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/u/justcool393 has a nice post about science and values below, and the conversation veers into discussion of what makes for good science. Without wanting to criticise anyone in that conversation, I'd like to vent a bit about a problem with broader discussion around Science (with a capital S), namely a kind of essentialism about science and the scientific method that's ubiquitous in Rat-adjacent spaces and popular science reporting.
In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.
This is true synchronically - some fields like pharmacology that have to deal with the insane complexities of human physiology are data-centric and heuristic by nature, others like particle physics involve a lot of narrow theoretical work and are reliant on dramatic insights, others like material science are somewhere in between. Moreover, ideas like replicability and experiment simply don't apply to all branches of science; many areas of geology (e.g. study of mass extinctions) are dependent on natural accumulation of evidence and lucky finds, while others (like parts of cosmology) are strikingly limited in the kinds of experimental data they can access, so the challenge becomes a matter of using existing data to probe theories.
But it's also true diachronically; what made for successful science in the 18th century is very different in many respects from what makes for successful science in the 21st century. Part of that is the disappearance of low hanging fruit, and the need for large scale co-ordination across teams with tens of thousands of contributors. Part of it may also be that we have stronger priors on which theories we can discard with minimal proof (e.g., perpetual motion machines). And while it's tempting to see these shifts in norms and practices of science over time as reflecting some linear trend, there's no guarantee that's the case. Here it's worth using the heuristic of an underlying "tech tree" that we're climbing (of course, things aren't like that, but work with me). In videogames, usually the amount of research points required to unlock the next branch of the tree increases steadily over time. But there's no reason to assume that has to be the case, or applies in a blanket way across different areas of science. We don't know what the future of the tech tree will look like; it's possible that advances in technology and society could open a new wave of "gentleman scientists" (cf. some of more optimistic commentary on the LK-99 affair).
I imagine some of you might be tempted to scoff at this and try to boil down "Science" into a few sensible epistemic rules, e.g., use of Bayes's theorem, active efforts at disconfirmation, preregistration of explicit weighted hypotheses, etc.. I think this is valuable as epistemology, but it doesn't provide a core to science - for one, plenty of non-scientific practices (e.g., running a sports team, managing an investment fund, optimising a relationship) also benefit from incorporating these rules. For another, many of the most fertile and successful canonical periods in the history of science (e.g., the Enlightenment) were a methodological Wild West, where few if any of these rules applied. So it's neither sufficient nor necessary for something to be science that it embody these principles. But perhaps most fundamentally, this approach to essentialising science relies on drawing a misleading equivalence between scientists and individual believers. In fact, belief doesn't have to come into science at all: someone can be a perfectly good scientist while remaining personally agnostic on the theories they're testing. What matters is that, for example, the results of their experiments are appropriately incorporated within industry and institutions. Indeed, there are some occasions where arguably science benefits from individual epistemic irrationality; e.g., scientists on the fringes who pursue low-probability high-impact theories to the detriment of their careers because they're (irrationally) true believers. All of those scientists would be individually better off (and more likely to get jobs) if they pursued safe mainstream alternatives. But if everyone does that, science is more likely to get stuck in local theoretical minima.
So if there's no core to "science", then what should we attribute the remarkable successful Renaissance/ Enlightenment technological revolution to? This is a big question, and I won't seriously attempt to answer it here. But two quick thoughts.
First, I wouldn't underestimate the role of what we could loosely call "engineering" - the steady accumulation of advances in things like horse-breeding and ship-building and glass-blowing and metallurgy and mining and industrial chemistry and carbon-fiber construction and so on. Many of the advances we think of as instances of historic scientific genius (e.g., Enlightenment astronomy, Hooke's microscopy, Faraday's insights on electromagnetism; see also, famously, John Harrison's resolution of the longitude problem) were very dependent on prior slowly-accumulated advances in fields like these, built on the back of lengthy intergenerational metis rather than just technê.
Second, I'd emphasise that the major expansion in human knowledge that (according to the traditional story at least) started in Europe in the 1600s-1700s and has since taken over the world should not be attributed to us summoning The Science Demon (the Science Demon doesn't exist, on my view; he's like like sixty different minor demons) but something rather more abstract. If I was pressed, I'd call him something like "pluralistic-quantified-high-stakes-competition-demon" (a close relative of one of the Darwinian demon). What started to happen in Europe, maybe, around the 1600s-1700s, was European civilisation started to converge on a successful recipe, involving lots of inter-state and inter-elite competition, increased quantification/visible demonstrations of results via things like warfare, ideological pluralism allowing lots of experimentation, etc..
That said, I'm not a historian, and precise characterisation of the demon is beyond my paygrade as a philosopher, so I'll leave my speculations at that. But what I would emphasise is that if are looking for any kind of unified explanation of "the success of science", it won't be at the level of "do experiments using method X"; it'll be something far bigger and more abstract, more at the level of civilisation-wide social-institutional design than epistemology.
I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
You might be right that it is a strawman, but intriguingly, it is not a baseless strawman. The book title "in confident hope of a miracle" is a quote from a Spaniard of the time. At least one Spaniard was indeed that superstitious. The difficulty is that, with no Gallup polling from back, then it is hard to know whether that level of superstition was common enough to matter.
There are also difficult issues around compartmentalization, both of society and within the minds of individuals. I think that there were sharp class distinctions between tradesmen and nobles. So tradesmen would be level headed and practical in regard to their trade. Shipwrights would build seaworthy ships based on trial and error and folk-naval-architecture, then the noble would swoop in to have the priest bless the ship to make it seaworthy. Within the head of the noble there would be two watertight compartments. One would commission ships, but only from shipwrights whose previous ships had made it back from America. The other would navigate the treacherous waters around heresy by ensuring that the importance of the priest was never doubted. The obvious point, that only the shipwrights track record mattered would be carefully ignored.
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