The two are incompatible. Naturalism offers us a theory of science a priori. Constructionism offers us a theory of science a posteriori. Naturalism is the theory that science needs no justification. Constructionism is a theory of how science can be justified.
Constructionism tells us a theory of science. Wootton claims to speak for a version of the latter—but backs it up with the former. That amounts to backing up justification with non-justification.
And that amounts to a fundamental failure to think things through. He asserts that European intellectual culture at the beginning of the early modern period lacked the discovery-concept. This is correct, in my view—literally Fleming Wootton claims that discovery first became cognizable in early modern culture as a direct consequence of That is to say, for him: through an instance of discovery.
This is vacuous. True, and as Wootton insists, , etc. But this point merely augments the vacuity. On the view that Wootton claims as his own, the invention of discovery is like the realization that there, after all, monsters. That is to say: not just a new account of the worldly data, but a reconfiguration of the very possibilities for any such account. The indication that we need to approach the question of discovery at this level is precisely that it seems empirically inevitable to us—but did not to our early modern forebears.
And the point is recursively reinforced when we consider that the very idea of discovery includes the idea of empirical inevitability. Of course, this does not just come down to looking at what is there, but to finding the worldly truth that is immanent within the latter. The statue in the mud; the force within the phenomenon; the lands beyond the horizon. It is precisely when we come upon the truth of the world, against its initial presentation, that we say we have made a discovery.
This extremely rich and entirely non-inevitable phenomenology cannot simply be theorized as arising from our primary encounter with experience. Rather, it has to be theorized as giving form to the latter; a form that, presumably, has to come from somewhere.
Wootton tells us that discovery got found during the early modern period. This is not only uninformative, but frankly question-begging. We need to ask how discovery got made. One is the humanist impulse ad fontes. Motivated by reverence, not disregard for antiquity, the fourteenth-century founders of the movement commenced what would become a signature trope of knowledge-production in modernity: digging down, seeking sources, trying to reveal pristine or original iterations.
Neoplatonism, ontologically obsessed with the concepts of latent and manifest, is surely a second factor. Precisely because the world was a Jammertal or vale of tears suggestive of the end times, the regenerate were on the verge of transcendent insight.
Itinerant with its creator during his lifetime, Paracelsianism became the insurgent medical theory of the latter sixteenth century, before entering the mainstream by the turn of the seventeenth.
It offered a programmatic association of epistemological hiddenness with preciousness, and a vision of the new philosophy as operating like an allegorical exegesis. Which brings us to a fourth factor in the early modern invention of discovery; probably more important than the other three put together. Wootton is never more traditional an historian of science than when he is talking about the factor of Christianity—or rather, not talking about it, other than to dismiss it.
And he connects this attitude, explicitly, to the precondition he has identified for the scientific revolution. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.
Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. The telescope rendered the old astronomy obsolete. Torricelli's experiment with the vacuum led directly to the triumph of the experimental method in the Royal Society of Boyle and Newton. By Newtonianism was being celebrated throughout Europe.
The new science did not consist simply of new discoveries, or new methods. It relied on a new understanding of what knowledge might be, and with this came a new language: discovery, progress, facts, experiments, hypotheses, theories, laws of nature - almost all these terms existed before , but their meanings were radically transformed so they became tools with which to think scientifically.
We all now speak this language of science, which was invented during the Scientific Revolution. The new culture had its martyrs Bruno, Galileo , its heroes Kepler, Boyle , its propagandists Voltaire, Diderot , and its patient labourers Gilbert, Hooke. It led to a new rationalism, killing off alchemy, astrology, and belief in witchcraft.
It led to the invention of the steam engine and to the first Industrial Revolution. David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is. Where astronomy led, other new sciences followed. To establish this claim it is necessary to look not only at what happened between and but also to look backwards, at the world before , and forwards, at the world after ; it is also necessary to address some methodological debates.
Chapters 6 to 12, which deal with the core period to , constitute the main body of this book; Chapters 3, 4 and 5 look primarily at the world before , and Chapters 13 and 14 at the world both somewhat before and somewhat after Chapters 2, 15, 16 and 17 deal with historiography, methodology and philosophy.
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