ABSTRACT
The acceptance of an aesthetic or pragmatic view of truth can lead us to feel like the poor relative of our more successful cousins in the hard sciences. When we turn to these sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, and the like—we may think that they don’t have to settle for such a debased form of knowing; they have not had to turn to affectivity as the standard of truth. Scientific truth seems to possess a rigor that extends beyond human valuing. We look at astronomy, for instance, and feel that it has proved that the Earth orbits around the sun, rather than the other way around. The movement of celestial bodies, dim theories of relationally determined being aside, are not influenced by human concerns, and the triumph of astronomy, we want to insist, is that it was finally able to brush aside human concern about our place in the universe to determine the actual state of celestial movement. But we must ask why this seems so objectively true. When we consider space, it becomes apparent that there is no fixed grid to which objects are attached. The sun, as much as the Earth, exists in a matrix of nothingness, and we make sense of their movement only through their kinetic relationship. If we choose, we could refix the Earth at the center of the universe, and describe the sun, the planets, and the stars as moving about it. While to accommodate this planetary centrism would require more arduous descriptive equations, and would force us to abandon simple elliptical orbits for more complicated patterns, there is no absolute reason why this retreat from Galileo couldn’t accommodate all of the observational data. We endorse the Galilean perspective because our lives work better when we occupy this ground. The simplicity of the theory makes it easier to learn, and reduces the time required to work through predictive equations. We prefer the elegance of its spare lines and internal consistency. These scientific judgments, too, are aesthetically and pragmatically grounded.
