How Not to Tell the History of Science
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
For example, noticing that the sun follows a predictable pattern in the sky over the year is not science, because it comes with no explanation and no prediction of anything else.
Similarly, learning swordmaking through trial and error is not science, it is a ritual. Figuring out why the steps in making a sword work, and thereby being able to modify/apply it elsewhere, is science.
In other words, science is the application of the scientific method.
Religious explanations are not scientific, as they are based on faith, not experiment.
Mathematics is not science, either, that's why we say "science and mathematics". Mathematics is a tool for describing phenomena. Math can be used to describe the path of the sun in the sky, but it doesn't explain it.
On the one hand, there are scientific fields where most of the work is indeed about observing and describing, and where hypotheses are often not challenged by experimentation but by the arrival of new data and alternative explanations.
But in the other hand, scientific knowledge in that traditional sense is not the only valid kind.
It is likely that the chief competitive advantage of human beings is not our individual skill for rational thought, but our collective capacity for transmitting and evolving cultural knowledge over centuries and millennia. Our cultural legacy is so ancient that it has influenced how our bodies evolved, but also so vast that it is easy to lose sight of it altogether.
We tend to see rational and cultural forms of knowledge as being in conflict with each other, but I have come to understand that as an oversimplified and often misleading point of view.
What is that based on? Plenty of cultural knowledge (what is that?) has been plainly wrong and destructive. Humanity has advanced when we've focused on rational thought, especially since the Enlightenment. Astrology and hate are cultural knowledge; astronomy and universal human rights are rational thought.
> We tend to see rational and cultural forms of knowledge as being in conflict with each other, but I have come to understand that as an oversimplified and often misleading point of view.
You said it and then called it oversimplfied. I agree that it's oversimplified.
I know people get carried away with Internet memes, but now we are rejecting rational thought? What will your basis for decisions be? Just follow the herd?
If anything, modern science is less about rationalism and more about empiricism than what came before. It's less about thinking and more about doing; less about explaining and more about ruling out explanations.
I could list a bunch of crappy software and say that's what humanity achieves with computers. It's laughable to say that the list above represents our achievements with rational thought.
How do you make decisions without rational thought? What do you use instead?
Defining “science” precisely and narrowly is not a dismissal of other forms of knowledge.
But pretending that centuries-old cultural knowledge conforms to a well-defined modern method doesn’t achieve much, other than lending further credibility to the method.
Science started when the scientific method started. The scientific method is a process for distinguishing facts from bullshit. The explosion in technology and science sprung from that. Endless age-old ideas crumbled away when the scientific method was applied to them.
Collecting and describing and organizing data is not science, although it enables science.
Further observations, of course, can be used to test and thereby support or disprove a hypothesis. The history of astronomy is a delightful exercise in hypotheses followed by more observations that separated truth from bullshit.
Ancient science generally gets broken down into mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and material. If we skip right to medicine and material, there was a huge amount of recorded “knowledge” of chemicals that either functioned as medicine or manufacturing, dating back 5k years. The people absolutely knew “these combinations worked” but still didn’t completely distinguish chemistry from magic and ritual and God.
There’s still science occurring there. Some combination of knowledge being applied and passed down through generations. There is precursor to our scientific method happening in parts, and it was still science.
Magic, ritual and God are not science because they have no predictive value.
Precursors to science are not science. Just like hydrogen and oxygen are precursors to water, but are not water.
There's a variety of factors contributing to this, to name some:
- Social mobility as a result of the Black Death
- Excess agricultural output, leading to population growth and specialization
- Wealth extracted from the Americas leading to a new class of Idles
- Certain inventions, like the printing press, massively increasing knowledge retention and spread.
Even more egregiously, this is a distinctly English view - neither the French nor the Germans have such a narrow view of science and at least until the late 1800s both had a higher scientific output than the English. This narrow view of science is ok if there is a positively-connotated word to describe the process of knowledge advancement, in English I guess that would be academia, although that is too narrow still. Without engineering and mathematics, science would have started to stagnate centuries ago - or never been formalized in the first place.
It’s not like those SUAC disciplines don’t have simple explainable models. In my opinion It’s just that in order to describe phenomena really accurately or if the described phenomena are complicated enough the only way to get reliable and improvable predictions is via complicated SUAC-type calculations.
Is it a familiar story?
I've been told all my life that we had great thinkers and scientists since the ancient times. There were children cartoons about Archimedes, arab scientists and the likes when I was a kid in the '80s.
The younger generations are the target audience, who will believe these lies about your education. As old times slip from living memory, they are rewritten into a caricature of themselves to serve the current zeitgeist.
This is not an isolated case, e.g. this article [1] about appropriating babywearing fashion that tried to gaslight us into thinking Europeans simply had no way of carrying their children prior to strollers, and so we should feel appropriately guilty over using modern baby carriers based on "indigenous knowledge".
Of course what matters here is viewing and rewriting everything through the lens of race
I'm just so tired of it.
The word is there 4 times: once in reference to the White House. Once in mention of Breivik manifesto. And twice in sentence "The classical story is not quite one of white supremacy—after all, if science is to be a universal enterprise, it cannot only be carried out by white people—but it is emphatically a story of European exceptionalism and the supremacy of European thought and values, which it invokes to explain the material prosperity and cultural superiority of Europeans."
So, you mean, you didn't read the article, went to cherry-pick some part of the article, and you're not happy because it is « viewing and rewriting everything through the lens of race ?
Way to go.
I'm quite sure neither China nor Persia/Iran or India will care what anyone says, be they European or otherwise.
Between trying to make a push against the mainstream assumptions in their fields, and getting increasingly defensive and personal in their writing, it’s very easy to miss the core arguments being made by each and the valid issues they were trying to bring attention to. There comes to be a lot of noise and easy distraction.
For anyone who gives either a try, which can be a very intellectually stimulating experience, you need to resist the urge to be superficially dismissive if you want to get anything out of the work at all. If you’re not open to gestalt shifts or parallel perspectives in the way you view the underlying subjects, there’s really no point in spending the time. You’ll just want to rip up the book and throw it at the wall.
However, this has been pretty thoroughly debunked enough for many decades now. Almost anyone with any interest in the subject now knows about Indian and Arabic mathematicians of the European 'Dark Age' era, Mayan mathematics and astronomy, Chinese developments in math and science, even prehistoric technological developments which certainly depended on experiment and observation (copper ore smelting as likely discovered by potters, etc.).
It might be a little more interesting and informative to focus on a specific branch of science, such as plant breeding by farmers in the past up to scientists today. Another one of importance is the discovery of infectious disease and of the various approachs to treating infectious disease from ancient history (plant extracts etc.) up to the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines. Such specific examples offer better examples of history's quirks related to scientific progress (such as the effect of the rise of Lysenko to power in the Soviet Union with respect to plant breeding in the USSR, or that of the advocates of gain-of-function research in the United States and China with respect to the global Covid pandemic, and such other fun stories).
Perhaps it would be more accurate to talk about multiple periods of extreme turmoil (wars, plagues, etc.) followed by a flourishing of art and knowledge when things start to settle down. Over the centuries, this happened a bunch of times in different places all over the Mediterranean and Europe.
There's no doubt one will find similarly going to back centuries. The Greeks/Romans play such an outsized role in our knowledge because they discovered an immense amount, wrote down an immense amount and, up until extremely recently, a passable degree of fluency in both Latin and Greek would not only have been a basic requirement for higher education, but was also a sort of way to signal one's culture/class/learning. So the average educated individual would have had ready access to the depths of all of this knowledge.
[1] - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509299/page/n3...
[2] - https://www.resourceaholic.com/p/digitised-antique-maths-tex...
The increasingly "uncomfortable" truth for many still persists today though, namely that modern science had its birthplace in the European Renaissance period. All kneel to the mighty Printing Press!
Well, yes. Just like one would need a special set of glasses to appreciate an article on threads vs coroutines. Historians write at other historians with the same short-cutting assumptions about loyalty to the author's position as software engineers writing at other software engineers. If we want to get the right understanding then we need to start with the right base frame of reference.
You are on "a level", historians are on a different level. Reality has many perspectives to it, and people have strong feelings about them.
My wife is a history professor. Her qualifying exams involved reading more than 250 academic books in various subfields related to hers. This is before she even really started her major research. History professors really do have just a completely different level of background than somebody who took a single course at university. Like, I would expect the typical history professor to have read something resembling 1000x the amount of academic work than somebody who took a single course.
So yeah, I'd expect a review written by a historian of a book written by a historian intended to be read by other historians will have wildly different context about the way that a subfield has evolved and been used or abused by various people over time.
Science is a style of debate.