The maladies of enlightenment science

This paper presents the evolution of the scientific method that has been instrumental in promoting the advancement of science and also technology throughout history. It is important to note that the scientific method refers to a cluster of basic rules of how to be the procedure in order to produce scientific knowledge, either new knowledge, either a correction or an increase of previously existing knowledge. The scientific method, therefore, is nothing more than the logic applied to science. The search for a suitable scientific method guided the action of most thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth highlighting among them Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, who with their contributions were crucial to the structure of what we call today of modern science. In addition to these thinkers, it was also important later contributions of Hegel, Marx, Engels, Popper, Russell, Duhem, Poincaré, Morin, etc.

International Journal of Science and Research, 2022

The roots of science go back to the contributions of Greek philosophers some 2,500 years ago. However, science as it is known today and its great power and remarkable influence over humanity emerged in the 16th century as a consequence of the Renaissance revolution that radically transformed the objects, methods and objectives of knowledge of nature. Objects became natural phenomena; the methods, disciplined cooperative research, and a set of objective, systematic, rational, and critical procedures that have been generically called the "scientific method"; and the objectives, the construction of a factual, verifiable and explanatory body of knowledge. What essentially characterizes science as a rationally and critically grounded body of knowledge is the method by which that knowledge is constructed. This article reviews the foundations of the scientific approach to knowledge generation and characterizes the scientific method.

One of the products of the scientific revolution is the general procedure for conducting scientific enquiry called the scientific method. The scientific method came to replace Aristotle’s (384 – 322 BC) methods which was considered by some philosophers as non-systematic, non-verifiable and non-justifiable and therefore could not produce verifiable and justifiable knowledge. It was these characteristics of the Aristotle’s purely deductive method that led philosophers to advocate and propagate a new way of forming knowledge. One of such philosophers who made significant impact on the formulation of the scientific method was Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626). Bacon proposed that theories should be drawn from several observations which are free from the observers’ prejudices. Bacon’s proposal was contested later by David Hume (1711-1776) and Karl Popper (1902 - 1994). Hume and Popper did not just contest Bacon’s method, they offered suggestions that shaped the scientific method into a resilient method. For example, they proposed that scientific enquiry should not begin with observations, it should rather begin with what we now call hypothesis or research question. The contribution of Bacon, Hume and Popper to the emergence of the scientific method and the growth of scientific knowledge are enormous.

Cosmos+Taxis, 2022

It is widely acknowledged by both historians and scientists that in the course of the 17 th century in Western Europe a new way of thinking about nature and knowledge took hold and new methods of obtaining knowledge of nature were proposed and tried. The spectacular success of this new science was recognized even at the time, and the genius of its leading practitioners was widely appreciated. There had been brilliant upsurges in scientific activity in various times and places before this, but this episode is unique in that, rather than lapsing into stasis or abandonment, it has continuously grown in both results and participants to the point where it is an integral part of modern civilization. Many reasons have been proposed for the origin and the success of the new science, but none convincingly address why this scientific revolution should have the staying power that others have not. The hypothesis developed here is that the innovations of the 17 th century-changes in methodology, epistemology, ideology, and institutions-coalesced to form a radically new social arrangement in the form of a self-maintaining system of scientific processes, an arrangement that can be formally described as an anticipatory social system.

The British Journal for the History of Science, 1976

DURING the decades following the publication of Darwin's Origin of species in I859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early i86os saw the appearance of Lyell's Evidence of the antiquity of man (I863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (I863), Renan's Vie deJsus (I863), Pius IX's encyclical, Quanta cura, and the accompanying Syllabus errarum, John Henry Newman's Apologia (I 864), and Swinburne's notorious Atalanta in Calydon (i865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the 'Test Acts' as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (I864), the first meeting of the X-Club (I864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, 'the controversy between "science" and "religion" took fire'.' To be sure, only part of this criticism arose directly from the new work of science. From within the Established Church discussion focused on theological issues as central as everlasting punishment, redemption, the nature of the Trinity, and the social role of the Church. From without, the role of the Church and its schools was debated in the universities and in Parliament. The rigours of clerical ritualism, given added force by the political manoeuvres of the papacy, were exciting dissatisfaction throughout Europe. Finally, successive conquests of biblical criticism, proceeding from German example, created fresh rifts which became indelibly associated with the use of new 'scientific' methods of scholarship. Of course, the confrontations of science and religion were made more complicated, at both social and intellectual levels, by a conflation of issues concerning the sufficiency of natural theology, the doctrine of revealed truth, the belief in biblical literalism, and the unfettered search for new knowledge. The last issue, in particular, has much to do with the difficult relationship we now perceive between the self-defining, selfgenerating ethos of scientific inquiry, and broader political and philosophical concepts of intellectual freedom. We can hardly neglect to ask whether we may see in the 'warfare' between science and religion an important reflexion of a much more general concern about the realities of

Journal of Classical Sociology, 2007

This comparative and historical examination of the ethos of science finds significant examples of the Mertonian ethos in university discussions from the 12th through the 14th century. The institutionalization of naturalistic inquiry based on Aristotelian modes of argument and demonstration was unique to Western Europe and did not occur in China or the Islamic Middle East. Nevertheless, Merton's writings on the ethos show no indication of his relying upon the rich historical evidence of Europe when formulating his famous conception.

Monography, 2022

17 The word 'law' in the seventeenth century is synonymous with 'form', 'principle', and 'axiom'; it does not mean an empirical regularity contrary to what we hear today in the wake of the empiricism of the Humean tradition (lawlike regularities). And the determination exercised on a natural or social phenomenon by its form-or law, or structureis not conceived as a causal determination: it determines the phenomenon in the sense that it circumscribes its possible becomings. 18 Bacon advances a series of experimental rules: variation of experience, prolongation of experience, translation of experience, reversal of experience, etc. (F. Bacon, De Dignitate, liv. V, ch.II, 1623 19 Experience is therefore in no way reduced to causal investigation. 20 I describe the inductive nature of analysis in ch.4