But why would anyone focus on the wrong turns? If you find a solution by trial and error, then you would call the process a success. The scientific process, which benefits from its mistakes as well as it does from its successes, can only be seen as an overall success.Interbane wrote:The history you're pulling from is when science was in it's formulative years. It is definitely useful as a note of caution, but there are markers that go beyond induction which can show us we're on the right path. While minor offshoots and divergent paths may fluctuate with paradigm change, the main pathways are all but certain. We've discussed these before. We can have near certainty with many of the findings of science. If that seems to be a change in perspective or premature, then you're ignoring parts of the world around you that show otherwise.ant wrote:But from a broad historical perspective, I'm highlighting the fact that science is not the triumphal forward marching parade it is often seen and reported as being.
Indeed, the early formative stages of science were a necessary transition from magical thinking. James Frazer, author of THE GOLDEN BOUGH discusses this early transition when early "savages" created a special class of citizens to pursue the mysteries of nature:
Frazer wrote:But a great step in advance has been taken when a special class of magicians has been instituted; when, in other words, a number of men have been set apart for the express purpose of benefiting the whole community by their skill, whether that skill be directed to the healing of diseases, the forecasting of the future, the regulation of the weather, or any other object of general utility. The impotence of the means adopted by most of these practitioners to accomplish their ends ought not to blind us to the immense importance of the institution itself. Here is a body of men relieved, at least in the higher stages of savagery, from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature. It was at once their duty and their interest to know more than their fellows, to acquaint themselves with everything that could aid man in his arduous struggle with nature, everything that could mitigate his sufferings and prolong his life. The properties of drugs and minerals, the causes of rain and drought, of thunder and lightning, the changes of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the daily and yearly journeys of the sun, the motions of the stars, the mystery of life, and the mystery of death, all these things must have excited the wonder of these early philosophers, and stimulated them to find solutions of problems that were doubtless often thrust on their attention in the most practical form by the importunate demands of their clients, who expected them not merely to understand but to regulate the great processes of nature for the good of man. That their first shots fell very far wide of the mark could hardly be helped. The slow, the never-ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others. The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of experience. Ridicule and blame are the just meed, not of those who devised these crude theories, but of those who obstinately adhered to them after better had been propounded. Certainly no men ever had stronger incentives in the pursuit of truth than these savage sorcerers. To maintain at least a show of knowledge was absolutely necessary; a single mistake detected might cost them their life. This no doubt led them to practise imposture for the purpose of concealing their ignorance; but it also supplied them with the most powerful motive for substituting a real for a sham knowledge, since, if you would appear to know anything, by far the best way is actually to know it.
