Styles of Scientific Thinking

Extract

Science as we know it today has a long history stretching back to the Greeks and the Babylonians. It is essentially the results of our continuing attempts to understand the natural world, and as such it is conditioned by our culture, by our beliefs concerning what is important and what is not about the nature and purpose of knowledge, and about the structure of argument and the criteria of proof. These factors vary from one culture to another, and together they determine the style of scientific thinking.

It was very difficult to get started, and fatally easy to become trapped in a blind alley. Early civilisations amassed much natural lore, and extensive astronomical observations were made, notably by the Babylonians. But the chief credit for initiating the scientific enterprise belongs to the ancient Greeks.

The whole scientific enterprise, as Alistair Crombie points out in his magisterial treatise, depends first of all on the underlying vision of reality, and then on the arguments used to support and verify that vision. The Greek philosophers provided both the vision and the argument. The first idea was that the vast complexity of the world can be understood in terms of simple elements; once we know these elements we can see how everything else follows from them, giving an integrated knowledge of the whole. The rules of rational inference were codified into the science of logic, and an outstanding example of the power of rational argument was provided by Euclid.