William Matchin
@wmatchin.bsky.social
275 followers 154 following 117 posts
Associate Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina. Bridging the gaps between linguistic theory, neuroscience, and aphasia. Chief Editor of @jocnforum.bsky.social
![This bears repeating. Bede in 725 C.E. quantitatively de-
scribed that “[t]he sea reflects the course of the Moon” (trans-
lated by Wallis, 1999, p. 84) and more than a millenium
later Lord Kelvin and others built analogue computers called
tide-predicting machines (Thomson, 1881). None of these —
while amazing feats of mathematics, observation, and engin-
eering — bring about the knowledge of gravity needed for
the canonical modern scientific explanation. No amount of
numerical predictions, statistical correlations of models to
data, give us theory. No amount of putting the data into a
model gives us a scientific explanation. As Catherine Z. Elgin
(2017) underlines:
Newton’s law of gravity enables us to recognize
that the moon’s staying in orbit, the ebb and flow
of the tides, and the apple’s falling from the tree
are fundamentally the same sort of thing. (p. 264)
None of these realisations are substantively numerical.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreie2bt62ut7ehhgm7id5ulvwlgvs5kptm6vyqpk6ydcfx7dbixspkm)
