 In a lengthy discussion of Newton’s Scholium on absolute space, Mach accuses Newton of violating his own methodological precepts by going well beyond what the observational facts teach us concerning motion and acceleration. Mach at least partly misinterpreted Newton’s aims in the Scholium, and inaugurated a reading of Newton’s bucket argument (and by extension the globes argument) that has largely persisted in the literature since. (See  absolute and relational space and motion: classical theories,  section 4, for discussion of Newton’s bucket argument.) Mach viewed the argument as directed against a ‘strict’ or ‘general-relativity’ form of relationism, and as an attempt to establish the existence of absolute space. (Strict relationism denies that there is any such thing as an absolute motion; all motion is merely relative, i.e., is nothing more than changes of location relative to some arbitrarily chosen reference frame.) Mach points out the obvious gap in the argument when so construed: the experiment only establishes that acceleration (rotation) of the water with respect to the Earth, or the frame of the fixed stars, produces the tendency to recede from the center; it does not prove that a strict relationist theory cannot account for the bucket phenomena, much less the existence of absolute space.