Jayson_Virissimo comments on Rationality Quotes: November 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (354)
What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?
So far as I know, he wasn't, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
According to Owen Gingerich's The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
(Emphasis added.) These quotes can be seen using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature. This link worked for me. These passages are also excerpted in this pdf.
So, Galileo was explicitly threatened with torture, though he was not actually tortured and may not even have been "shown the instruments of torture" (which is the strongest claim made in reputable sources). As I argue in this thread, I believe that this justifies saying that the Church used torture (as an institutionalized practice) to force Galileo to recant.
* An earlier version of this comment referred here to "the 1633 sentence entered against Galileo" because I misread Gingerich's use of the word "sentence" to refer to a sentence of punishment, but he just meant a grammatical sentence ><.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
I got burned during a debate because I trusted the history from my physics textbook. After having read several books on the history of science (rather than summaries inside larger works) I am convinced that the Dark Arts on on full display even in natural science coursework.
A gun can be used to commit a crime even if it isn't fired.
"Torture" here is analogous to "shooting", not "crime".
I was analogizing "torture" with "gun", not "crime" or "shooting". Torture was a tool that the church had on hand and was prepared to use, and Galileo's knowledge of their threat to use torture was what led him to recant. (It was the forcing of his recanting that was the "crime" in my analogy.)
It might be more precise to say that what the church had on hand was an institutionalized practice of torture, but using "torture" to refer to the practice (rather than a particular act) seems within the bounds of accuracy in poetry.
That's a bit contrived - imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it's revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn't expect his poll numbers to go up.
I would still say that torture was used to break his will. To say this would be accurate, if not precise (because I'm not specifying whether I mean a particular act or an institutionalized practice). Whether his will proved too easy to break to satisfy the electorate is another matter.