ZT:From "The Origin of Science" from Objective Knowledge


所有跟贴·加跟贴·新语丝读书论坛

送交者: xinku 于 2007-02-04, 08:07:39:

From "The Origin of Science" from Objective Knowledge
By Karl Popper. Oxford University Press, 1972; 1979


For more information on Karl Popper, go to The Scientific Philosophy of Karl Popper at http://www.brown.edu/Courses/Bio_Community_Health168C/popper.htm (from which the photograph was taken)

See also John Burnet on the relationship of science and religion in Greek thought at http://plato.evansville.edu/public/burnet/ch2.htm

Or see Michael Fowler's Physics lecture at http://www98.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/lectures/thales.html

The first beginnings of the evolution of something like a scientific method may be found, approximately at the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., in ancient Greece. What happened there? What is new in this evolution? How do the new ideas compare with the traditional myths which came from the East and which, I think, provided many of the decisive suggestions for the new ideas?

Among the Babylonians and the Greeks and also among the Maoris in New Zealand--indeed, it would seem, among all peoples who invent cosmological myths--tales are told which deal with the beginning of things, and which try to understand or explain the structure of the Universe in terms of the story of its origin. These stories become traditional and are preserved in special schools. The tradition is often in the keeping of some separate or chosen class, the priests or medicine men, who guard it jealously. The stories change only little by little--mainly through inaccuracies in handing them on, through misunderstandings, and sometimes through the accretion of new myths, invented by prophets or poets.

Now what is new in Greek philosophy, what is newly added to all this, seems to me to consist not so much in the replacement of the myths by something more "scientific", as in a new attitude towards the myths. That their character then begins to change seems to me to be merely a consequence of this new attitude.

The new attitude I have in mind is the critical attitude. In the place of a dogmatic handing on of the doctrine [in which the whole interest lies in the preservation of the authentic tradition] we find a critical discussion of the doctrine. Some people begin to ask questions about it; they doubt the trustworthiness of the doctrine: its truth.

Doubt and criticism certainly existed before this stage. What is new, however, is that doubt and criticism now become, in their turn, part of the tradition of the school. A tradition of a higher order replaces the traditional preservation of the dogma: in the place of traditional theory--in place of the myth--we find the tradition of criticizing theories (which at first themselves are hardly more than myths). It is only in the course of this critical discussion that observation is called in as a witness.

It can hardly be a mere accident that Anaximander, the disciple of Thales, developed a theory which explicitly and consciously diverges from that of its master, and that Anaximenes, the disciple of Anaximander, diverges just as consciously from his master's doctrine. The only explanation seems to be that the founder of the school himself challenged his disciples to criticize his theory, and that they turned this new critical attitude of their master's into a new tradition.

It is interesting that this happened only once, so far as I know. The earlier Pythagorean school was almost certainly a school of the old kind: its tradition does not embrace the critical attitude but is confined to the task of preserving the doctrine of the master. It was undoubtedly only the influence of the Ionians which later loosened the rigidity of the Pythagorean school tradition and so paved the way leading to the philosophical and scientific method of criticism.

The critical attitude of ancient Greek philosophy can hardly be better exemplified than by the famous lines of Xenophanes:

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw
And could scupture like men, then the horses would draw their gods
Like horses; and cattle like cattle; and each would then shape
Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of its own.

This is not only a critical challenge--it is a statement made in the full consciousness and mastery of a critical methodology.

Thus it seems to me that it is the tradition of criticism which constitutes what is new in science, and what is characteristic of science. On the other hand it seems to me that the task which science sets itself [that is, the explanation of the world] and the main ideas which it uses, are taken over without any break from prescientific mythmaking.

--as excerpted in From Texts to Text: Mastering Academic Discourse, by George H. Jensen (HarperCollins, 1991)

Return to Week 3 or Week 4

Posted by A. L. Trupe Sept. 19, 1999
http://www.bridgewater.edu/~atrupe/GEC101/popper.html




所有跟贴:


加跟贴

笔名: 密码: 注册笔名请按这里

标题:

内容: (BBCode使用说明)