Written Homework Three: Analyzing Argumentative Discourse in Galileo: The Tower Argument
Galileo discusses in Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World the views expressed by himself and those held by followers of the Aristotelian Ptolemaic worldview. In his work, Galileo presents and discusses the points of the arguments using three fictional characters. Simplicio, who argues the Aristotelian Ptolemaic points, Sagredo who acts as a neutral third party, and Salviati, who argues the Copernican points, which coincide with Galileo’s beliefs. The Aristotelian view is based on a geocentric worldview, stating that the heavenly bodies (including the sun) revolve around the earth. Alternatively, the Copernican view is based off of the …show more content…
The tower argument is actually very similar to the first premise of the argument presented by Simplicio. The tower argument goes as follows, “A tower from whose top a rock was let fall, being carried by the whirling of the earth, would travel man hundreds of yards to the east in the time the rock would consume in its fall, and the rock ought to strike the earth that distance away from the base of the tower.” (Matthews, p.72) In addition to the tower experiment, Salviati provides two more examples demonstrating other aspects of the same idea. He then points out to Simplicio and Sagredo that the argument “proving” the Aristotelian view contains circular logic and is ultimately unsound. He goes on to prove that it is a paralogism by stating that the conclusion of the statement is unknown. The middle term however, is based off of the soundness of the conclusion. If the fact that the earth is static is based upon the fact that the ball falls in a straight line and vice versa, that the ball falls in a straight line because the earth is static, then neither point can be accepted as a satisfactory aspect of a valid argument. Because the truth of the two terms of the premise is based solely on the validity of the other, neither is valid. In this way, Salviati rejects the auxiliary hypothesis of the heavy bodies …show more content…
This thesis revolves around the principle of the tribunal experience, crucial experiments, and the undetermination of theories. (Dewitt, p. 47) In its simplest form, the Quine-Duhem Thesis states that scientific ideas or theories face trials as a body of beliefs, not singly (tribunal experience), there are no single experiments that can be done to determine the correctness of one belief (crucial experiments), and the available data does not typically favor one unique theory over another. The tribunal experience portion of the Quine-Duhem Thesis applies to the tower argument in the aspect that neither the Aristotelian Ptolemaic nor the Copernican views can be proven by any single aspect of the whole paradigm. Both views must be taken and applied as a whole to prove their validity. You cannot adjudicate the whole Aristotlean view for example, solely on the validity or invalidity of the falling bodies premise. Likewise, the crucial experiments portion of the Q-D thesis can be easily applied to the tower argument. The tower example is the perfect parallel because there is no one experiment that could prove either theory correct or incorrect. The fact allegedly gleaned from the tower experiment, that the earth is motionless because the ball falls in a straight line, is not crucial in proving