 The kind of folk-reading of Newton that underlies much of the contemporary literature replaces Mach’s interpretation with a more charitable one: for instance, Dasgupta 2015, is a recent influential presentation of the following dialectic, and its relation to  symmetry  arguments. According to this reading, Newton’s point is that his mechanics – unlike Descartes’ [special character:mdash] could explain why the surface of the rotating water is curved, that his explanation involves a privileged sense of rotation, and that absent an alternative hypothesis about its relative nature, we should accept absolute space. But our discussion of Newton’s argument showed that it simply does not have an ‘abductive[special character:rsquo], ‘best explanation’ form, but shows deductively, from Cartesian premises, that rotation is neither proper nor ordinary motion.