It is not merely in a passing phrase that sciencia seems to be a modern, foregoing tradition of knowledge. In fact it literally means "knowledge" according to etymology. This isn't unconcealing much in history though. Actually the word is an intentional anachronism which appeals to a dead and ideally unchanging reference of latin language, per the convenience of a 19th century conception of phycisists, like William Whewell's, who coined the term.
The "scientist", aside from holding a foregoing importance to history, is actually a neologism in Whewell's writing, and if anyone were ever to inquire what was actually intended by that term, aside from a displacement of "naturalism" as key to epistemelogical pursuits of the material world, they would find this man William Whewell, who was among many things, someone with strong theological inclinations.
He leaned toward a theory of "Fundamental ideas", as science, and he supposed these fundamental concepts, considered further, were based on another point of reference reflecting innate ideas.
Quote:
“We are able to have knowledge of the world because the Fundamental Ideas which are used to organize our sciences resemble the ideas used by God in his creation of the physical world. The fact that this is so is no coincidence: God has created our minds such that they contain these same ideas.”
Here is a short discussion of his philosophy of science. His work in its consistency seems to mainly be a provincial disagreement with Kant's phenomenological intuition, and in that turn, a broad unplaced sentiment to return to something nearer to plain Cartesianism, as evident here. He is referring to a sensible material world by ontological argument just as Descartes did. His objection to Kant's phenomenological "idealism" (bracketing space and time) seems a bit rosily colored in its own way, if considered in that statement.
There is a familiar pragmatism in Whewell's suggestion (I would have guessed he is American but he is actually from the UK), which seems to demonstrate the strife of a present intellectual climate, by presenting the starkness of what people may believe, at the same time as suggestions of loosening the strictness of this very "correspondence" or referential theory of truth ("belief base" or rigorous epistemology) into terms which aren't wholly reconciled in their conjecture.
So anyway, this is a quick and dirty consideration of the origin of the term science. Would anyone believe there is anything more preferable than Whewell's conventional platonism, as an appeal to godhead?
Don't we today rely on such oblique appeal to something that is both embodied and gathered in the logos of textbooks, and yet found at the same time as the changeable mode or plain revolution of those same "fundamental concepts"?
Whewell wanted to describe the methodological process and substance of science as extensive, and not contradictory to itself clearly, so he conceived of a pantheistic substance and its modes, which on the face of it, makes sense. Looked at formally, it is a little more difficult. How really does "science" or its formal method stand for the notion both of its authoritative reference, knowledge, and methods of gathering it which undermine hypostatic frames of reference? Formally this is the problem of induction.
So just in case anyone didn't know, aside from what is seemingly appropriate and inappropriate for a modern person to think in general, the idea of science is clearly somewhat broadly taken, in any case.
Edited by Kurt (07/29/15 01:27 AM)
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