mediocrity principle

The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about Earth, and by implication the human race. It is used either as a heuristic about Earth's position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The traditional formulation of the Copernican mediocrity principle is usually played out in the following way. Ancients once thought that Earth was at the center of the solar system, but Copernicus successfully proposed that the Sun was at the center. This was confirmed a hundred years later by Galileo who demonstrated with a telescope that Jupiter’s Moons orbited Jupiter and that Venus must orbit the Sun. Several hundred years later, Harlow Shapley found that our solar system was not at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, but rather one of many other stars. In the mid Twentieth Century, George Gamow and his colleagues discovered that although it “appears” that Earth is at the center of an expanding universe, that in an expanding Universe, everyone “appears” to be at the center. And, at the end of the Twentieth Century, Geoff Marcy and colleagues showed that planetary systems orbiting stars are quite common, putting to rest the idea that our Sun is somehow special in that it has planets. In short, the Copernican Mediocrity is the series of ideas and discoveries demonstrating that Earth is a relatively common planet orbiting a relatively common star going around a relatively common galaxy which is one of countless others in a giant, perhaps infinite, universe. There is also a stronger, philosophical version of the mediocrity principle. This associates the Renaissance with greater openness to what seemed to be radical ideas. In this view, the Roman Catholic theology of the day, with regards to the place of Earth in the cosmos, was that if God made man in God’s image and that this was God’s most perfect creation, then there was only one logical place to put this most perfect creation—at the center of the Universe. As a result, when Copernicus suggested that Earth was not the center of the entire Universe, but rather was a planet, just like any other planet, orbiting the Sun, it was a start toward dislodging the philosophy that human beings were somehow very special. On the other hand, this philosophical interpretation has been criticized by some historians who claim that theologies of the day actually viewed the heavens as perfect, and Earth (and humans) as the dregs (rather than the pinnacle) of creation. In this view, Copernicus was actually promoting rather than demoting the earth by removing it from the "basement," and that the philosophical shift proposed above didn't really occur.

Mediocrity Principle

See also