SadKangaroo wrote on Dec 6th, 2024 at 10:51am:quote author=Frank link=1730517241/74#74 date=1733444430]Calling Indigenous lore science marks Ed Husic’s ignorance
According to Ed Husic, the Minister for Science, Indigenous Australians were “the nation’s first scientists”, whose insights, obtained “through observation, experimentation and analysis”, rested upon “the bedrock of the scientific method”.
Nor is Husic alone in making those claims. Thanks to generous taxpayer funding, a burgeoning industry promotes “Indigenous science” in venues ranging from schools to universities.
But to call Indigenous knowledge “science” grossly misrepresents the nature of the scientific enterprise that emerged from the intellectual revolution of the 17th century.
Henry Ergas |
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I view the Bible in much the same way. It represents humanity’s early attempt to explain the world around them, an endeavour that parallels the essence of science.
While we now understand that the sun’s movement across the sky is due to the Earth’s rotation rather than divine intervention, such explanations were their way of making sense of the universe at the time.
The same applies to Indigenous Australians. Their rich traditions and stories were their initial frameworks for interpreting and understanding the complexities of the natural world.
They, much like our ancestors two millennia ago, did not advance their observations to the stage of making predictive hypotheses. Nevertheless, I believe it is fair to characterise their efforts as an embryonic form of scientific inquiry.[/quote]
Well, you are as ignorant as Husic.
Ergas:
However, the great thinkers of the 17th century radically transformed what Kant later referred to as science’s “regulative principles”: that is, the rules that distinguished science, as an activity and as a body of knowledge, from mere knowhow.
At a fundamental level, the transformation involved a dramatic change in the conception of the cosmos.
In effect, the 17th century upended the Aristotelian view of nature, which claimed that the basic properties of matter differed in the various parts of the universe. Nature, the proponents of the new science argued, was homogenous, uniform and symmetrical: matter was the same throughout the universe, governed by the same causes or forces. Moreover, those forces were mechanical: the very essence of science lay in uncovering their laws of motion.
In turn, those presuppositions of regularity and homogeneity underpinned a change that proved momentous: the rejection of Aristotle’s prohibition on metabasis, that is, on the transposition of methods from one discipline to another.
The sciences, said Rene Descartes in 1637, could not progress “in isolation from each other”; they all had to advance, and could only advance, by adopting common methods, centred on developing mathematical representations of the phenomena they were seeking to explain.
And the test of those representations had to be both analytical and empirical: analytical in terms of mathematical correctness; empirical, in that it had to be shown that the representation could be used to recreate the phenomenon.
Truth, in other words, was “fact” in the Latin sense of the word: that which can be done or made. As Giambattista Vico summarised the new thinking in 1710, “verum et factum convertuntur” – the true is that which can be converted into fact, ie, can be done in practice.
That is why Newton, to prove the existence of a centre of gravity, devised the famous experiment of the rotating bucket filled with water. It is also why Francis Bacon resuscitated the Greek term “praxis” – the unity of theory and practice – in the Novum Organum (1620) to describe the “scientia activa” of experimentation, which, far from diverting study from its object, was the sole means of “augmenting” it.
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However, the pioneers of the new science were cautious in their claims. Yes, mathematical techniques could accurately model limiting cases, such as motion in a vacuum; but they only approximated actual outcomes. And it was improper to speculate about the underlying causes of phenomena beyond what could be directly observed and experimentally verified.
Hence Newton’s great outcry, “hypotheses non fingo”, “I feign no hypotheses”, regardless of how much superficial completeness adding unproven hypotheses might give his system.
That intellectual modesty opened the road to a recognition of the uncertainties inherent both in the actual operation of the laws of motion and in their testing. In what ranks among humanity’s great breakthroughs, Blaise Pascal’s work on probability theory, and Thomas Bayes’ formalisation of inductive inference, set the basis for the systematic hypothesis testing that allowed Western science to progress at an unprecedented rate.
Another crucial feature of the intellectual revolution: its openness. Traditionally, true knowledge had been seen as esoteric, handed down, within closed circles, from one generation to the other and validated by the weight of inherited authority. By the end of the 17th century, that notion had been utterly discredited. Instead, theories, models and experimental results were widely published, discussed and contested, vastly accelerating their development.
In short, what defined Western science and made it absolutely unique – and uniquely powerful – was the tight integration of formal methods, rigorous verification and public replicability.
