WINE, WATER, AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL SOBRIETY - A NOTE ON THE KOYRE-MACLACHLAN DEBATE

In the First Day of his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, Galileo provides a description of the behavior of wine and water when they an put in contact in a particular way. Alexan dre Koyre employed this text to criticize Galileo's excesses in the us e of thought experiments, although he valued such experiments as usefu l and necessary in Galileo's work. James MacLachlan, who defends the r ole of real experiment in Galileo's work, reconstructed the experiment described by Galileo and demonstrated that the results agreed with th ose he reported. According to MacLachlan, Galileo had really performed the experiment and Koyre went too far in his rationalistic interpreta tion. This note points to a text by Ambroise Pare, written many decade s earlier than Galileo's text, that shows that the phenomenon describe d by Galileo was widely known and, therefore, weakens the case for Mac Lachlan's interpretation.