Du Châtelet on scientific knowledge

What is the best method for doing physics, and what is the epistemic status of the resulting theoretical claims? I read Du Châtelet’s account of scientific method as a response to “Pemberton’s Challenge,” which asks how we should navigate between, on the one hand, speculative systems whose claims about the natural world lack adequate justification to count as knowledge (which Pemberton attributed to the Cartesians), and on the other making such strict demands that little or nothing would pass muster as natural philosophical knowledge (the certainty of the mathematicians).

What is at stake, I argue, is the search for alignment between the method for doing natural philosophy and the epistemic status of the resulting knowledge claims.

I argue that Du Châtelet provided a richly-theorized account of uncertain knowledge, which may have taken Newton’s rules of reasoning as its starting point but soon transcended them. The upshot is a lasting transformation in our understanding of scientific knowledge.

The draft paper can be found here.