Styles of Knowing: A New History of Science from Ancient Times to the Present

1. Introduction: The SIx Styles of Knowing

1´ 1 Introduction The Six Styles of Knowing Astyle of scientific knowing is more than a method of scientific practice. This book differentiates between six styles: the deductive (in which science is built on first principles), the experimental, the hypotheticalanalogical , the taxonomic, the statistical, and the evolutionary. Each of these styles has its own criterion for good science, the proper way of arriving at “the truth.” There is no way to deduce or derive the styles of science from anything else; they form their own justification. The proposal that there are six different styles of science was first made by the historian Alistair Crombie in his magnum opus, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition.1 The assertion of six styles is the result of Crombie’s taxonomic investigation, of his surveying the many forms in which the sciences have been practiced through history. The foundations of culture and the intellectual capacities of human beings have not been axiomatized to the point where we can prove that they yield these six styles and no others. Perhaps in the future new styles of science will arise, or perhaps they are already here, unnoticed. Technology may constitute an additional style; we will return to this topic later. This view of science has various implications. In the philosophy of science , it implies that no one style can be regarded as foundational, forming a 2 ¨ Introduction basis for all the others. In cultural history, it implies that there is no monolith called “science” (or “natural philosophy”) that has stood apart from the rest of Western culture since the ancient Greeks. The six styles identified here have their roots in different eras of cultural history and bear the marks of their origins even today. This clearly illustrates that styles are not “paradigms ,” one succeeding another in strict sequence in the history of science. Once a new style has emerged, it endures, retaining its distinct identity. Yet these styles are not inalterable. Each one has followed its own developmental path. They have entered into various alliances: the deductive and experimental styles, the experimental and statistical, the statistical and evolutionary , and so forth. And there is another way in which this style-based view of science bears on the history of both science and culture: namely, by opening up a wider range of historical contexts for scientific practice. Crombie sees the stirrings of all six styles in ancient Greece, though most of them did not fully emerge until much later. The Greeks developed the deductive style, in which the only kind of knowledge that qualifies as true science is knowledge derived from first principles that are necessarily true. The view that only the deductive style can lead to genuine scientific knowledge (scientia) persisted until the seventeenth century, though by then other styles of science had also taken root, presenting a growing challenge to the ideal of certain and necessary knowledge. In this respect, the High Middle Ages (1150–1400) constituted a pivotal period for science. The deductive style underwent fundamental changes and, after a long process, was eventually forced to relinquish its claims to dominance. For some time, however, the new, medieval form of deductive thinking remained the only generally accepted style of thought in the sciences . Analogy existed, but was a theological form of reasoning, rather than a scientific one. And while medieval thinkers posed questions about historical development, they couched their answers in the form of deductive systems, as the historian Johan Huizinga observed.2 The Middle Ages did not give rise to an experimental style, though a conceptual logic emerged that helped to pave the way for experimentation. The experimental working method did not truly take shape until the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, and even then it took two distinct forms: one associated with the Renaissance virtuoso, and the other with magicians and alchemists. The man of virtù, represented by Galileo Galilei, was primarily in search of insights of a general nature, preferably ones that could be expressed in a simple geometric form or as a numerical ratio. The magician, in contrast, represented by Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, was interested in anything unusual or anomalous. The Renaissance also produced the hypothetical-analogical style, which Introduction ´ 3 was championed around 1600. The beginnings of the taxonomic style also lie in this same period. This book therefore addresses the Renaissance in some depth, though not for the same reason as histories...