first established.” Although “the precise period in question varies from historian
to historian,” as Henry (2008:1) notes, it is often identified symbolically with
the 144-year period from the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus
Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Sphere) in 1543 to
that of Newton’s seminal Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (Math-
ematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1687.^2
In the rest of this section, I will show some of the characteristics of the
formation of modern science in the Scientific Revolution which are directly
relevant for the exploration of methodological characteristics of biolinguistics
in section 3.
2.1 How was modern science formed in the Scientifi c Revolution?
What exactly happened in the Scientifi c Revolution? Henry (20 08: 5–6) suc-
cinctly summarizes an answer to this question as follows:
A simple but essentially accurate way of summing up what took place in
the Scientifi c Revolution, then, is to say that the natural philosophy of the
Middle Ages, which had tended to remain aloof from mathematical and
more pragmatic or experiential arts and sciences, became amalgamated with
these other approaches to the analysis of nature, to give rise to something
much closer to our notion of science. The Scientifi c Revolution should
not be seen as a revolution in science, because there was nothing like our
notion of science until it began to be forged in the Scientifi c Revolution
out of previously distinct elements.This passage indicates that modern science was formed through the amalgama-
tion of two independent approaches to nature: what Henry calls “mathematical
and more pragmatic or experiential arts and sciences” and natural philosophy.^3
According to Henry (200 8:5), while mathematical and pragmatic or experiential
arts and sciences were such “technically developed disciplinary traditions” as
astronomy, optics, and mechanics, natural philosophy “aimed to describe and
explain the entire system of the world.”
2.2 Mathematical and pragmatic or experiential arts and sciences
Henry (200 8: 18–19) states that before they came to be amalgamated with
natural philosophy, the mathematical and pragmatic or experiential arts and sci-
ences underwent an important change in attitude toward mathematical analysis:
To put it simply, the Scientifi c Revolution saw the replacement of a pre-
dominantly instrumentalist attitude to mathematical analysis with a more
realist outlook. Instrumentalists believe that mathematically derived theories
are put forward merely hypothetically, in order to facilitate mathematical
calculations and predictions. Realists, by contrast, insisted that mathematical172 Masanobu Ueda