In my last blogpost, I stated that we couldn't just examine the history of science by simply looking back at the past, picking out examples of technologies or methods that anticipate the modern discipline, and just rubber stamping our approval of it.
From a purely historical perspective, such an action would deny us a true picture of how people in previous times and eras conceived of the world they lived in.
Furthermore, for those of interested in making comparisons between the West and other civilizations' understanding and methods of investigating Nature, we would need to be cognizant of certain key ideas that may have existed in one culture but do not exist in another.
With that in mind, I propose that we reverse engineer the Modern Natural Sciences, in order to comprehend the assumptions that lay behind this enterprise.
Moving backward in time......
1.) Although the accumulated body of knowledge which we call Science is ever-changing, the outlines and boundaries of the discipline we are familiar with were formed largely in the 19th century.
This was the period of time when the word scientist, a term coined by the philosopher William Whewell, entered into public discourse to identify a trained professional class who were paid to examine the natural world. Consequently, this is also the era where the formal concept of peer review appears, which we can define as the repetition of experiments by colleagues in order to verify their results.
At the heart of this field of study lays the scientific method, which is essentially the observation of natural phenomena through the use of controlled and repeatable experiments.
ie: "I take this substance, i alter these conditions in its environment, i let it perform a given action. The result is observed and measured."
It is the drive toward experimentation that is the defining characteristic of modern science.
Taking the results of our experiments, we then try to develop laws or generalized explanations of why this experiment produced these results. The hope is to eventually develop a theory that generates predictions that can be tested.
However, this dependence on experimentation as the key ingredient to establish the veracity of theories was not always held to be the case.
2.) Prior to the rise of modern science, the central category for inquiry into the workings of Nature was a field of study called natural philosophy. Although sharing a number of similarities, the manner in which Natural Philosophy organized man's understanding of Nature differs with the modern approach on a number of issues. Two major points must be stressed.
Method - Instead of experimentation, natural philosophers generally preferred a much more speculative approach that made use of historical or anecdotal observations of empirical phenomena. The philosophical tradition relied heavily on the authority of the Greek Philosopher Aristotle, who favored a type of deductive abstract reasoning instead of the inductive experimentalist method for deriving truths about the natural world.
Furthermore, Aristotle's theory on substances defined the basis for matter in terms of essential forms and qualities, which is quite different from our modern understanding of physical properties.
An Example: Why is Snow white?
Modern Science - "Snow, which is a configuration of water molecules below a specific temperature, carries certain physical properties. These properties are transmitted to the sensory organ of your eyes via light, which possess a specific type of behavior under normal circumstances. The light stimulates receptors on your eyes which sends a signal to your brain via an optic nerve and which is interpreted as the color white."
Aristotlean - "Because Snow possess the Quality of Whiteness in it. The Quality/Property/Attribute may be deemed essential - in other words it is an attribute that makes any entity or substance what it fundamentally, and without which it loses its identity."
As you can see, two very different ways of reasoning about a natural phenomenon.
3.) Relationship to Technology - The other issue that needs to be
pointed out, is that Natural Philosophy's relationship with technology
is very different from Modern Science. We often associate
technological innovation with new discoveries or refinements of
scientific principles.
This was not always the
case. The theoretical "understanding" of the world (philosophy) was
very much divided from the practical aspects/methods associated with
technology.
An example: Does a farmer need to know biology, geology, and meteorology to grow crops?
Of course not - while those fields are quite helpful in the process and planning of farming, the theoretical knowledge does not equate with the practical know-how of growing crops.
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The Point of This Whole Blog
Think about this for a second.
When we are drawing comparisons between the ways people look at nature in different cultures, we need to be very carefully as to what we are in fact comparing.
We need to acknowledge that up until the 20th century, a vast swath of humanity lacked the conception of Modern Science.
These civilizations may have had teachings or philosophies that approximate the Western conception of natural philosophy. However, their starting assumptions about the way the Cosmos, Nature, and Man work are in fact different from the Western tradition.
But what we definitely know all civilizations had, was know-how/technology.
So fields like Astronomy, Metallurgy, and Medicine exist in all of these places - except that they lacked a unifying framework.
Whereas we could group all these disciplines under the Natural Sciences, these indigenous cultures lack the category and theoretical underpinning to do just that.
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