From Kepler to Gibson

ABSTRACT

We argue that the idea of embodiment and the strategies for carrying out embodied approaches are some of the most prevalent and interdisciplinary legacies of early modern science. The idea of embodiment is simple: to explain the behavior of bodies, we must understand them as unified wholes in their environments. Embodied approaches eschew explanations in terms of qualitative descriptions of the intrinsic properties of bodies and promote explanation in terms of the interaction between bodies. This idea can be found in Kepler's optics, Descartes' physics, and Newton's physico-mathematics. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson, 1966) is the culmination of this centuries-long embodiment movement which can be traced back to the 17th century.

Notes

¹ This is also a familiar scholarly opinion; see Kuhn (1970).

² We thank an anonymous referee for urging us to clarify this.

³ We are giving a canonical interpretation of Aristotle. There are, of course, some divergent opinions concerning Aristotelian essences. The view we outline here is the consensus on this point. See S. M. Cohen (2009) and Lewis (2009) for further analysis on the topic.

⁴ Again, some objections could be raised to this claim by noting that Aristotle himself proposed four causes (material, effective, formal, and final) to be explained to give a full account of any phenomena. However, final causes are privileged within his schema. See Matthen (2009) and Lennox (2009).

⁵ What happened in physics happened later in other sciences: appeal to whole bodies and not inner-body entities became increasingly common. Perhaps, molecular biology and genetics still hold a different status in this sense—that is, they still appeal to genes (and not whole organisms) as cause and agent of evolution and development. Nevertheless, there are dissenting voices (e.g., see Lewontin, 2000; Oyama, Griffiths, & Gray, 2001).

⁶ This quote comes from Motte's translation (1962)—this translation was first published in 1729.

⁷ Notice that we are using “dynamics” in the sense of change. Classically, Leibniz attributed the term dynamics to Newton's theory because it was a theory based on forces (δύναμις). These two senses are different although closely related (for the definition of motion—changes in the system—in terms of forces see Gal & Chen-Morris, 2013, pp. 187–188). Anyway, we are always going to use “dynamics” in the first sense.

⁸ Some may object that Newton did not offer “explanations,” a position endorsed by some contemporary scholars. A full discussion of this topic is beyond our scope, but we note that, for the historical Newton, the laws of motion and the law of gravity clearly offered “explanations.” In the Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy, which preceded the third book of the Principia (the book in which Newton deduced universal gravitation), Newton explicitly noted that he only employed causes that are “true and sufficient to explain their phenomena” (Newton, 1999, p. 794; emphasis added). This is not to say that Newton thought he could explain gravity in itself, but that is a whole other issue.

⁹ This topic is worthy of a whole paper. However, for a matter of space, we do not address it in depth. If the brief discussion we offer here is not persuasive, the reader can take it as one of our assumptions until we develop a further elaboration elsewhere.

¹⁰ We picked DST as an example, but other tools, close or not to DST, might be chosen as well—for example, matrix calculus to measure momentum of inertia tensor (see Shockley, Carello, & Turvey, 2004; Turvey, Burton, Pagano, Solomon, & Runeson, 1992).

¹¹ See H. F. Cohen (1994), Chapters 1 and 2.

¹² Boyle's sentiment also belies now dated historiographical statements like “[Modern science substituted] for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world—the world of quantity, of reified geometry, a world in which, though there is a place for everything, there is no place for man” (Koyré, 1965, p. 23). Boyle clearly thought the world of quality and sense perception is part of the natural world and explicable in similar ways. This point, and the ways in which early moderns dealt with the sciences of the life and mind, is explored by the current vanguard of early modern scholarship (see, e.g., Distelzweig, 2013; Manning, 2015).

¹³ An unpublished technical report of this phenomenon can be found at http://www.um.es/documents/2103613/2107123/Technical+report.pdf/ed976b1e-e2f0-47b6-be33-a04ddf283baf