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Closing the Circle: How Harvey and His Contemporaries Played the Game of Truth, Part 2

Part I, "Rationality revisited" focused on Harvey's claim that since each systole of the heart forcefully expels blood into the aorta, therefore, after a number of such beats, the amount expelled would exceed the amount that the body could supply, which is impossible, therefore the blood from the arteries somehow returns to the heart again through the veins. In abbreviated form, this claim was expressed in the form since x, therefore y, therefore z. From that examination it was concluded, on the one hand, that any sense of rationality, any feeling of necessity that this claim produced in Harvey's readers arose from such things as tautologies and appeals to folk physics, and not from any selfevidence inherent in the claim itself. On the other hand, it was argued, Harvey and his contemporaries, even those who vigorously disagreed with the notion of the circulation, still subscribed to that sense of necessity. In short, the historical evidence suggests that that claim was both constructed and compelling, at least in the form ifx, therefore y, therefore z. Hence, the term "rational" seems rather inadequate to describe the character of Harvey's claim, and, for that reason, I would like to replace it with the word "coherent". But since "coherence" has a long history of use in ways not always intended here, I shall have to spend most of Part 2 setting out a meaning that I believe to be consistent with the way that Harvey and his contemporaries behaved.' However, before getting into that, I want also to shift from the word "constructed" to the term "conventional", though this too requires some elaboration, particularly with respect to that term's epistemological connotations.