Advances in Biolinguistics - The Human Language Faculty and Its Biological Basis

analysis reveals how things must be; if the calculations work, it must be

because the proposed theory is true, or very nearly so.

Henry (2008 : 19) adds that “the new realism can be seen at work” in the
astronomy of Copernicus, Brahe and Kepler. As Henry (2008 : 24–25) notes,
Kepler, for example, proclaimed that the mathematical astronomy of his New
Astronomy has explanatory power:

Here, then, Kepler was clearly announcing that this astronomy was not

merely abstract mathematics for use in practical calculations, but was pre-

senting a physical account of the way the world system really worked.

The above passage suggests that in astronomy, mathematics has come to be
used “to explain, not just to describe, the workings of the physical world”
(Henry 2008: 25).

2.3 Galileo’s science of motion

Henry (2008: 26) further observes that the use of mathematics was also found
in “the mathematical science of (terrestrial) mechanics.” Henry (2008: 27), rec-
ognizing that “the greatest fi gure in this movement is Galileo Galilei,” describes
the nature of Galileo’s work as follows:

Although Galileo is most famous for his defense of Copernican theory, his

initial interest was in terrestrial mechanics and, in particular, kinematics.

Like many of his contemporaries, he was dissatisfi ed with the Aristotelian

account of motion, and struggled to arrive at a better theory. During the

course of his career, his account of free fall, for example, took him from a

mere refi nement of Aristotle’s belief that bodies fall with speeds proportional

to their weight, to the realization that acceleration in free fall is a constant

(in a vacuum) for all bodies.

Galileo’s science of motion includes at least three interesting methodological char-
acteristics relevant to a discussion of the nature of biolinguistics. Takahashi (2006:
422–423) summarizes the fi rst two of them. First, Galileo’s science of motion
laid the foundations for the method of modern science. It is the method which
includes the idealization and abstraction of phenomena, the use of mathematical
models, and the empirical examination of predictions of mathematical models
by experiments. Second, Galileo stopped asking why motion occurs, but instead
studied how motion is mathematically described. Galilei (1638/1954 : 166–167)
expressed an opinion against Aristotle’s view about “the cause of the acceleration
of natural motion” in Salviati’s (Galileo’s own spokesman) words as follows:^4

Salv. The present does not seem to be the proper time to investigate the

cause of acceleration of natural motion concerning which various opinions

On the current status of biolinguistics 173