Abstract
This chapter will attempt to derive some general lessons from the particular analyses of the previous chapters. The previous examples in which Galileo defended Copernicus from various kinds of objections will be combined and reworked as contributions to the Copernican Revolution. The latter episode, in turn, will be taken as an archetypical example of human rationality. The general lessons will be about the nature of rationality; the role in it of the mental activities of criticism, reasoning, and judgment, and of the intellectual traits of fallibilism, openness, fairness, and rational-mindedness; and the all-encompassing notion of critical reasoning.
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Kuhn (1957) remains perhaps the best synthetic account of the Copernican Revolution, although the time is ripe for updates and revisions, an excellent example being Westman (forthcoming).
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Note that the concept of simplicity is itself not simple; in particular, it was not simply a matter of counting which theory used fewer epicycles, which could become a complicated business; see, for example, Price (1959).
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In some cases these connections were more direct than, and occurred to Galileo chronologically prior to, the case of the vertical fall. Nevertheless I shall illustrate the point with the vertical fall objection, which he did not explicitly criticize until later when he wrote the Dialogue. One reason for this is that this criticism involves the most crucial principle of physics, namely what today we call the law of inertia; another reason is that this example involves critical reasoning in a much more central and vivid manner. My account of the vertical fall argument here is a digest of that found in Finocchiaro (1980, 36, 116, 192-199, 277-288; 1997a, 143-146, 155-170, 323-325). For an alternative but overlapping account, see Feyerabend (1975, 69-108; 1988, 55-109); for an appreciation and some criticism of Feyerabend, see Finocchiaro (1980, 182-200).
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Galileo was forced into this type of partly theological inquiry when he began to be attacked as a heretic. His most considered analysis is found in his famous Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (Favaro 5: 309-348; Finocchiaro 1989, 87-118; Galilei 2008, 109-145). For an interpretation of the latter, see Chapters 4 and 9 of this book.
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Finocchiaro, M.A. (2010). Galilean Rationality in the Copernican Revolution. In: Defending Copernicus and Galileo. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 280. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3201-0_6
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