Greek Version of Scientific Instrumentalism Was Particularly Instrumentalist
There are at least two ways that science is circumstantially practiced. One is as a heavily mathematical search to understand the basic structure of the universe and what's in it - what David Deutsche refers to as "revealing and explaining the fabric of reality." (3) The other is as fairly straightforward instrumentalism - the theory predicts something, that something is the case, so the theory should still be taken as sound. The understanding people think that the instrumentalists are incurious and the instrumentalists think that the understanding people are fanciful. At the center of the debate is the nature of theory: do theories have a kind of correspondence to the world or are they crude psychological tools humans need to deal with the world.
But nonetheless, both sides are still dealing with theories. The questions are about what the theories mean and whether there's much more to science than testing them - but it's still about the development of theories. That's just how science is done.
After the jump, evidence that the Greeks may have had a qualitatively different third approach.
A researcher at Harvard University is finding that ancient Greek craftsmen were able to engineer sophisticated machines without necessarily understanding the mathematical theory behind their construction. Recent analysis of technical treatises and literary sources dating back to the fifth century B.C. reveals that technology flourished among practitioners with limited theoretical knowledge. "Craftsmen had their own kind of knowledge that didn't have to be based on theory," explains Mark Schiefsky, professor of the classics in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "They didn't all go to Plato's Academy to learn geometry, and yet they were able to construct precisely calibrated devices."...Schiefsky has found that the steelyard--a balance with unequal arms--was in use as early as the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., before Archimedes and other thinkers of the Hellenistic era gave a mathematical demonstration of its theoretical foundations. "People assume that Archimedes was the first to use the steelyard because they suppose you can't create one without knowing the law of the lever. In fact, you can--and people did. Craftsmen had their own set of rules for making the scale and calibrating the device," says Schiefsky. Practical needs, as well as trial-and-error, led to the development of technologies such as the steelyard... Craftsmen learned to improve these machines through productive use, over the course of their careers, Schiefsky says... According to Schiefsky, the interplay between theoretical knowledge and practical know-how is crucial to the history of Western science.
At some points this sounds like standard instrumentalism - you see what works. But the question is - as it always is in rhetoric and argumentation - what is going on here. And so a modern instrumentalist, when performing an experiment, is still doing it in the background of a mathematical theory. The instrumentalist may be content to say that confirming predictions exhausts scientific practice, but she's still talking about predictions.
It sounds like the pre -Archimedean Greeks developed technology without any reference to background theory. For them, technology was created by people who had developed a kind of knack for it. These people were no doubt unusually apt about perceiving regularity in the universe. Had they been given the right tools, they could and very probably would have been scientists. But even without those cognitive resources, they were still able to develop something that we'd very much like to call technology without practicing anything that we'd be comfortable calling science.
References:
* Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications. Penguin (Non-Classics), 1998.
* Even Without Math, Ancients Engineered Sophisticated Machines [Science Daily]
Previously:
* Pre-Darwinian Empiricism Read Through Peirce
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
* It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
