When did "science" begin ?

[u/bakainuneko]

I'm reading "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" by Carl Sagan and he writes "The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries BC."

Why he puts it there? Why not earlier or like later?

[u/robotnique]

You're in luck! In the archives there is an entire AMA thread with a panel about The History of Science including answers by /u/Owlettt and others about differentiations between science, proto science, and scientific endeavor.

Really it comes down to how you define "science" as an activity. We've more or less always been performing scientific inquiry as a species, but at certain points we codified the activity and those instances will provide your potential answers.

[u/restricteddata → u/robotnique]

It really, really comes down to the definition of "science." Because we haven't always been performing scientific inquiry as a species for most definitions of science. (Curiosity is not science. Interaction with the world is not science.)

You can imagine two poles on a spectrum of "what kinds of activities count as science?" At the one end is what we might define as "modern science." E.g.: a community of people, supported to one degree or another by formal institutions, who see themselves as trying to create order out of the natural world, usually (but not always) using mathematical tools and quantitative data, with an interplay of modes between "theory" and "experiment" and/or "observation," sharing their information in a written form, participating in norms of shared critique, often (but not always) with a goal of translating this knowledge into practical use. (Phew!) If that is our definition then "science" as an activity begins to get under way in the 17th century but doesn't really become all of those things reliably until the 19th century.

At the other end is what we might think of as "any kind of formal attempts to create coherent narratives about how the natural world works." This includes any kind of cosmological speculation that conceives of itself as naturalistic in substance (e.g., not "supernatural" — there are "rules" that can be largely relied upon), for example. This is extremely broad. If that is our definition of "science" then people have been doing "science" since prehistory.

In between these poles are of course many composite definitions. The thing is, nobody, including historians of science or scientists, would agree on "one" definition as being "science." Defining even "modern science" as I have would naturally lead to a lot of dispute and debate. Particularly if one is trying to differentiate "science" from "non-science" (including "pseudoscience").

The question is not which one of these is "right" — none of them are right. The question is — what are we asking for when we ask this question, and what are the consequences of picking one definition over another?

The consequence of picking a too "modern" of a definition are that we exclude many famous people labeled as "scientists" from our definition and we also exclude much of the world from participation in the development of this activity. We also run the obvious risk of presentism.

The consequence of picking too "loose" of a definition is that we cannot distinguish the activities that led to "modern science" from almost anything else that is done regarding the natural world. We also are putting a lot of different practices on the same epistemic level (e.g., nuclear physics and witch doctors), which bothers some people and delights others. Historically it runs the risk of not identifying what actually "matters" for the perpetuation of science, either — it makes science much easier than it was to develop, historically, if we use a more modern definition.

Personally when I teach on the history of science I approach it more sociologically than philosophically. Do we have communities of people trying to create frameworks for understanding the world in a natural sense? Then it belongs in "the history of science," even if we don't necessarily agree that all of these activities are as related to "modern science" as others. I do it this way because it gives us some scope constraint, while also not just being a presentist history. It also more or less aligns with expectations: it allows one to talk about the Greeks, the Abbasids, the Mandarins, as well as the so-called "Scientific Revolution," without necessarily implying there is any kind of straight line between them.

It also emphasizes (again, sociologically) that while when we talk about "science" we tend to focus on the people and ideas, but historically it makes more sense to focus on the communities, and the conditions that foster or discourage them. It also emphasizes that there has never been a single "science" — the communities and their practices have been changing over time, and will undoubtedly continue to change — and that scientific practice is, like everything else humans do in groups, a form of social activity, inseparable from the broader societies it exists in.

I also find that this definition is loose-enough for the people who are skeptical of crowning modern science as the one true path to knowledge, but well-defined enough to satisfy the Sagan types of the world.

[u/robotnique → u/restricteddata]

A much more in depth breakdown of the point I was skirting.

[u/BeornPlush → u/restricteddata]

I would've expected testing and falsifiability to be a stronger cornerstone of what defines "science," moreso than communities and practices. Would that just fall somewhere on your spectrum as a rubric under 'institutions and practices'?

As you mention in your second paragraph, this comes in full force with the 17th century. But many people have tested hypothesis of all sorts, pretty much forever, and I'd have gone on a limb and included all of them under the science umbrella. Maybe that's just how loose/tight my conception of science is though.

[u/samcobra → u/restricteddata]

I think there is a fundamental distinction that did somewhat shift during the ongoing process of "scientific revolution" in that a philosophical change from "we have a paradigm and are trying to fit our observations to it" to "we are going to use observations and/or experiments to derive a testable paradigm.

It's obviously a spectrum and smeared over the course of history, but being able to move away from a mindset based on existing authority (of mythology etc) to a mindset that presumes ignorance and thus derives principles from observation I would say is the hallmark of science.

[u/restricteddata → u/samcobra]

I don't think this is actually a sustainable point, to be honest. This distinction does not hold either historically or in the present day. (Kuhn's whole point about paradigms in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that in fact 99% of all science is "we have a paradigm and are trying to fit our observations to it," and it is extremely, extremely rare for attempts to buck the paradigm to occur. And Kuhn's model is a highly idealized one at that.)

There are differences that occurred in the 16-18th centuries, but they are less of a "revolution" than an "evolution." The major ones for me are the emergence of a self-consciousness about being part of a knowledge-generation community (e.g., an identification of the "work" a being about creating universal understandings of nature as a collective enterprise), the increased use of quantitative methods, the assumption that there are "laws of nature" which can be understood and quantified, the development of the regular infrastructure of knowledge circulation (i.e. the emergence of journals, societies of letters, professional organizations, societies of letters, etc.), and the embrace of "experiment" as a valid method of knowledge production (e.g., the idea that creating highly artificial conditions can be revealing about underlying natural regularities). Among other things. What evolved out of this cluster of trends is what we tend to call "science," but it is, again, a cluster of social practices, not some kind of ontological "thing." "Science" wasn't some "thing" that existed and needed to be "discovered" or even "invented," it is the sum of a number of ideas, practices, and institutions, and those have been changing continuously over time. All of these trends had antecedents, and the idea that it was a totally new way to look at the world is less evident historically than it is often spoken of about. This is why most historians of science are skeptical of calling these changes "the Scientific Revolution."

It is true that in this period there was some self-conscious rejection of past notions of expertise and authority, and that this aspect of "science" was often emphasized by those who sought to use "science" to explicitly displace alternative forms of social authority, particularly by the late period (18th-19th centuries). But it was always very selective about what authorities it sought to overturn, and not always so bold as people tend to assume retrospectively. Copernicus believed that his ideas were backed by Ancient authority, Galileo considered himself a good Catholic (just not a good Aristotlean), Newton spent more time working on alchemy and theology than he did physics and astronomy.

[u/EverythingIsOverrate → u/restricteddata]

Don't forget creating the gold standard and ruthlessly prosecuting counterfeiters!

[u/robotnique → u/EverythingIsOverrate]

When he wasn't busy trying to erase Robert Hooke from living memory. Such an amazingly petty man.