Tooltip Tags: clock mechanisms

clock acts as an organism as long as it runs properly

An example of an historical analogy used to explain a scientific idea:

"While Leibniz had associated life with sensation and appetite, Stahl [Georg Ernst Stahl] associated it with a capacity to resit decay…He argued for vegetable souls using a mechanical clock metaphor to contrast machines and organisms. The clock has been designed by a human. It acts as an organism by fulfilling its purpose: to tell the time accurately. As an extension of its designer, it is both organic and instrumental. When the clock breaks, it continues to follow the laws of physical necessity, but it is no longer instrumental. It becomes simple mechanical. The human provides the clock with formal, efficient, and final causes, making it organic, but only when it runs properly. An organism, occurs when the formal, efficient, and final causes exist within the clock: when it defines, creates, directs and copies itself."

Lucas John Mix (2018) Life Concepts from Aristotle to Darwin. On vegetable souls. Cham, Switzerland: plagrave macmillan.

Read about analogy in science

Read examples of scientific analogies

Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.

explaining celestial motion with vortices is like explaining the mechanism of a clock before inspecting it

An historical example of an analogical argument in science:

"In mechanical clocks one and the same motion of the hour hand can arise from the action of a suspended weight or an internal spring. But if the clock under discussion is really activated by a weight, then anyone will be laughed at if he imagines a spring and on such a premature hypothesis undertakes to explain the motion of the hour hand; for he ought to have examined the internal workings of the machine more thoroughly, in order to ascertain the true principle of the motion in question. The same judgement or something like it should be passed on those philosophers who have held that the heavens are filled with a certain most subtle matter, which is endlessly moved in vortices. For even if these philosophers could account for the phenomena with the greatest exactness on the basis of their hypotheses, still they cannot be said to have given us a true philosophy and to have found the true causes of the celestial motions until they have demonstrated either that these causes really do exist or at least that others do not exist. Therefore if it can be shown that the attraction of all bodies universally has a true place in the nature of things, and if it can further be shown how all the celestial motions are solved by that attraction, then it would be an empty and ridiculous objection if anyone said that those motions should be explained by vortices, even if we gave our fullest assent to the possibility of such an explanation."

Roger Cotes (1713), Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Cambridge, Editor's preface to the second edition of Newton's Principia.

In, Isaac Newton (1999) Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (3rd edition, 1726): The authoritative translation (I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman), University of California Press

(The notion of the 'heavens [being] filled with a certain most subtle matter, which is endlessly moved in vortices' reads as a rather poor straw man target today, but was seriously proposed by Descartes.)

Read about analogy in science

Read examples of scientific analogies

Many examples of science analogies are listed in 'Creative comparisons: Making science familiar through language. An illustrative catalogue of figurative comparisons and analogies for science concepts'. Free Download.