Hydrostatics and Experiment

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with capturing exactly what is involved in the idea that the progression in hydrostatics from Stevin to Newton corresponded to the shift from the attempt to construct a science on the basis of given, unproblematic, postulates to the recognition that the adequacy of postulates needed to be discovered and justified via experiment. The importance that experiment could play in the discovery of previously unknown phenomena was clear in the context of pneumatics in the wake of Torricelli’s experiment. However, as far as hydrostatics is concerned, the move from Stevin to Newton did not involve discovery of hydrostatic phenomena that were significantly novel. If a theory is supported by a range of evidence to the extent that it can explain it in an uncontrived way, then it can be supported by old as well as new evidence. The path from Stevin to Newton can be seen as involving steadily increasing degrees of support from a largely unchanging pool of evidence because of the extent to which that evidence could be naturally explained to an increasing degree. Other roles for experiment in seventeenth-century hydrostatics can be clearly discerned in the work of Boyle. Those roles concern the way in which thought-directed manipulation can contribute to novel concept formation and the way in which the exposition of a theory can be facilitated by key thought experiments or archetypal experiments actually performed.