1- why is the scientific method timeline chronology out of order? 1687 before 1650? 1950 before 1946?

2 - your maxim, “Everything is connected to everything else” - a digital notion, certainly; utopian/dystopian; and simply untrue.

Please forgive the appearance of naiveté on my part as I attempt to ask a question about one of the statements above - “It is not necessary that science increase the “truthfulness” or volume of total information. It is only necessary that it increase the order and organization of knowledge.”

Is this intended to be understood as a “descriptive” statement, or a “prescriptive” statement? If it is descriptive - merely stating the “truth” that science at its essence is a tool for the organization of knowledge and the scientist as the presenter of this knowledge - then is there not an imperative to also judge the truthfulness (and perhaps also/therefore the “justness”) of said knowledge once it is organized?

If it is prescriptive why leave out that imperative?

Early in our understanding of human evolution some used the theory to justify oppression of “lesser” peoples. Now, I believe in evolution and am not here throwing up a cavil against the theory. But the information was collected and organized but there was no effort to organize it and present it in a “truthful” or “just” way.

What am I getting at here? Earlier in the article it was mentioned that science has become institutionalized. I would take that a step further and say that science and its practitioners have become (involuntarily) our cultures high priests and prophets. They present their research (truths) to a largely ignorant public who on the whole take the “experts” at their word. The scientist also serves as a type of prophet - the dire warnings about the potential for disaster in New Orleans and the “coming to pass” of such warnings that went unheeded are just one example, global warming may be thought of as another. The scientist is in this role, whether he/she likes it or not, by default - our old gods are gone and science is our new source of revelation. With this role comes a certain responsibility, correct? Perhaps that is a false assumption. Assuming that is the case then is there not a need to not only organize knowledge, or even deem it useful, but to go a step farther and judge its truthfulness (for ideas true or false have consequences) as well as to present those ideas/findings/theories in a way that promotes a just use of the new information or technology.

I understand the danger of co-mingling scientific study with morality and ethics. Galileo’s experiences in the middle ages (and others since) perhaps justify the need for an amoral approach to science. However, could it be that the pendulum has swung to far the other way? Is there no room for asking questions about the ethics of knowledge gained? Copernicus’ experiences

I am not entirely certain that I have properly asked my question so I will hope for a response and a chance to clearify the question. Thank you for presenting these ideas.

“One example, which may be more than fifty years old (depending on how one demarcates the origin as opposed to full flowering), is statistical inference, without which psychology, social science, epidemiology, and so on would be impossible.”

Epidemiology maybe, but to say that psychology is impossible without statistical inference is just completely unhinged. There’s a whole literature out there about how reliance on null hypothesis significance testing is a major factor in the slow progress of scientific psychology.

I’m also curious to hear more about the invention of the “fact”.

Sorry….I (just) discovered your website from a friend recently. I found it fascinating and offers views that I don’t normally find in Asia.

About Fact, I see it more of “verifying” Truth instead of“‘invention of”. Also, I would add that Fact (Earth cycles around the Sun) is different from Dogma or Belief. Though I don’t know if 1550 is the year when this ‘happens’ on a noticeably larger scale.

Would be interesting if there are more mapping co-relations to ebb/flow of technology in (east) Asian civilisation…mapped to similiar western view. :-) Om.

I agree with Barry Kort that self-awareness of science is in fact a scientific advance. That is the story journalists tell scientists.

Nomaps provoked an interesting idea: what would be a good test for determinism. If I wanted to demonstrate that technology and science were the primary determinants of our history, what kind of evidence would I need to bring forward? I mean what kind of real, actual evidence, vs. hypothetical.

2004: TeleCommunities? (online thematic communities of practice with emerging co-intelligence in which content can be contextualized and re-contextualized to form new meaningful worldviews)

I would take issue with the opening statement. Again, the determinism of technology or of science is but a part of the overall determinism of humanity which in turn is part of the determinism of life et. etc.. A joke I remember from science class: ‘Q:why is the steam engine descended from a loaf of bread? A:necessity is the mother of invention’

Science pushes forward the boundaries of knowledge. Technology reflects the needs and desires of humanity.

The idea that the world is real and worth studying closely in the first place would seem to be a basic predicate for the development of a scientific culture. You might actually argue that the Incarnation gave to Christian civilization a tendency that the other great civilizations did not have. You would have to argue against J. Diamond here. Also, one of the best statments I’ve read about science futures is contained in Berlinski’s A Tour of the Calculus:

“The body of mathematics to which the calculus gives rise embodies a certain swashbuckling style of thinking, at once bold and dramatic, given over to large intellectual gestures and indifferent, in large measure, to any very detailed description of the world. It is s style that has shaped the physical but not the biological sciences, and its succes in Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics is among the miracles of mankind. But the era in thought that the calculus made possible is coming to an end. Everyone feels this is so, and everyone is right.”

Obviously this elegaic view is not shared by the great panjandrums of hard science, but it certainly seems true to me.

1550 Invention of the Fact

I would like to hear more about this! I would have thought Fact had always existed. It seems such a bedrock concept.

I would nominate journalism and storytelling as important contributions to the scientific method.

Scientific research is often slow, tedious, and arcane. Scientific models are often complex, highly mathematical, and difficult to explain or comprehend. Researchers often develop highly idiosyncratic terms and language that translate poorly into ordinary language.

Journalists, storytellers, and playwrights have made important contributions to research by their artful techniques of translating scientific arcana into formats that are accessible to the intelligent audience.

While I can readily appreciate a well-crafted story, I often found myself at a loss how good stories are crafted. Eventually, I got around to putting together my first feeble attempt to construct a scientific theory of storycraft. Out of this effort came the Seven-Layer Character Model (hinted at by the Onion Model from Shrek), and the associated Vexagon Diagram, with the key theorem suggested by Tom Clancy (the vector sum of all fears is zero).

Here is a very brief summary of my thoughts to date on Drama Theory and StoryCraft:

http://underground.musenet.org:8080/EmotionsAndLearning/Drama.html

The typical heroic version of the history of science would include the beginning of what might be called “materialist” explanations such as atomism among the pre-Socratic Greeks, and would attrribute the experimental method to Roger Bacon about 1260. Then there is the detailed, sytematic Aristotelian attempt at explanation of natural and other phenomena in the 4th C bce, I’m not sure by what criterion these dates are not on your list. Of course, these are “western;” other developments of like sort could be adduced in other cultures; but your list also looks western. (science as we now know it certainly can be traced in descent from the Greeks, and Western Europe by R. Bacon’s age so these additions seem the right ones.)

Was this really a new innovation? I have the feeling it has happened all along.

Massaging the data to fit the hypothesis no matter what 1980s.