Science isn't about just collecting and cataloging information. It's about observing phenomena, constructing an explanation for it (a hypothesis), and devising an experiment to test the prediction of the hypothesis.
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.
I don't understand how this is meant to be a reply to the review article. At any rate, Smith's book is really good, but (obviously) written as an academic analysis. Stylistically maybe a little overkill for the layperson in this forum, but there are people with wide-ranging interests here who might dig it.
That’s a very incomplete view of science and knowledge in general.
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.
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.
The exponential growth in knowledge output and technological advancement started before the formalization of the scientific method though.
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.
I can’t agree with this. You may be describing the formalization of science, but science was occurring well beyond the bound of the scientific method.
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.
Mathematics is not science, it's a tool used by science. Knowing combinations that work is not science, either, when it does not come with an explanation as to why it works that is able to successfully predict other combinations that work.
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.
> 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.
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 agree they are values, but they are also the product of lots of rational thought. Look at all the Enlightenment thinkers who produced it.
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?
Nobody is rejecting rational thought. Most of your values are innate and most of the rest is socialization. This is not an "internet meme", it's the consensus view since approximately the time of Plato.
Rational thought is like mathematics: it makes no difference between the real world and hypothetical worlds. If you feed garbage in, you get garbage out. Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought.
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.
> Like communism, Holodomor, and the Great Leap Forward. Those are good examples of what the humanity has achieved with rational thought.
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?
I like your point, but most of it does not seem in tension with gp. Given that, your opening line was pretty hostile and dismissive.
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.
A hypothesis is not necessarily an explanation. There are fields of science where you "shut up and calculate" to get the prediction rather than try to interpret and explain.
In the process of “shut up and calculate” (SUAC) you often come upon much deeper insights about the involved processes and quantities than you ever could with wordy and “understandable” explanations. Of course simple, explainable models are great, but they have limited ability to describe the world, which is much more complicated. I don’t see how successfully handling this complexity (and getting the successful predictions) could take away from understanding.
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.
My point is not that there are no insights coming from SUAC, but rather that explanations are not a required thing of science, because predictions work without them, and the accuracy of predictions, and making new predictions makes science move forward, whether with explanations or without.
> According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen
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.
This is a professional review of an academic history book. "Familiar story" means "common narrative in History of Science academia until recent years." It doesn't have much to do with laypeople.
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".
This is just my opinion, but for those that are seriously interested in the history of science, it is best to start with “history of natural philosophy” as a search topic, as this will yield far more interesting and foundational knowledge and insights on how we got to modern science than arguing about Euro-centric perspectives from the renaissance forward.
> I opened this article and immediately ctrl-f searched for "white". Was not surprised at all with what it jumped to.
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 ?
I did the same and ... you lie about content of the article.
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."
There's two books reviewed. The second one in the review (Smith) is more looking at the science-adjacent fields that had an influence (like paper) rather than arguing that Newton relied on colonisation because he used a little data from ship captains.
I’m not offended, just tired. I’ve read so many articles with the exact same theme and message. I have started pre-filtering them by just starting to search for all the common race-baiting terms at the beginning to save myself time.
Heh... they need to read Persian history and Chinese history to get a grip on how others perceive science and who came up with what. I know people of those extractions who often when in argument will argue which of their civilizations came up with what first and of course it's always "their own" that came up with something first.
I'm quite sure neither China nor Persia/Iran or India will care what anyone says, be they European or otherwise.
I’m currently reading Paul Feyerabend’s “Farewell to Reason”, which makes a lot of the same arguments, but in a more philosophical and less political way. Highly recommend it if you’re looking for a heterodox take on the history and philosophy of science.
Feyerabend was a brilliant renegade philosopher of science and articulated a lot of strong claims about the emperor’s clothes. But like Thomas Szasz in his role as renegade philosopher of mental health, as Feyerabend’s career continued his writing became increasingly caught up in antagonizing the peers who cast him out as a pariah and outcast.
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.
I suppose the traditional 1950s-era simplistic high-school-textbook story is indeed that of scientific progress as originating with the Greeks who discovered mathematics, then stagnation until the European Renaissance applied mathematics to physics.
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).
One can easily find things like textbooks from the past. This [1] is the first one I was able to find. This is not a cherry picked example. I searched for '1950s math textbook pdf' on Yandex, which led directly to this [2]. That's simply their most "recent" textbook. It's from 1946, and seemingly a later edition of a book first published in 1931. In the historical introduction one will find mention of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Hindus, Arabs, and more.
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.
My cheeky wager is that U.S pupils from yesteryear actually had a better globalist understanding of the origins of science than students today, only because modern textbooks have gotten shittier and watered down. (And sometimes even needlessly politicized). There's a very prevailing and disgusting pop-science trend today that's obsessed with breaking everything down and explaining things as simplistically as possible.
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!
The notion of one Dark Age followed by one Renaissance in Europe is another one of those myths.
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.
The opinion piece went from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Breivik and white supremacy in five paragraphs. I reckon you need a special set of glasses to appreciate these kind of articles.
> I reckon you need a special set of glasses to appreciate these kind of articles
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.
Depends also on the historian. In my grad studies history courses, age/sex/race/gender was so 80s, and thought of not at all sufficient to understand history.
No. I'm not talking about having infield knowledge or references. Granted my master is in a different field but I spent several years at university with the subject and fitting read one course titled History of Science due to a childhood dream of becoming an archaeologist. I don't recommend it, the job market is close to nonexistent. I'm talking about the political narrative that the authors history revisionism is resting on. You need to be a believer before reading the article to believe it.
> Granted my master is in a different field but I spent several years at university with the subject and fitting read one course titled History of Science due to a childhood dream of becoming an archaeologist.
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.
Book reviews are, by definition, opinion pieces. And I've written a bunch of them. They're assessments of the book, and thereby assessments of the content, theoretical orientation, and conclusion of the book, and thereby of the subject matter that the book covers.
For anyone who interests, A Little History of Science of William Bynum is recommended. A book written for school children, but IMO highly accurate and of course accessible.
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.