Why are we here?
Before we talk about study design, statistics, or peer review, we need one shared foundation:
What counts as science?
How does science reason?
What does it mean to explain something?
Okasha’s first three chapters are basically those three questions.
The core story for today
A lot of “history of science” can be told as a shift in where authority comes from:
- Authority-based knowing: tradition, scripture, revered texts, famous names
- Evidence-based knowing: observation, measurement, mathematization, replication, community scrutiny
Not that religion vanishes, or that authority stops mattering, but the method of settling disputes changes.
Before “science”: explanation by authority
For much of human history, if you asked “Why does this happen?”, the most socially legitimate answers came from religious or cultural authorities. That’s not because everyone was irrational. It’s because:
- there weren’t strong institutions for systematic measurement,
- many phenomena are hard to observe directly,
- and communities need coherent narratives.
The modern scientific posture is not “we are smarter now,” but “we have a better machinery for error-correction.”
Early mathematization: Egypt and Mesopotamia
Long before Greece, people built reliable knowledge with mathematics:
- Egypt developed practical geometry for surveying, construction, and administration.
- Babylonian (Mesopotamian) traditions were especially strong in astronomical record-keeping and calculation.
Key idea: once you can count, measure, and predict (even approximately), you can start separating “what works” from “what’s sacred.”
Pre-Socratic natural philosophy (the “turn” toward natural causes)
Around the 6th–5th centuries BCE, the Greek “pre-Socratics” start asking for non-supernatural explanations and general principles.
Thales of Miletus
Often called an early figure in natural philosophy. Two stories worth telling (with the right caveats):
- He’s credited with proposing natural explanations for events rather than mythic ones.
- He is alleged (via Herodotus) to have predicted a solar eclipse (commonly dated to 585 BCE), but modern scholars are skeptical about how literal/accurate that story is.
Use this as a teaching moment: even origin myths of science get mythologized.
A few “pre-Socratic” examples
- Anaximander: speculated that animals originated in moisture and that humans came from other animals (often summarized as an early evolutionary speculation).
- Empedocles: used a simple vessel experiment (clepsydra idea) to argue that air is “something,” not nothing—because it can block water and must move out for water to move in.
- Democritus: argued that matter is composed of atoms (atomos = “uncuttable”), a conceptual ancestor to later atomic theory.
- Eratosthenes: estimated Earth’s circumference using shadow angles at different locations (famously associated with Alexandria and Syene) plus distance.
- Heraclitus: emphasized change and the difficulty of grasping nature; the fragment “nature loves to hide” is commonly attributed to him.
Important Note: these folks did not get it right; rather, they changed what counts as an explanation.
Thales of Miletus (“Father of Science”) was the first to claim a non-supernatural explanation for earthquakes and lightning. He made a lot of money predicting solar eclipses and droughts.
Hellenistic / Roman / Late Antique continuity (not a flatline)
It’s too simple to say “science stopped until the Renaissance.” Knowledge production changed form and institutional support varied, but:
- Greek texts persisted and were reinterpreted,
- engineering and practical knowledge continued,
- and later European universities emerged with their own constraints and possibilities.
The Islamic world and knowledge transmission
A lot of scientific and medical development flourished in Islamic societies (and in multilingual borderlands), including major advances in medicine, astronomy, optics, and chemistry, and crucially: translation, commentary, and institutional practice.
Scholasticism and “natural theology”: the bridge to early modern science
From ~12th century onward, scholasticism tried to reconcile classical philosophy (especially Aristotle) with Christian doctrine. This matters because it trained scholars to:
- argue carefully,
- define terms,
- and build systems of reasoning.
Aquinas argued for “natural theology”, that is, “to know god by studying nature”
Francis Bacon and the re-branding of method
Bacon’s contribution is partly philosophical and partly rhetorical: he attacks “argument from authority” and promotes systematic observation and inductive learning from nature. Novum Organum becomes a symbol of the shift toward method as something teachable, not a genius’s private gift.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvtCLceNf30&t=182s
Scientific Revolution and institutions: take nobody’s word for it
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton are the usual cast, but for research methods, the bigger point is:
- science becomes an organized, public, and cumulative enterprise.
The Royal Society is created with the motto: Nullius in verba (“take nobody’s word for it”).
Where do you see “Nullius in verba” in modern CS? Where do we fail it?
Captures the new ideal: claims should be checkable by experiment and communal scrutiny.
Where do you see “authority” in Computing?
Semmelweis as a case study in evidence vs. acceptance
Ignaz Semmelweis (1847) required hand disinfection in obstetrical clinics and dramatically reduced maternal deaths, yet met intense resistance because the causal story (germs) wasn’t widely accepted and the implication (“doctors are causing this”) was socially explosive.
Scientific Revolution
There is a shift back to the idea that human reason has the power to discover truth.
So the best minds tend to astronomy: Nicholaus Copernicus proposes heliocentrism.
Challenges Ptolemaic astronomy, big deal.
Who is your favorite scientist? Why?
Negative induction Hypothesis
A modern philosophy-of-science argument:
- Many past theories were successful yet false (phlogiston, caloric, crystalline spheres…).
- So why think our current best theories are true?
This is often called the pessimistic (meta-)induction.
- Science is an engine for becoming less wrong.
- Models can be useful even when they’re not literally true (Ptolemy is a great example of a “useful falsehood”).
- The goal is not final truth; it’s reliable inference under constraints.
Science as a social discipline: norms + rewards
If you were born 100 years ago? Would you still be a graduate student?
Scientific discoveries and Scientific thought are a product of the social environment of the age. For example, math in the Early Renaissance was anti-social
Even if the logic is good, science is made by humans with incentives.
https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
Merton’s CUDOS norms
- Communality/Communalism (often “communism” in Merton): knowledge is a shared public good; secrecy fights progress.
- Universalism: evaluate claims independent of a person’s identity or status.
- Disinterestedness: the institution should reward truth-seeking over personal gain (even though individuals have incentives).
- Organized skepticism: claims face structured criticism before acceptance.
[Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms#Four_Mertonian_norms]
If scientists mostly want recognition, how do we award it? (papers, citations, keynote slots, grants, awards, priority)
Scientists are people
Even the famous ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOTlx_UK08I