[fnord_too]

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I don't really see how your thought experiments would have allowed Aristotle to draw any conclusions without doing an actual test. Presumably whatever string you are thinking of isn't going to add a lot of mass relative to a metal ball, so why couldn't he think it possible that it might fall "slightly faster"?



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I think what he meant was, you have say two 10 pound balls, drop them, they fall at the same rate. Now tie a string between them, so you have a 20 pound mass, does it now drop faster? This assumes that Aristotle wasn't thinking of rigid bodies when he made the statement. But...

The whole point of the scientific method is that the way things work is often non intuitive or counter intuitive, so thought experiments are basically treating physics like math. You assume some things, and derive.

It's easy for us today to poke wholes in what Aristotle said, but that is not the same thing as poking holes in his reasoning. Certainly, the example DS points out would probably have made Aristotle think, but I would guess that when Aristotle thought about the problem he was thinking of solid bodies, and the answer was so "obvious" that he never considered unusual circumstances that would cast doubt on the theory. I tend to agree that his reasoning on physics (and physiology) was pretty sloppy (from what little I have read), but as I alluded to before, I think most of that is due to the belief that the world can be understood and explained by pure thought, not even realizing that the fundamental tenets of what one "knows" as obviously true are based on observation. In math, this works. You start with axioms that are assumed true and show what that implies. There is no reality to conflict, unless you assert that the math models reality; there are only errors in pure logic.