[ExI] history of science

[William Flynn Wallace]

'The Knowledge Machine' by Michael Strevens.

He is trying to explain the difference between Newton's attitude in doing
physics and his attitude doing alchemy:

"Yet he was not following the iron rule (only empirical testing counts).
He was not following any methodological doctrine at all.  What drove him
was pure instinct, a quirk of his psychology that made him quite unlike his
seventeenth century peers, a natural intellectual compartmentalizer."

I am going to take him to task for this, but I am curious as to what this
paragraph means to you, as a nonpsychologist (other psychologists welcome
too).

bill w
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