Areins Pelayo
Resident Graduate Scholar
Department of Philosophy
About
“Understanding Hypotheses in Newton’s Scientific Thought”
In his widely read Principia Mathematica, Newton wrote to “feign no hypotheses” concerning the cause of gravity. A ‘hypotheses’ for Newton was a conjectural, causal explanation, and some of his contemporaries understood his refusal to propose hypotheses as a more general methodological statement: the aim of science is descriptive only, so hypotheses have no place in it. The recent accessibility of Newton’s unpublished and overlooked works on alchemy, theology, and natural philosophy helped commentators form new, more accurate pictures of Newton. Many now acknowledge that Newton did use hypotheses. While showing that Newton did use hypotheses, most scholars set aside the task of articulating the makeup of Newton’s hypotheses: that is, exploring what specific roles hypotheses had his thought and what criteria they needed in order to be justified and worthy of acceptance. The aim of my dissertation is to fill these two gaps in the literature. I argue that there are six criteria that Newton thought hypotheses should meet in order to be justified: (i) the analogy of nature, (ii) experiment, (iii) non-contradiction, (iv) parsimony, (v) mechanism, and (vi) divine conformity. I further argue that serving as tools to guide empirical research and serving as underlying mechanisms for a scientific explanation were the two main roles justified hypotheses played in Newton’s scientific thought, particularly his physics and optics. These were the standards to which Newton adhered to avoid feigning a hypothesis.