Essay 2

1. People during this time period were able to produce at least three different ways to characterize the nature of science. These different characterizations were used in various ways.
   1. “The first was philosophical, defining science as a particular method of enquiry, producing knowledge in the form of general causal laws, preferably mathematical, as in the physical sciences, or which could be reduced to this form.” (411)
      1. “This characterization of science was a legacy of nineteenth-century positivism, and it was very strong in the ‘logical positivist’ position articulated in the 1930s by the Vienna Circle; but even those philosophers who were anti-positivist in their stance, such as, in their different ways, Emile Meyerson and Karl Popper, continued to accept it. Few doubted that the scientific method existed, or disputed the centrality of issues such as laws, explanation, and prediction to the business of defining philosophically what science was.” (411)
   1. “A second, less academic, way of characterizing science was to see it in essentially moral terms, as the embodiment of basic values of freedom and rationality, truth and goodness, and the motor of social and material progress.” (411)
      1. “Those who characterized science in this way saw it as the disinterested pursuit of truth, undeflected by the sway of emotions, and free from personal, political or economic interest They generally believed that rational, scientific thought, if more generally distributed amongst the population, would put an end to misunderstanding, prejudice and social conflict, and even to fascism and totalitarianism.” (411)
   1. “A third way of characterizing science was as a universal human enterprise. By this, we mean that science was seen as the expression of an innate human curiosity, a general and universal desire to understand the world, that was a fundamental part of human nature and human thought throughout time and space.” (411)
      1. “Others use the phrase ‘science and civilization’ in order to express their claim that science was central to human civilization properly understood – or according to some, that science was human civilization.” (412)
   1. Unassumed piece of evidence: Science can be characterized in any way, shape, or form.
2. The philosophical features of science led historians to conceive ‘the scientific revolution’ as the seventeenth-century transformation of human thought into a form close to the ‘scientific knowledge’ as defined by twentieth-century philosophers.
   1. “They regarded the main theme of ‘the scientific revolution’ as being the elevation of experience above tradition and authority, or the rise of research and experiment as against the study of ancient texts; and this was supposedly exemplified in Copernicus’s rejection of Ptolemy, Galileo’s rejection of Aristotle and his challenge to the Catholic Church, and – a sole example from the ‘life’ sciences – Harvey’s rejection of Galen.” (412)
   1. “Finally, the fact that these historians characterized science as a universal human enterprise meant that they conceived ‘the scientific revolution’ as only a revolution within science. Since they supposed the scientific enterprise to be a fundamental part of human nature, the history of science, for them, was in principle as long as the history of the human race itself; they counted all respectable knowledge about the natural world, wherever and whenever it was found, and however it had been produced, as some form of science.” (413)
   1. Unassumed piece of evidence: Physical sciences along with many other early discoveries paved the way for the terminology we use in science today.
3. The characterization of ‘the scientific revolution’ has been weakened by recent research. New historiographies have made it more difficult to maintain its original thought.
   1. “For example, the work of Robert K. Merton started a new tradition of seeing the cardinal intellectual changes of ‘the scientific revolution’, in England at least, as a consequence of Puritanism (or, more generally, of Reformation and Counter- Reformation theologico-politics), and hence as a consequence of the development of capitalism.” (413)
   1. “At the same time, studies of the rise of the mechanical arts have revealed that practical technology 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.” (414)
   1. Unassumed piece of evidence: Although some things go against the “norm” of what science is “supposed to be,” it proves to be beneficial in the long run.
4. Finally, difficulties have arisen with the characterization of ‘the scientific revolution’ as a stage in an enterprise as universal as (supposedly) human nature itself.
   1. “It has been realized that when the supposed heroes of ‘the scientific revolution’ such as 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 creation.” (414)
   1. “It is now being recognized that even the post-‘scientific revolution’ way of studying the natural world was very different from what we now call science – so different, indeed, that it has taken a great deal of effort to recover it; and there is an increased awareness of the very deep differences between the ways the natural world has been conceived and studied in ancient, medieval, Renaissance, early modern and modern times.” (414)
   1. “Finally, the characterization of science as the universal and trans-cultural knowledge- producing enterprise was weakened when this general disenchantment with modern science led to a search for ways of knowing the natural world that seemed not to share in its objectionable feature.” (416)
   1. “These changes in the assumptions about the nature of science over the last twenty-five years have led to various attempts to rewrite the history of the ‘scientific revolution’. One set of attempts in the late 1970s, springing particularly from the radical, feminist, and environmental critiques of science, followed the traditional characterization of the ‘scientific revolution’, but re-evaluated it as a bad thing rather than a good thing: the origin of modern forms of repression and exploitation, rather than progress and liberation.” (416)
   1. Unassumed piece of evidence: The “scientific revolution” will forever evolve and add more details from what it was in the past.

The argument Cunningham and Williams is presenting is that the “scientific revolution” and science in general is something that is more complex than people actually believe it to be. Scientists over the past hundreds of years have been trying to fully understand what science is. Of course, different people had their different opinions but, those different opinions created more of a rift between people because it became more of a question of “Who is wrong? Who is right?”

Having different characteristics or characterizations make it hard for some people to grasp. Whether more sophisticated or dumbed down to be easier to understand, people will need to understand that there is no easy way to tackle science.

The claim I felt like held a lot of weight was: “The philosophical features of science led historians to conceive ‘the scientific revolution’ as the seventeenth-century transformation of human thought into a form close to the ‘scientific knowledge’ as defined by twentieth-century philosophers.” This claim contributed to the argument that Cunningham and Williams made because it shows how philosophers were trying to come with a newer way to understand science that was similar to what everyone was somewhat familiar with while at the same time, making it where it was more modernized.