Hydrostatics and the Scientific Revolution

Abstract

The extent to which dealings with the world as it can be observed and manipulated is dependent on the availability of concepts up to the task has not been adequately appreciated by historians of science. Detailed attention to changes that the concept of pressure underwent in the seventeenth century can serve to ameliorate that situation. The history of hydrostatics can also usefully illustrate the way in which science emerged in the seventeenth century as autonomous from mathematics, practitioners’ knowledge and metaphysics. Hydrostatics employed mathematics but differed from mathematics insofar as its postulates were in need of empirical support. As far as practitioner’s knowledge of hydrostatics is concerned, that did not change much during the seventeenth century. However, the level of understanding of hydrostatics was much deepened by way of theories that could explain what was taken for granted by practitioners. Finally, knowledge of hydrostatics was distinct from the accounts of the ultimate structure of the world favored by mechanical philosophers. It owed little to their attempts to construct such a metaphysics. From a modern point of view the technical sense of pressure can appear obvious. There is much to be learnt about science by recovering the way in which it became obvious.