In Saving the
Phenomena: The Background to Ptolemy's Planetary Theory, Goldstein explores
the usage of the term "phenomena." He claims that it is important to
understand what was being referred to at the time of Ptolemy when he penned the
Almagest.
Ptolemy did an unprecedented act when he took data that had
been collected earlier by people making observations of the heavens above. The
meticulous data that was taken allowed Ptolemy to create a planetary model that
was derived explicitly by geometric techniques - the first of its kind. The
observations used covered more than 800 years including observations made by
the Babylonians.
Goldstein points out that Ptolemy reduces his models to
tables. The means the tables are constructed are explicitly given, and they
show a heavy appeal to geometry, not arithmetic schema. Luckily, through
Ptolemy's desire to be explicit in all that he did for his work, the
observations that he used are noted in detail and how they are used as well. I
would draw a parallel to modern research articles that we, as a community, to
be of great merit; the kind of articles that you can look at and reproduce what
the authors did because it is well documented.
Goldstein also points out how Ptolemy's work got taken as
gospel of just how everything was believed to be by ancient and modern scholars
as commonplace among his predecessors rather than the unique work that it
actually was. Goldstein feels that this may be because Ptolemy did not stress
his innovations beyond releasing them.
To tie this back with DiSessa, I see the usage of the
observations by the Babylonians and Ptolemy's predecessors to be how we want to
build up students from a groundwork. If you have a solid foundation upon which
to work, p-prims or detailed observations, it will simplify things moving
forward as you don't have to account for the lack of such a thing. All told, I
found this an interesting article.
Bernard R. Goldstein, "Saving the phenomena: The background to Ptolemy's planetary theory," Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. 28, pages 1-12 (1997)
