies are immobile, certain others in motion, and then examines
with what [additional] suppositions the celestial appearances
agree.9
From a classical point of view, this characterization of astronomy is thoroughly
damning: astronomers don=t give demonstrations, they don=t deal with causes,
they posit hypothetical models and then merely check them against experience,
unable to know whether what they have put in motion and what they have left at
rest really are as their models describe. It would be bad enough if the astronomer
had to depend on the physicist for causal explanations of the heavens. It is
utterly devastating that the astronomer can but say that his models Asave the
phenomena@ since nothing whatever follows from this about whether those
models are true or false.
The Medieval Interlude
With the fall of Rome, serious astronomy ceased to exist in what had been the
Latin West (and almost everywhere else for that matter). By the tenth century,
however, it was very seriously pursued in the Arab world, both in a variety of
royal observatories and in many of the universities of Islam. Islamic astronomers
had Arabic translations of the relevant texts of Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy,
among many others, and intellectuals had no difficulty quickly identifying the
ambiguous attitudes of the Greeks with respect to the astronomy-physics nexus.
Nor had they any trouble deciding who had won the standoff between Aristotle
and Ptolemy over the scientific status of astronomy. With very few exceptions,
Arabic astronomers accepted the argument that epicycles, eccentrics, and
equants were implausible mechanisms, however successful they might be
empirically. The Arab inference from that fact, however, was not to dismiss the

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pretensions of astronomy to scientific status. On the contrary, the remedy -as
they saw it- was the development of a new astronomy that would avoid the
awkward and ungainly mechanisms of the Almagest. Their would-be solution to
the crisis of astronomy was, in effect, to deny that the crisis was epistemic, in the
sense that the epistemic foundations of science were under threat. Rather, they
insisted that the flaw must lie with the astronomy itself, whose models must be
brought into line with Aristotle=s strictures on the nature of science. Accordingly,
much of Islamic astronomy consisted in efforts to develop a theory of the heavens
which, while rivaling Ptolemy=s empirical success at saving the phenomena,
could do so while retaining those elements of Peripatetic physics that the Arabs
held to be self-evident.
Specifically, as Pierre Duhem points out, Arab astronomers and physicists
like Averros (1126-98) and Avempace (d. 1138) Atried to construct an astronomy
from which epicycles and eccentrics were both banished.@10 Generally, this
involved a revival of Aristotle=s theory of homocentric spheres, supplemented by
new mechanisms added on to handle changes in apparent size and brightness.
The Arabs had little patience with Ptolemy=s refinements, insisting (with
Averros) that Awe find nothing in the mathematical sciences that would lead us
to believe that eccentrics and epicycles exist.@11 While granting that Ptolemy=s
astronomy excelled at saving the phenomena, they balked at the mechanisms he
used to accomplish that task. Averros again: AThe epicycle and the eccentric are
impossible . . . in our time astronomy is nonexistent; what we have is something
that fits calculation but does not agree with what really is.@12 When he refers to
Afitting calculation,@ Averroes means, of course, that Ptolemy=s astronomy fits
the observed motions of the heavenly bodies and enables us to predict their
positions. But such empirical success as this counted for little among those who
hankered after an a priori physics and astronomy. Despite strenuous efforts
during two centuries and more, Arabic astronomers found no satisfactory
replacement for Ptolemy=s unwanted geometric contrivances. But not even this
failure was enough to force them to re-think their definition of what scientific
knowledge amounted to.
By the time serious astronomy arrived again in Europe (the 13th century
and beyond), much the same attitude prevailed as in Islam. Aristotle=s physics
was accepted as gospel -by the philosophers if not the theologians. More
important, the Aristotelian definition of science remained canonical. Judged
against those yardsticks, the astronomy that the Scholastics inherited from the
Greeks looked singularly unpromising. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) spoke for the
majority when he insisted, even while conceding that Ptolemaic astronomy fit the
facts better than the system of homocentric spheres, that:
The assumptions of the astronomers [referring to the models of
Ptolemy] are not necessarily true. Although these hypotheses
appear to save the phenomena, one ought not affirm that they are
true, for one might conceivably be able to explain the apparent

Epistemic Crises
motions of the stars in some other way of which men have not as
yet sought.13
Astronomers like Ptolemy, according to Aquinas, sought to justify the belief in
Aeccentrics and epicycles by the fact that we can save the sensible appearances of
the heavenly motions by this hypothesis.@ ABut,@ he goes on, Athis is not really a
probative argument, since the apparent movements can, perhaps, be saved by
means of some other hypothesis.@14
Aquinas=s refrain is by now familiar. What is wrong with Amerely@ saving
the phenomena is that one does not thereby rule out the possibility that some
alternative, but observationally equivalent, configuration represents the way
things really are. Short of being able to rule out the other possibilities, one is left
with mere opinion, and that amounts to neither knowledge nor science.
There were in the Middle Ages occasional dissenting voices to this
consensus about the conventionality of mathematical astronomy. One
astronomical voice in the wilderness was that of Bernard of Verdun. He argued
that one can save the phenomena perfectly well with Ptolemaic epicycles and
that, for all the talk of the possibility of other configurations, no one had actually
been able to produce an alternative mechanism which worked anything like as
well. Nothing else matters, says Bernard, except Athe truth of the conditional: If
the epicycles and eccentrics did exist, the celestial motions and the other
phenomena would occur just as they do now.@15 What Bernard does not explain,
of course, is how to bridge the gap between a) our current ignorance of workable
alternatives to Ptolemaic models and b) the claim that no such models exist, for
the latter is what was required in order to establish the scientific status of
quantitative astronomy. A science of Awhat ifs@ is no science at all.
The Astronomical Revolution, Properly Speaking
Almost everyone holds that the astronomical revolution was ushered in by the
appearance of Nicholas Copernicus=s new heliocentric system. Many authors,
from philosophers to poets, have waxed eloquently about the profound changes
involved in Copernicus=s displacement of man from the center of the universe to
an insignificant rock somewhere in the heavens. Profound though this change
was, it is crucial to stress that Copernicus=s work did little or nothing to resolve
the crisis about the scientific status of astronomy. Instead, it simply intensified
that crisis. The Copernican heresy managed not only to reinforce the traditional
philosopher=s conviction that mathematical astronomy was founded on
absurdities (Athe Earth moves@) but it also brought theologians, Catholic and
Protestant alike, into the fray, who were mightily offended that astronomers like
Copernicus would presume to correct Scripture. The theologians, like the
philosophers, insisted that a mathematical theory of the heavens -whether
geocentric or heliocentric- simply was not bona fide knowledge and ipso facto
could not be genuine science so long as it depended on post hoc checking of its

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results.
Besides providing additional theoretical reasons for worrying about the
status of astronomy, the system of Copernicus failed significantly to improve
much on its Ptolemaic rival. Contrary to what some commentators have claimed,
the Copernican system was not simpler than Ptolemy=s, requiring about the
same number of different epicyclic motions to explain the planet=s behavior as
the latter did. (Yes, Copernicus did use epicycles.) Nor was it ontologically
simpler in the sense of postulating fewer entities. For instance, Copernicus like
Ptolemy had every planet carried about on a crystalline sphere.16 The astronomer
and historian Owen Gingerich has argued persuasively that the best available
Ptolemaic models of planetary movement yielded predictions that were of the
same degree of (in)accuracy as those derived from Copernicus.17 The one place
where Copernicus=s model was a significant improvement on Ptolemy=s, the
motion of the Moon, provided no general argument for heliocentrism, since
Copernicus=s Moon, as much as Ptolemy=s, was in a geocentric orbit. At the
empirical level, therefore, there was likewise little basis for choosing between the
two, especially until the invention of the telescope.
Copernicus published his principal astronomical work, De Revoutionibus,
from his death bed in 1545. Containing a preface written by Andreas Osiander,
its overseer on Copernicus=s behalf, the book created a stir even before its
publication. Copernicus himself was an unabashed realist about the core
premises of his new system. The Earth really moved, he maintained, and the Sun
was the center of the Solar System. Historians of science have long reminded us
of how counterintuitive both of these premises were. Is it possible that we could
be on an Earth rotating on its axis and revolving about the Sun and still be
completely unaware of that motion? The answer of Galileo (1564-1642),
Copernicus=s self-appointed defender and advocate, was an unequivocal yes.
Indeed, the whole point of what we still call the doctrine of Galilean relativity of
motion is that the observable behavior of most things here on the Earth would be
precisely the same whether it was absolutely at rest or in uniform motion.
That, of course, does not establish that the Earth is moving, only that it
might be. Still worse, Galileo=s argument has the probably unintended
consequence that it renders empirical observations of relative motion and rest
impotent to decide between heliocentrism and geocentrism: a rock would fall
more or less straight down whether it were dropping on a stationary or a moving
Earth. (Once more, empiricism suffers at the hands of astronomers who have no
tool other than experience for conducting their battles against the physics of
Aristotle.)
That notwithstanding, Galileo maintained -as had Copernicus before himthat the heliocentric system is true and that astronomy must be considered a
science capable of delivering veridical belief. But this was more bluster than
argument. Neither Copernicus nor Galileo had definitive grounds for insisting
that astronomy was a science in the classical sense (which both accepted as
correct) of consisting of indubitable theories about heavenly motions.18 Nor, as

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Copernicus and Galileo themselves admitted in their more candid moments, did
they have any proofs (as opposed to arguments from aesthetics or from mere
plausibility) for the core theses of heliocentrism. Indeed, as noted before,
Galileo=s most powerful and influential argument ostensibly in favor of
Copernicanism is that there is nothing in observation or in a sound physics that
refutes the heliocentric system.19 (This is rather like saying that we know that
angels exist since there is nothing in our experience that refutes their existence.)
It follows that, if we would identify those who resolved the millennial crisis
of astronomy, we must look elsewhere--principally to Kepler, to Descartes, and to
Boyle- in order to grasp the complex of factors that led to the definitive
enthronement of astronomy as the queen of the sciences . It was those theorists,
not the philosophically challenged Copernicus nor the brash Galileo, who
articulated and defended a notion of the nature of science that could finally
secure an undisputed place for astronomy among the sciences and could, at the
same time, resolve the epistemic crisis that had plagued astronomy since
antiquity.
Let us begin with Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). Although best known
among moderns for his three laws of planetary motion, and his meticulous
derivation of the elliptical character of planetary orbits, Kepler=s interest to us
lies elsewhere, especially in his lifelong project to work out the physics of the
heavens. By that, I mean that he was concerned to figure out what forces caused
the heavenly bodies to move as they did. Unwilling to accept the age-old idea that
the planets moved in perfect circular paths (or paths compounded out of perfect
circles), he broke much more sharply with his predecessors than Copernicus or
Galileo had dared to do. Perhaps, he surmised, the planets don=t move in circles
at all, and perhaps they are not carried along by moving crystalline spheres but
by virtue of forces emanating from the Sun.
Kepler was suddenly blurring the classical boundaries between physics,
astronomy, and cosmology, and was doing so quite deliberately. (The opening
sentence of his most important book, THE EPITOME OF COPERNICAN ASTRONOMY, is
the provocative salvo: AAstronomy is a part of physics.@20) In virtually all these
investigations, his method was to postulate one or more hypotheses and then
rigorously explore what the world would be like if those hypotheses were true.
He knew perfectly well that this way of going on had been in bad epistemic repute
for two millennia. That didn=t deter him because he saw, as few of his
predecessors had, a way around the dilemmas that had been dogging empiricism
for so long.
Basically, from the time of Ptolemy and even before, astronomers had seen
the empirical checking of their hypotheses as simply a matter of comparing
(some of) the consequences derived from their models against what we observe
in the sky. An agreement between what our theories entail and what we have
thus far observed was about all that pre-Keplerian empiricism could offer. Kepler
insists that such a wholesale and indiscriminate empiricism is open to all the
charges of bad logic and inconclusiveness that had traditionally been brought

Epistemic Crises
against it. But there is, he insists, another way to be a good empiricist.
Kepler rightly recognizes that he is up against two quite distinct
challenges. One of them is that which arises from the presumed fact that, for any
hypothesis which fits the facts, there will be (possibly many) others that fit the
facts too. Let=s call this Kepler=s version of the problem of empirical
equivalence of rival hypotheses. The second difficulty that any empiricist faces is
the oft-repeated argument that since false hypotheses can have true
consequences, the possession of true consequences by some hypothesis of
interest does nothing to establish its truth. On this view of things, in order to
show by experience or observation that an hypothesis is true, one would have to
examine all its consequences and that is patently impossible for any typical
scientific hypothesis. Let=s call this the problem of the partiality of testing.
The first explicit recognition that these were the two principal sources of
epistemic unease about astronomy came a generation before Kepler. It was the
Ptolemian, Christopher Clavius (1537-1612), who in 1581 explicitly formulated
the hurdles that an empirical astronomy faced. It was, he insisted, the sceptics
about the possibility of astronomical knowledge who must be confronted:
They concede that, on the assumption of eccentric and epicyclic
spheres, it is possible to explain all the phenomena; but hold that it
does not thence follow that the said spheres are to be found in
nature: first, because it may be that all the appearances can be
accounted for in some yet more convenient way as yet unknown to
us; second, because it may well be that the phenomena can be
explained by the said spheres even though they be purely fictitious
and in no wise the true cause of those phenomena: just as a true
conclusion may be inferred from a false premise.21
Clavius points out that this skeptical critique of astronomy has far-reaching
implications, going well beyond astronomy itself. Indeed, he warns that the
whole enterprise of natural science would be Adestroyed@ if one did not permit
fallible inferences from observed effects to unobserved causes:
For whenever anyone inferred a certain cause from its observable
effects, I might say to him what they [the skeptics about astronomy]
say to us -that forsooth it may be possible to explain those effects by
some cause as yet unknown to us. 22
If one is not justified in inferring from the phenomena that there are epicycles
and eccentrics Ajust because a true conclusion may be inferred from a false
premise, then the whole of Natural Philosophy will be destroyed.@23 Kepler has
precisely the same concerns, as we will see in a moment. I mention Clavius=s
complaints first to stress that it was not only the Copernicans or heliocentrists
who were reeling under the force of the skeptics= arguments about the
illegitimacy of astronomical knowledge. Geocentrists as much as heliocentrists
were bridling at the efforts of mainstream (but generally nonastronomical)
thinkers to deny scientific status to the project of grounding one=s theories
about the heavens on experience and observation.

Epistemic Crises
Kepler saw perfectly clearly that if the crisis of astronomy, and the
attendant crisis of empiricism were to be ended, one would have to find plausible
solutions to both the problem of empirical equivalence and that of partial testing.
Otherwise, he feared, the astronomer would continue Ato be excluded from the
community of philosophers who inquire into the nature of things.@24 Although he
grappled with these issues throughout his career, his most sustained effort to
deal with them can be found in his Defense of Tycho against Ursus, written in
1600. He deals at greater length with the problem of empirical equivalence than
with the problem of partial testing, though he has interesting things to say about
each.
Concerning the problem of empirical equivalence, he says that people have
jumped too readily to the conclusion that, if one hypothesis (or astronomical
system) can save all the phenomena, then there must be others that can do so
every bit as well. To the contrary, Kepler denies that two genuinely different
astronomical hypotheses can ever really be such that they have all the same
physical consequences. It is true, he concedes, that different hypotheses may
yield the same predictions about observed locations of a planet on the celestial
sphere. Yet line-of-sight observations do not exhaust the kind of evidence that an
astronomer can collect. Consider the example of Venus. For the sake of
argument, let=s assume that Ptolemy=s and Copernicus=s models each predict
all the same coordinates for Venus as their rival does. Does this mean that we
cannot use experience to discriminate between these theories? Certainly not. For
instance, within the Ptolemaic system, where Venus is revolving around the
Earth in an orbit between the Earth and the Sun, we would expect that, whenever
Venus=s coordinates correspond with those of the Sun, Venus will pass between
us and the Sun, creating a dark spot on the Sun=s surface (technically known as a
solar transit). By contrast, in the Copernican system, Venus will share the same
celestial coordinates as the Sun whether it is passing on the far side of the Sun,
relative to the Earth, or the near side. When the former circumstances obtain,
Venus would simply be occluded rather than appearing as a dark spot on the
Sun=s surface. Because of this difference, the astronomer in principle can use
careful observations of Venusian transits to choose between the system of
Ptolemy and Copernicus, because they are not observationally equivalent, even
if they yield exactly the same celestial coordinates for a planet.
Kepler generalizes this sort of argument against observational
equivalence, concluding that:
If a man assesses everything according to this method, I doubt
indeed whether he will come across any hypothesis, whether simple
or complex, which will not turn out to have a conclusion peculiar to
it and separate and different from all others.25
People have been misled into imagining that there are many pairs of empirically
indistinguishable hypotheses, Kepler thinks, because they have imagined that the
sole astronomical task is that of predicting the place where a heavenly body will
appear at a given time. Once we realize that there is more to a knowledge of the

Epistemic Crises
heavens than positional astronomy, we can recognize that most cases of
seemingly equivalent hypotheses turn out to be empirically distinguishable.
AEvery hypothesis whatsoever,@ he insists, Aif we examine it minutely, yields
some consequence which is entirely its own and is not shared with any other
hypothesis.@26
What about the second problem, that of the incomplete character of the
testing process? Recall that the difficulty here arose from the universally
acknowledged fact that false hypotheses may have some true consequences.
Absent achieving the impossible (by investigating every possible consequence of
an hypothesis), how can one be confident that a hypothesis that has so far stood
up well to an investigation of its consequences will continue indefinitely to do so?
What Kepler is up against here is nothing less than knowledge-certainty
assimilation that had driven thought about these matters ever since Plato and
Aristotle. Examining a finite number of the consequences of an hypothesis, even
if we discover them all to be true, obviously cannot Aprove@ that the as-yet
unexamined consequences will likewise be true.
Kepler=s strategic response is bold: he concedes the point, but denies its
salience. Of course, he acknowledges, the ordinary, empirical checking of an
hypothesis cannot prove it to be true as opposed to merely probable. But
suppose, he continues, that the hypothesis can do some things out-of-theordinary? Suppose, for instance, that it not only explains the phenomena of the
heavens that we have to hand but that it can also successfully predict presently
unknown phenomena? Kepler stresses that what impressed him mightily about
the Copernican system was Athe admirable agreement between his
[Copernicus=s] conceptions and all [the objects] which are visible in the sky; an
agreement which not only enabled him to establish earlier motions going back to
remote antiquity, but also to predict future [phenomena] . . . much more exactly
than Ptolemy, Alfonso, and other astronomers.@27 Kepler seemed to believe that
it was one thing for an hypothesis to explain why we already know about the
world; it is quite another, and epistemically much more potent, if it can predict
correctly things that we don=t now know.
If surprising predictions count for a great deal, so does a rather different
trait of certain theories, viz., their ability to explain a very diverse range of
different kinds of phenomena. While a false hypothesis may well be able to
explain a few things successfully, we generally find that such hypotheses do not
hold up well in the face of being applied to many and diverse facts. Kepler=s view
was that false hypotheses would quickly Abetray themselves@ by failing when
they were applied to phenomena very different from those which suggested them
in the first place.28
He cites one further trait of powerful hypotheses in order to quell the
skeptic. Many hypotheses and systems, he says, can explain certain things about
the heavens, while they leave other prominent features unexplained. (The
hypothesis is not thereby falsified because its failure is not that it says false things

Epistemic Crises
about these phenomena; it simply says nothing at all. Kepler thinks that there is
good reason to be suspicious of all such hypotheses that are silent where they
should speak. He cites as an example the fact that Ptolemy=s theory postulates,
but does not explain, why Mercury, Venus and the Sun all have the same period,
one year. This is simply taken within Ptolemaic theory as a brute fact about the
heavens. By contrast, the Copernican theory can offer an explanation for it,
namely, that, being inferior planets moving about the Sun, Mercury, and Venus
would appear from a moving Earth to require the same time as the Sun to
complete a revolution. AThings,@ he says, Awhich arouse our astonishment in the
case of other [astronomical systems] are given a reasonable explanation by
Copernicus.@29 Kepler cites several other examples of celestial phenomena
treated simply as brute facts by Ptolemy which receive a plausible causal
explanation from Copernicus.
As should already be clear, what Kepler is struggling to do is to articulate a
new version of empiricism, a new theory of experience. It begins with an explicit
recognition (as the critics of empiricism had long argued) that simply knowing
that the examined consequences of a hypothesis are correct is inconclusive. But,
having granted that point, he does not draw their conclusion that scientific
hypotheses are merely fairy tales. Rather, his approach is to stress that what is
important is the kind of known consequences we are dealing with. If the
examined consequences represent facts already known when the hypothesis was
devised, then the hypothesis garners little support from them. If all the examined
consequences involve the same sort of behavior, we likewise have no basis for
credence. By contrast, if the hypothesis successfully predicts new kinds of things,
if it explains a wide diversity of phenomena, and if moreover, it can explain facts
that rival theories have to assume as unexplained, then Kepler thinks that the
standard skeptical arguments no longer apply. When all these criteria are
satisfied, thinks Kepler, we can be sure that the hypothesis we are dealing with is
really true.
Clearly, Kepler=s is a highly nuanced empiricism. It replaces the
traditional empiricists= refrain about Asaving the phenomena@ by a recognition
that some phenomena have much higher probative value than others. It
responds to the sceptics= challenge that false hypotheses can have true
consequences by insisting that false hypotheses cannot have true consequences of
the particular sort that Kepler has described. Still, we have to ask ourselves: Is
this enough to establish that such hypotheses are known with certainty and that
they thus qualify as scientific in the canonical sense? Kepler obviously thought so
as this revealing remark of his about Copernicus clearly reveals: ACopernicus
thought his hypotheses were true . . . . And he did not merely think so but he
proves that they are true.@30 Sad to say, Kepler=s explicit arguments won=t carry
him and Copernicus this far. Even if it were so (which surely it is not) that no
false theory ever predicted new phenomena successfully, explained a wide
variety of phenomena, and explained many facts treated as unexplained
primitives by its rivals, that would still be no more than a contingent empirical

Epistemic Crises
fact, insufficient to establish the certainty of any hypothesis that exhibits these
virtues. To find the tools to leap that final hurdle, we must leave Kepler to one
side and look to a succession of thinkers later in the 17th century who take the one
step that Kepler was reticent to take: breaking with the demand for full certainty.
The Invention of Moral Certainty
Ren Descartes (1596-1650) tends to be known to modern audiences chiefly as a
philosopher and inventor of the famous cogito argument. Among his
contemporaries, however, Descartes was admired at least as much for his science
as for his philosophy. He wrote books on geometry, optics, and astronomy.
Naturally enough, it was in his scientific works that he considered at length the
question of the status of astronomy as a form of scientific knowledge. Like Kepler
and the whole astronomical tradition preceding them, Descartes acknowledged
that the methods of astronomy do not permit the straightforward derivation of
observable facts from one=s a priori first principles. Hence, an Aristotelian
science of first principles is not possible in astronomy. Instead, one must, said
Descartes, propound conjectures or postulates, which are then to be compared
with what we see in the heavens around us. The crucial question, of course, was
whether this feature of astronomy precluded its claims to possess infallible
knowledge and, if so, whether that in turn preempted the possibility of a science
of astronomy. Descartes=s response to this conundrum was different from
Kepler=s. Rather than insisting that the empirical checking of a theory can, under
the right circumstances, produce certainty, he insists that the notion of certainty
itself requires some teasing out.
Specifically, Descartes distinguishes between two types of certainty: what
he calls Amoral certainty@ and the more traditional type associated with the
truths of logic and mathematics. The first type, none other than our friend from
chapter 2, will prove of paramount interest to our concerns. Basically, moral
certainty is the sort of conviction we have about the most secure beliefs in our
ordinary life. For instance, Descartes claims that although he never visited Rome,
he is nonetheless Amorally certain@ that it exists, since so many ordinarily
reliable witnesses have told him so. Likewise the beliefs that the sun warms the
body or that water nourishes plants are morally certain. Of course, in principle,
they could all be mistaken and thus these beliefs are not entitled to the same sort
of certainty possessed by necessary, self-evident propositions, such as the truths
of arithmetic or geometry. But, says Descartes, we have no reason whatever to
doubt the existence of Rome and powerful reasons to accept its existence, just as
we have no reason to doubt that the Sun provides warmth or that water
nourishes. It is that situation -weighty arguments and evidence in favor of a belief
and no independent, specific reasons to doubt it -that characterizes moral
certainty. Put differently, we are morally certain of a belief when the only
remaining doubts about it, if any, are those arising from a generalized scepticism,
one which insists that possibly everything we believe is erroneous.

Epistemic Crises
What Descartes aims to show with this doctrine is that the disciplines of
physics and astronomy contain theories that exhibit moral certainty; that feature,
he will claim, entitles them to scientific status. But he faces a problem. It is one
thing to argue for the moral certainty of those things that we see (or, as in the
case of Rome, that others have seen); it seems to be quite another to argue that
our beliefs about things that are both unseen and unseeable can exhibit this sort
of surety. He explicitly acknowledges the problem he is up against. Speculating
about the unseen world, he says, is akin to the conjectures one might make upon
stumbling across a watch whose cover one could not open. One might theorize
about its internal mechanisms, but how could that ever produce knowledge? He
writes:
Just as an able watchmaker can make two watches that mark the
hours in the same way even though their internal mechanisms have
nothing in common, so is it possible that God possesses an infinity
of diverse ways in which he might make all the things of this world
appear exactly as they do, without it being possible for the human
mind to discern which among those various means he actually
chose to do things.31
We see here, of course, a version of the standard argument against the viability of
inferring the unseen from the seen. Having acknowledged the problem, Descartes
sets out to solve it, invoking a rather different metaphor. Imagine, he says, that
we discover a letter written in code. We try to decipher the letter, substituting one
letter for another, until -if we are lucky- we find that a certain substitution
formula produces a message that is perfectly intelligible. In such circumstances,
we immediately jump to the conclusion that our Adecoding@ is correct and that
we have correctly identified the content of the message. But, of course, maybe
our key was wrong, and we just happened on a decoding which, while producing
intelligibility, does not get to the real message of the document. While
improbable, says Descartes, that is nonetheless possible. But suppose, varying
the example slightly, that the message is a very long one. Our confidence that we
have the right key increases in direct proportion to the length of the message. The
likelihood that a mistaken key would enable one to render intelligibly a very long
message is so remote as to be inconsequential.
That, he says, is precisely the position of the physicist-astronomer who can
use his hypotheses to explain things in the world as diverse as Athe heavens, the
magnet, light and fire.@ Under such circumstances, the conviction that our
hypotheses have identified the Atrue causes of things@ becomes as strong as the
conviction that a successful decoding of a lengthy message must be the right
decoding.32 What justifies our confidence is not (as Aristotle would have liked)
that we have deduced our hypotheses from some set of self-evident axioms. On
the contrary, what makes us morally certain of the truth of our best scientific
hypotheses are their impressive empirical credentials, that is, their ability to
explain a great many, diverse things about the world.
It is useful to contrast this version of empiricism found in Descartes, with

Epistemic Crises
that exemplified by his contemporary, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). In his NOVUM
ORGANUM, Bacon stressed the importance of the single, telling Acrucial
experiment,@ which would simultaneously confirm one hypothesis and refute its
rival(s). Baconian empiricism shared the classical ideal of science as fully certain
knowledge. Bacon=s self-appointed charge was to find ways to prove hypotheses
beyond any possible doubt, using empirical methods and tests. Eliminative
induction, that is, the systematic elimination via empirical refutation of all the
possible rivals to a given hypothesis, was the last-ditch effort of the empirical
tradition to cling onto classical certainty as the aim of scientific inquiry. Unlike
Bacon, the advocates of moral certainty were not looking for the singleton
Akiller@ experiment that would settle once and for all the truth of an hypothesis
by vanquishing its rivals. On the contrary, they stressed that what produced
moral certainty was a situation in which diverse and independent strands of
argument and evidence pointed in the same direction. Moral certainty could
never emerge from a single experiment or observation: it must be the product of
a certain type of aggregation of confirming instances. Just as, in the law, one
strand of evidence (say one witness who places the defendant at the scene of the
crime) should be insufficient to convict, so one or even a small number of
confirmations of one=s hypotheses are insufficient to establish their moral
certainty.
Descartes is emphatic that moral certainty of this sort is still not full
certainty or full proof, for even when we have moral certainty, it is (just)
conceivable that we are wrong. But, he insists, moral certainty is a sufficient basis
to construct a science upon. The astronomer and the physicist need not apologize
for producing hypotheses that are morally certain since such hypotheses-properly tested against a wide and diverse variety of the phenomena-- and
lacking known alternatives that perform equally well, can provide us with bona
fide scientific knowledge.
Precisely the same message about the centrality of moral certainty in
science comes from the writings of Descartes=s younger contemporary, Robert
Boyle (1627-91). Like Descartes, Boyle held that what was important was not so
much whether an hypothesis fit the facts as we know them but rather whether the
facts against which an hypothesis is being assessed are of the right sort, in
terms of their variety and their quantity. AIt is,@ he insists, Amuch more difficult
to find an hypothesis, that is not true, which will suit with many phenomena,
especially if they be of various kinds, than but with a few.@33 It is better still, says
Boyle, if the hypothesis --in addition to explaining many and various facts-- can
lead successfully to the prediction of new kinds of facts. Indeed, he counts the
ability to successfully Aforetell future phenomena@ as a solid basis for moral
certainty.34
It should not go unnoticed, for it is of primary importance, that the new
prophets of a genuine science of astronomy in the 17th century (and I mean
especially Kepler, Descartes, and Boyle) all insist that their picture of astronomy
as a postulational or hypothetical activity which depends on sophisticated post

Epistemic Crises
hoc confirmation is not limited to astronomy itself. On the contrary, each insists
that this is in fact the method of all the natural sciences, and most especially of
physics or (as it was then called) natural philosophy. On their analysis,
astronomy is no longer to be regarded as a kind one-off oddity because it
depends on post hoc confirmation. On the contrary, and rather than proceeding
in the traditional manner of aspiring to raise astronomy to the same lofty footing
as physics, they turn the tables on that tradition by insisting that physics is on
precisely the same epistemically humble footing as astronomy. They then add the
crucial rider that such a footing need not be epistemically parlous, provided that
the right kind of evidence is forthcoming to secure one=s hypotheses. In the
same vein, John Locke insists that all branches of natural philosophy -including
both physics and astronomy- are systems of hypotheses, capable of yielding
moral certainty but not knowledge in the traditional sense. [LL:ref]
Ever since Newton=s time, there has been much talk of the so-called
Newtonian synthesis. This term refers to the fact that Newton managed to
explain numerous celestial and terrestrial phenomena utilizing the same
explanatory principles and laws. The significance of this is usually said to be that
Newton thereby dissolved the age-old, ontological divide between the heavens
and the Earth. But a more salient interpretation of the significance of the
Newtonian synthesis arises out of the themes we have been exploring here. By
deriving both physical and astronomical phenomena from his initial hypotheses,
Newton exhibited the ability of those hypotheses to explain, and often to predict,
an unheard-of diversity of phenomena. Prior to the 17th century, that attribute
would not have had much epistemic currency, since the mainstream tradition
assigned no particular importance to explaining very different kinds of facts. But
viewed in the context of our discussion, Newton=s ability to explain terrestrial
and celestial phenomena using the same principles qualified his theory for being
regarded as possessing a moral certainty that none of its rivals could lay claim to.
The scientific community, for its part, quickly came to regard Newton=s system
as morally certain and continued to do so until the end of the 19th century.
The invention of moral certainty--of belief free of any specific reasons for
doubt and with strong positive support--was a godsend. It simultaneously
resolved the epistemic crisis of empiricism and the disciplinary crisis of
astronomy.
Historians of rhetoric may well take issue with my claim that moral certainty was
Ainvented@ in the 17th century, reminding us that medieval and renaissance
thinkers had recognized a category called moral certainty long before the
scientists and jurists thought of using it. But such a suggestions would, I think,
be to mistake the use of a term for the meaning of a concept. While it is certainly
true that the term Amoral certainty@ has an ancestry dating from well before,
that phrase had never taken on the meanings that Descartes, Boyle, Wilkins and
a host of others were to give it. The latter were the ones who suffused that old
notion with a new content that proved to be very potent for defusing important
crises in European natural philosophy and in English law. Concepts are invented

Epistemic Crises
in as strict a sense as words are and their invention is vastly more important.
Astronomy=s Revenge
One of the fascinating features of this case is the way in which, through the
course of the 17th century, the relation of physics and astronomy changed so
dramatically, and generally in astronomy=s favor. Recall that ever since the
Greeks, physics had been accorded pride of place among the natural sciences,
hailed because of the self-evidence of its core principles and its seeming lack of
need for post hoc empirical testing. Ever since Ptolemy, astronomy--without a
priori certain axioms and desperately needful of less than conclusive empirical
testing- had suffered badly from the comparison.
By the end of the 17th century, the tables had turned completely.
Astronomers were still conceding that the first principles with which they began
were not intrinsically intelligible or inherently true but now the astronomers
could insist that such principles were nonetheless capable of acquiring high
credibility through their eventual connection with the phenomena via prediction
and explanation. More than that, the astronomers were able to watch as the
physicists were obliged to acknowledge that their own much touted Afirst
principles@ were nothing more than garden-variety hypotheses, requiring the
same sort of inconclusive empirical confirmation that astronomers had long been
derided for resorting to. Physics, in short, came to adopt the postulationalempirical method of the astronomers, once the astronomers had been able to
refine that method into a powerful tool for research and discovery. The much
vaunted epistemic and methodological divide between physics and astronomy
collapsed and with it the pretensions of physics to learn about the natural world
from the armchair.
The notion of what is Ascientific@ changed forever in the process. By the
end of the 17th century, with few exceptions, the classical Platonic- Aristotelian
notion of a science of indubitable first principles had been relegated to the scrap
heap of history. More, the crucial science-opinion distinction had been shattered.
Thenceforward, scientific knowledge would, reluctantly but unambiguously, be
seen to be opinion through and through, albeit opinion that was, at its most
robust, highly reliable. Moral certainty -strong empirical support combined with
the absence of specific reasons for doubt-- came to replace full certainty as the
guiding aim of scientific inquiry. Science, like the law, learned in the 17th century
to live with the fallibility of its most important judgments.
Modern science continues, more or less, to use the same criteria for
evaluating theories as those articulated by Kepler, Descartes and Boyle. These
have, of course, been vastly enhanced with the development of statistical
techniques in the last 150 years. But most scientists remain persuaded that the
best theories are those that simultaneously explain a broad range of data, make
successful surprising predictions, and offer explanations for phenomena that
their rivals leave unexplained. I believe that there has been no innovation in

Epistemic Crises
scientific epistemology in the last 250 years that has had so large an impact on
science as the 17th-century articulation of criteria for moral certainty.
Conclusion
Almost a century ago, the well-known scientist-historian, Pierre Duhem (18611916), visited many of the same events discussed in this chapter, using them as
the narrative backdrop for his highly influential monograph, TO SAVE THE
PHENOMENA.35 Before concluding, we must pause briefly to compare notes, as it
were. What I have been describing as the Acrisis of early astronomy@ Duhem saw
in very different terms. He was one of the most vocal and ingenious defenders of
the doctrine usually known as instrumentalism. According to this way of
thinking, the aim of science is not to explain the world, let alone to get at its
fundamental building blocks; rather, he thought that the scientist=s goal should
be the description, prediction and correlation of observable phenomena. The
entities postulated by the theoretical models of the science do not point to
anything really in the world, but serve merely to facilitate calculation and
prediction. Accordingly, he saw the events that precipitated the crisis of
astronomy in altogether salutary terms. Early astronomers, as Duhem thought,
were discovering just how acute the limits of theoretical science were and how
precarious it was to suppose that one=s theories and models actually captured
anything fundamental about the world.
He saw the hankering of the Aristoteleans, the Arabs, and the Copernicans
after some sort of Atrue@ account of the unobservable structure of the heavens as
completely quixotic. For him, the medieval and renaissance skeptics were right
to infer that astronomy in particular (and science in general) had no privileged
access to the underlying structures responsible for movement and change in the
world. He characterized the response of pre-Copernican professional
astronomers (except the Arabs) to the crisis of astronomy as one of general
acquiescence in the relegation of astronomy to a domain of subjects that are less
than genuine and robust sciences. (In this, I think that he is about as wrong as it
is possible for a historian to be. The number of professional astronomers who
accepted an instrumental reading of the aims and methods of astronomy is a tiny
fraction of the whole. It was generally the philosophers and theologians, who had
their own reasons for devaluing astronomical theory, who were in the vanguard
of foisting this view onto astronomy.)
Revealingly, Duhem ends his narrative with Copernicus and Galileo. His
selection of that cut-off point can have been no accident. If one looks at the sort
of unconvincing arguments that Copernicus and Galileo gave for believing that
atronomy produced certainty, one can triumphantly conclude, as Duhem did,
that most of the powerful philosophical arguments were on the side of the
skeptics about astronomy=s pretensions to status as genuine knowledge.
However, had Duhem continued the story through another century (as we
have done here), it would have been clear that there was a very different moral to

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be drawn. What resolved the crisis of astronomy was not, as Duhem would have
preferred, a broad acceptance of the idea that theories and models are not to be
interpreted as candidate structures for how the world really is. Rather, what
resolved that crisis was the recognition that all such structures are fallible and
may have to be abandoned, as new evidence becomes available. But that
recognition, more or less complete buy the end of the 17th century, did not entail
(as Duhem often liked to suggest) that theories were radically underdetermined
by the data nor that theories should be regarded merely as calculational Ablack
boxes,@ making no claims about basic structures or underlying mechanisms.
Duhem stopped the story at the beginning of the 17th century because it
was only by freezing the debate there that he could infer that his own
instrumental view of theories had been borne out by the vagaries of astronomical
history. He said nothing about the emergence of the doctrine of moral certainty
and the solution it provided to the conundrums that had dogged astronomy=s
claim to scientific status since antiquity. To have done so would have forced
Duhem to grapple, as he never did in his philosophical work, with the notion that
certain sorts of empirical tests can establish the superiority of one set of
theoretical structures over another. It would likewise have obliged him to revise
his famous view (later appropriated by Quine) that any theoretical model can
always be reconciled with the evidence, however recalcitrant the latter may
appear to be.
The unequivocal admission of astronomy to the pantheon of the sciences
was not, as Duhem would have it, the final victory for instrumentalism and its
Spartan view about what theories assert. It was, rather, a triumph for a
fallibilism that takes theories and the claims they make deadly seriously.

Epistemic Crises

1.THOMAS KUHN, THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, 108-9 (1962).

2.Here is Foucault=s principal definition of an episteme:
ABy episteme, we mean . . . the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive
practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; the
way in which, in each of these discursive formations, the transitions to epistemologization,
scientificity, and formalization are situated and operate; the distribution of these thresholds,
which may coincide, be subordinated to one another, or be separated by shifts in time; the
lateral relations that may exist between epistemological figures or sciences in so far as they
belong to neighbouring, but distinct, discursive practices.@ (ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE 191
(1974))
A native English speaker who wrote such prolix prose would be hard pressed to find gainful
employment as a writer, except perhaps for the drafting of company reports for stockholders. In
France, by contrast, one gets a university chair.
3.A. MacIntyre, Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science, in
PARADIGMS AND REVOLUTIONS 56 (G. Gutting, ed., 1980).
4.PIERRE DUHEM, TO SAVE THE PHENOMENA 117 (Jaki ed. Chicago 1969) (1908).
5.It has often been supposed that early astronomers were concerned with no more than predicting the
line-of-sight location of a planet in the sky. Had their interests really been strictly circumscribed to a
two-dimensional geometry of the heavens, the failure of the homocentric spheres to account for size
and brightness would have been of no significance to them.
6.Before Ptolemy, Hipparchus had shown the equivalence of an eccentric and an epicycle, provided
that the period of the epicycle is the same as the period of the its associated deferent.
7.PLANETARY HYPOTHESES, Book II.
8.The distinguished historian of ancient astronomy, Otto Neugebauer, notes that this particular
congruence between Ptolemy=s prediction of the solar distance and independent measurements of it
Abecame the solid foundation of the planetary shell structure which dominates medieval astronomy.@
O. NEUGEBAUER, A HISTORY OF ANCIENT MATHEMATICAL ASTRONOMY 111-12 (1982).
9. From SIMPLICIUS, IN ARISTOTELIS PHYSICORUM LIBROS . . . (ed. Diels) 291-92 (1882). (I have used
Doland=s and Maschler=s translation.)
10.PIERRE DUHEM, supra note 85, at 29.
11.Quoted in id. at 30.
12.Id at 31.
13.Id. at 41.
14.Id. at 42.
15.Id at 43.
16.See Swerdlow.
17.Owen Gingerich, Copernicus and Tycho 229, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 87-89 (1973).
18.Galileo=s nearest approach to an empirical Aproof@ of the motion of the Earth was his jejune

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theory of the motion of the tides, which virtually no one, not even the other Copernicans, found
compelling.
19.In his popular writings about Copernicanism, Galileo conveniently ignored the fact that his friend
and contemporary, Johannes Kepler, was arguing persuasively that the Copernican claim about
planets revolving in circles about the Sun was almost certainly wrong.
20.J. KEPLER, OPERA, vol. 6, 119 (Frisch ed.).
21.Blake, p. 32.
22.Blake, p. 33.
23.id.
24.I am using N. Jardine=s translation of KEPLER=S DEFENSE OF TYCHO AGAINST URSUS from his THE
BIRTH OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1984). This quotation comes from p. 144.
25.Id. at 141.
26.Id. at 143.
27.Quoted in Koyr, 129 (1973).
28.Gardner,
29.Koyr,

253.

129 (1973).

30.J. KEPLER, supra note 101, at vol. 3, 316.

31.RENE DESCARTES, PRINCIPLES OF PHILOSOPHY, Book iv, ' 204. My translation.
32.Id. at Book IV, '205.
33.BOYLE, supra note 71, at vol. 4 234.
34.Royal Society Boyle Papers, vol. IX, f.25.
35. Cf. DUHEM supra note 85.