Cunningham and Williams, De-Centering the 'Big Picture': "The Origins of
Modern Science" and the Modern Origins of Science
This paper is launching a different historiographic perspective in reference
to the Scientific Revolution (SR). Kuhn claimed that scientific revolutions
occur frequently and even regularly, and there is nothing unique about them:
they signify the ongoing process of science, of the leaps in scientific
advancement. According to this view, the term ‘scientific revolution’ is
generic and is in contrast to its being a specific term that stands for a
historical episode that occurred in the 17th century, when a dramatic
disruption occurred in science1. The term Scientific Revolution was coined
by Alexander Koyre, in the 1930’s, as a tool for understanding the birth of
modern science.
“This paper is based on the principle that big pictures are both necessary and desirable”2.
I agree with this claim- one can be an expert on water molecules but to be
bereft of knowledge of the river. A ‘big picture’ (context) is crucial for
making the ‘small picture’ meaningful. I agree with the claim that “science is
taken to be as old as humanity itself, so that the history of science can in principle run
continuously from prehistoric megaliths and Bronze Age metallurgy to the human
genome project”3 since I think that in the most fundamental level science is
about survivability, so it must be as old as humanity itself. The authors are
striving to expose and reconstruct the aims of the founders of the old big
picture of the history of science (Butterfield’s contemporaries and followers)
that emerged out of the special circumstances of the period around WW2.
1
Cohen H. Floris, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, Uni of Chicago Press, 1994,
p. 21
2
Cunningham and Williams, De-Centering the 'Big Picture': "The Origins of Modern Science" and
the Modern Origins of Science, The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 26, No. 4,
(Dec., 1993), pp. 407-432 (p. 407).
3
Ibid. p. 408
The motivation of doing so is not rooted in new or better research that has
been done, but because “circumstances have changed”4. In other words, they
actually admit to promote a different account that they hesitate to call
postmodern, which is a tendency emphasizes the idea that our world is fragmented
into a plurality of local, autonomous discourses, developing what may be termed the
Lyotardian description of the postmodern condition. The second tendency emphasizes a
poststructuralist element in postmodernism; preoccupied with the problem of meaning, it
results in a position presenting meaning as fundamentally elusive and slippery5. Zuzana
Parusnikova, by the way, rejects the idea of a postmodern philosophy of
science. Promoting a new big picture is recognizing that there are many
ways to gain knowledge and the single unitary dominant view of what
science is and how it must be performed, is not intelligible any more. In
promoting this new picture the authors reperiodised the invention of the new
science and found “that the period 1760-1848 is a much more convincing place to
locate the invention of science…Its main significance, we think, is that it helps to
demarcate more clearly the place in the big picture which our culture occupies”6. So, in
the new big picture science was invented in the mid 18th century and is no
longer a universal neutral human endeavor that spans over all human culture.
The concept of the SR, developed in the 1940’s, was an amalgamation of
three different visions of science that existed that time: 1) the positivist,
which reduced knowledge to causal laws expressed in a mathematical
language, 2) the moral, which characterized science in terms of values like
freedom, rationality, truth and goodness, 3) science as a universal human
enterprise that emanates from curiosity and the need to understand the
4
ibid. p. 409
Zuzana Parusnikova, Is A Postmodern Philosophy Of Science Possible?, Stud. Hisr. Phil. Sci., Vol. 23,
No. 1, pp. 21-37, 1992 (p.21)
5
6
Cunningham and Williams, p. 410
world. the authors claim that the picture of the SR as a synthesis of different
view points of science, distorts every one of them and The most obvious
explanation for this change is internalist (that is to say, in terms of things internal to the
History of Science discipline)7 such internal things were practical technology [that]
played an important role in those intellectual changes, and was not simply a consequence
of them. In general, it is now widely recognized that religion, politics and economics to a
large extent facilitated, instead of impeding, those changes which supposedly defined 'the
scientific revolution': some would say they produced or were constitutive of them 8 and
when Newton used theology, mysticism, alchemy and biblical chronology in their study
of the natural world this was neither insanity nor a failure to be properly 'scientific' but
part of a coherent attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the Christian God by
studying His creation9.
Their argument is that the view of the SR as formulated in the 1940’s, is not
plausible any more. A concept, they claim, that was formulated to
substantiate views like believing in a single scientific method which makes all
knowledge like the physical sciences, or that science is synonymous with free intellectual
enquiry and material prosperity, or that science is what all humans throughout time and
space have been doing as competently as they were able whenever they looked at or
discussed nature10 ceased to satisfy. They suggest a new big picture that will
not be based upon science seized as a universal human enterprise that is
rooted in timeless logic, bearing absolute immutable moral values of
freedom rationality and progress; rather, it will be based upon science as a
contingent enterprise reflecting the aims and morals of a particular social
group in a particular historical time; one among a plurality of ways of
knowing the world, it must be seen as limited, bounded in time and space
and culture. If science is not timeless, than it must have a beginning. The
7
ibid. p. 413
ibid. p. 414
9
ibid.
10
ibid. p. 417
8
authors locate the beginning of science in the Age of Revolution 1760184811(the industrial revolution, the French revolution, the intellectual
Kantian revolution). They established their view upon several principles: 1)
the ideology of science has to be explained and not accepted (for instance:
how did science come to have "objectivity" ascribed to it?12). If science is contingent,
it has to be explained. 2) Science reflects the social relations that exist in
society: knowledge is an integral product of a particular society.
3)
Apprehending the right meanings of categories that have been used during
different times in history by different actors. 4) It is necessary to identify
exactly in what project of inquiry was a historic actor engaged during his
investigations of nature (what are the questions that gave rise to specific
answers). Without knowing the project the result is meaningless.
From principles 3 & 4 it is possible to trace the change in nomenclature of
the actors as marking the beginning of science, i.e. science started when the
term natural philosophy was not in use anymore when it refers to the
investigation of nature; it ceased to be a clerical endeavor and started to be a
secular activity. This happened around the beginning of the 19th c. New
disciplines to investigate nature were created: biology, replacing animal
economy or animated nature had banished the soul out of the discipline, geology
replaced sacred history. In this period scientists became professional salaried
researchers: no more an enterprise exercised by gentlemen, rather, by
professionals. In this time laboratory experimental research was created (in
Germany, and was emulated in France and England) and became a standard
of scientific research and a profession for itself. This process of
'secularization' of knowledge means religious institutions giving way to new social
11
12
ibid. p. 418
ibid. p. 419
institutions in matters of politics, education, social policy and morality. And this kind of
change was just what happened in the Age of Revolutions as new political, legal and
educational institutions were established across Europe, inspired by the philosophes, as
with the educational systems of Prussia and Hannover, or imposed by the administrators
of Napoleon's Empire13.
Locating the scientific revolution in the Age of
Revolution conforms to the 2nd principle that claims that science is a
sociological product of a specific society (in this case, the birth of a new
middle class with new power bases). As for the 1st principle, new values
emerged out of these three revolutions, values that became part of science as
we know it today: originality and genius out of the intellectual revolution,
free enquiry (liberalism) out of the political revolution and progress and
prosperity out of the industrial revolution. “what we are proposing in this paper is
something more fundamental: that this period saw the origins of science, in the revised
sense: that it saw the creation of science's particular and definitive aims, values and
practice, not by derivation from some transcendent realm, but as a result of particular
human activity in response to the local conditions of material life: an event not of
emergence but more of invention. This term 'invention', which is our preferred term,
helps to fix the revised view of science as a contingent, time-specific and culture- specific
activity, as only one amongst the many ways-of-knowing which have existed, currently
exist, or might exist; and for this reason the phrase which we propose for the fundamental
changes which took place in this period is 'the invention of science'….What we are
speaking of is therefore not the origins of modern science, but the modern origins of
science”14.
‘De centering’ has a long history. Ptolemy de centered the earth in an
attempt to ‘save the appearances’; he was not radical enough and saved the
appearances within the Aristotelian framework. Copernicus achieved the
13
14
ibid. p. 424
ibid. p. 428
ultimate de centering and everything crumbled thereafter. So ‘de centering’
is a powerful and fruitful concept and I agree with the authors who are
advancing this idea. A narrow centered world view is carrying catastrophes
under its wings; with European ‘science’ blowing in their back, 175 soldiers
of Pizarro destroyed the Inca of Peru and 500 soldiers of Cortez destroyed
the Aztec empire of Mexico. The British destroyed the Aboriginal culture of
Australia and the Americans the Indians of North America. All the destroyed
cultures were in a mythological pre-scientific stage and possessed a different
knowledge of the world that was not valued by the cultivated ‘scientific’
Europeans. I absolutely agree with authors that are many modes of
knowledge and it is not confined solely to the positive/mathematical mode.
The only reason why the European culture dominates the world is, because it
was enforced by guns (a product of science). However, I argue that the Age
of Revolution presupposes the Scientific Revolution that was actually
launched in a previous age of transformation: the age of the great ocean
voyages; the age of urbanization and developing commerce; the age in
which the Catholic Church lost its unity and four new churches were
established during 20 years; the age of the printing machine- the age of the
Renaissance. I do not agree to the assertion that the SR presupposed the
industrial revolution; I think that it is impossible to commence an industrial
revolution without revolutionizing knowledge first. I suggest seeing the
beginning of the SR in the 17th c. but in considering it, to distinguish
between its long- range results, which cannot be confined to any social
framework, political organization, distribution of power, etc. and to its short
range results which are closely tied to particular social and political
conditions. Among the long range results are the immutable values of
science that are with us since the 17th c. and are not confined to specific
geographical area or to a particular society, they are above particularization.
All the rest is an outcome of social/political conditions. The great revolution
was the triumph not of ‘industry’ as such but of capitalist industry, not of
liberty in general, but of the bourgeois liberty, not of the modern economy or
the modern state, but of the economies and states in a well defined region 15,
so what is considered today ‘science’ is a result of these particular
conditions that were shaped during that time.
David Gilad
15
E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789- 1848, Mentor Books, 1964, p. 17