Reddit mentions of The Scientific Revolution (science.culture)

So this is a very, very, very tricky question, because when we get right down to it, we still don't have a very rigorous definition of "science" today. That is, we don't have a clear way to say, "this is science" and "this is not science." This is known as the Demarcation problem and after several decades of no progress made, most historians and philosophers of science have simply abandoned the project altogether as a badly thought-out one, even in the cases of outright silly nonsense.

(Now I know a lot of people out there who don't study this stuff for a living are probably saying, but what about Karl Popper? What about falsifiability? Etc. Let me just say that it doesn't really work out very smoothly along those lines and that has been known for many decades now. Falsifiability is a nice way to attack Creationism but as a rigorous means of sorting out science from non-science it falls flat when you start trying to apply it widely.)

It gets much worse if we take philosophical standards of the day (be they Popper's or Merton's or whomevers) and try to apply them backwards in time. We find that most of those heralded as the "first" or "great" scientists break ever rule in the book, routinely. (Galileo is such an offender that Paul Feyerabend wrote an entire book about it.)

So this gets tricky as an historical question, and historians of science are prone to debate with each other just how unclear it is that there, for example, was any kind of "Scientific Revolution" ("There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.") at all, or whether the evolving professionalization, practices, and mindsets were something both more gradual and as-of-yet-still-unfinished than most people realize.

But that's probably not the answer you're interested in. I think what you're probably going for is a history of professionalization of science, the latter loosely defined as systematic inquiry into nature.

Peter Dear, an historian of science at Cornell, has argued quite persuasively in my mind that the real distinguishing feature of the "Scientific Revolution" of the 15th-16th century (e.g. Galileo et al.) is not that they came up with brand new ways of thinking about the universe, or that Galileo himself was any kind of real outlier here (he did not pop out of nowhere and there were, indeed, plenty of other astronomers and philosophers and etc. running around at the same time as him, though we tend to ignore them), but that they started on a very regular basis merging quantitative studies of nature with philosophical ideas about nature. That is, they started integrating mathematics into their empirical observations, and using these to develop better theoretical models for big questions like "how is the universe run." That, he argues, is somewhat different than what came before, though even then, there are always antecedents. But there are plenty who would even disagree and argue with him on that apparently simple point.

If you want to talk about the professionalization of this kind of inquiry, the early 18th century is when it starts to really become considered almost a "profession" in some parts of the world.

If you want to ask, when does it start to look like what we would today call "science" — with the university positions, industrial cooperation, little boys (and later, girls) saying "daddy I'd like to be a scientist when I grow up," foundations giving grants, people having regular educational and career paths, not just something for rich elites, research published in journals, etc. — that's the mid-to-late 19th century. Obviously bits and pieces of that are present earlier, but prior to the 19th century it still looks, largely, like an informal thing that mostly is done by rich men in their spare time.

Sorry for such a long answer that is probably not what you wanted! I hope, at the minimum, it impresses upon you the fact that historians of science consider this to be a not very easy question to answer, and generally regard the flip answers provided by scientists ("Galileo! Newton!") as being horribly inadequate, if not outright propaganda of a sorts.

An excellent introduction to the field is provided by The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin. Here is a brief review.

Mike Rugnetta made a few stretches or mistakes in explaining Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" yet the corrections still could have been used to explain the misuse of quotes or the way meaning is lost through translation both literally and through people and time.

The first is error Rugnetta mentions 'I think, therefore I am' doesn't mean I think therefore I have a body, it means I think and therefore there must be stuff, stuff which I'm comfortable labeling me thinking all them thoughts." It would have been better to quote Descartes himself (Yes, I will get to how Descartes is speaking as the I next) explicitly stating, "this 'I,' that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am." (Does Popeye owes Descartes royalties?) Thus the I is the soul and in a secular way a "placeholder". This may seem minimal but would a placeholder continue to exist if the body were removed? Descartes say this is separate from the body and thus continues despite a body being( if the body never was because "Descartes” says I is a soul not a physical thing.) The use of the word “soul” is perfect as today it connotates a religious, in but outer body thing and that is what Descartes is writing about in that Part IV of Discourse on Method.

Say Whaaaa?

Yes. Not only is this a portion of Descartes’ search for the truth (knowledge) but Part IV is about proving “the existence of God and of the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics.” (This quote is from the beginning of the discourse and in in italics. I don’t know if this was from an early editor or friend or pompous Rene Descartes himself). He is constantly drowning the reader with I because he is expelling to the reader how and why he arrived at writing the Discourse. When you learn a little about Descartes’, you suddenly see how parallel the Discourse is to his early life. Thus to say the cogito’s I isn’t really a person speaking” is to ignore Descarte’s definition of I as the soul and thus a person with or without a body.

This leads me to correct Rugnetta’s claim that the Discourse’s avoidance of “you, us or we” was an omittance of the other yet applicable to the other. Descartes is completely redefining philosophy and thus the pre-science days of science. At this time, you were taught to listen, read, memorize and repeat. Scholarship was not thinking critically as we view it today (or some of us) but of absorbing the scholastics. Descartes found much of this during his youth most unsettling when he attended a Jesuit high school which taught the opposite: independent thought. There he began to seek the new topics that were banging on the gates to Universities such as mathematics and later on would conclude he needed to start anew and wipe all predisposed through teaching and get at the essential building blocks: I think, therefore I am.

Why did I tell you all that? To go to the next misused quote, I’m sure there’s something in all of Descartes’ life you could have connected the two (I don’t know much of Sartre so good luck). With No exit, I think there might have been a way to tie it in.

Anyway… Thanks Mike. Thanks for making me pull out Descartes’ Discourse on Method (Hackett, 3rd Ed), The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin (Uni. Chicago), and my notes from “The Age of the Scientific Revolution”, a course studying the 1500s and up. Today we call it the Scientific Revolution but to those living at the time they called it philosophy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Wait, I take back that sarcastic thanks and replace it with a sincere thank you. It was enjoyable to reread sections of the old course material. Made me miss that course actually. Now why the hell did I spend an hour writing this crap?!! WHo'll read it?! Psh!

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