In a recent post my currently favorite philosopher, Benjamin Cain, stated this: “Galileo famously said that the book of nature, as it were, is written in the language of mathematics.” He followed that with:
“What’s less well-known is that when read in context, Galileo’s point was pure scientism, meaning that his celebration of science was complemented by disdain for what we’d call the humanities, including philosophy.
Moreover, this raises the question of what it means to say that one language or another is ideal for telling the universe’s “story.” Is the “book” of nature written in mathematics? Or is it perhaps a work of poetry?”
Or maybe a work of accounting or, oh, I know, computer program documentation.
If one considers the context, Galileo was one of the first European natural philosophers to see mathematical relationships between physical phenomena and, in his enthusiasm, maybe he over spoke. Maybe what he should have said was “much of the book of nature, as it were, is written in the language of mathematics.”
There, no scientism, no problem at all.
If you consider what Galileo truly knew, his claim is a massive overstatement. A prediction that “much of the book of nature …” is a far better prediction, one that has proved close to being true. His philosopher counterpart was making claims equally baseless.
Rather than jumping to conclusions, how about we take a breath, give our topics some room, consider their context and then assume something other than the worst. Galileo a scientismist and before science, and scientism, had been invented … quite a feat.
Postscript Back when I was in the classroom I taught beginning chemistry students that all questions are complex. So, if you add heat to a beaker of water, what happens to the temperature of the water? All said “It would go up.” That is the “direction of the change.” But how much would it go up? That, of course depends upon how much heat was added, how much water is in the container, what the starting temperature of the water is, and … and…. Science without mathematics is cri
Uncommon Sense 