Widespread public literacy seems to be the trigger that sets off the collapse of mythic thinking. Where literacy remains the specialty of a priesthood jealous of its privileges, among the ancient Maya or in Egypt before the New Kingdom, writing is simply a tool for recordkeeping and ceremonial proclamations, but once it gets into general circulation, rationalism of one kind or another follows in short order; an age of faith gives way to an age of reason.

And because I’m obviously not arrogant enough…
Note publication dates.

More interconnected people makes more information come in showing that previously-reasonable rituals in fact do nothing, and thus the ritual target cannot be conscious – it cannot understand what you’re trying to tell it to do, nor appreciate your offers and sacrifices.

[…]

Eventually, though, materialists arose – people who were so well-networked they had all the information to realize that gods don’t make much sense, if any. So, desiring to serve Reason, they rejected gods.

Reproducibility is an idea; that it is good, a theory. Because of the background of respect for philosophy, the revolution in communication enabled a surge in inquiry.

“Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years, the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.”

…

“The Aristotelian doctrine of inertia was a doctrine of rest—it was motion, not rest, that always required to be explained. Wherever this motion existed, and however long it existed, something had to be brought in to account for it.

The essential feature of this view was the assertion or the assumption that a body would keep in movement only so long as a mover was actually in contact with it, imparting motion to it all the time… If resistance were reduced to nought, the speed would be infinite; that is to say, if the movement took place in a vacuum, bodies would move from one place to another instantaneously. The absurdity of this was one of the reasons why Aristotelians regarded a complete void as impossible, and said that God Himself could not make one.

It is astonishing to what degree not only this theory but its rivals—even the ones which superseded in the course of the scientific revolution—were based on the ordinary observation of the data available to common sense. And, as writers have clearly pointed out, it is not relevant for us to argue that if the Aristotelians had merely watched the more carefully they would have changed their theory of inertia for the modern one—changed over to the view that bodies tend to continue either at rest or in motion along a straight line until something intervenes to stop them or deflect their course. It was supremely difficult to escape from the Aristotelian doctrine by merely observing things more closely, especially if you had already started off on the wrong foot and were hampered beforehand with the whole system of interlocking Aristotelian ideas. In fact, the modern law of inertia is not the thing you would discover by mere photographic methods of observation—it required a different kind of thinking-cap, a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself; for we do not actually see ordinary objects continuing their rectilinear motion in that kind of empty space which Aristotle said could not occur, and sailing away to that infinity which also he said could not possibly exist; and we do not in real life have perfectly spherical balls moving on perfectly smooth horizontal planes—the trick lay in the fact that it occurred to Galileo to imagine these.

To answer Butterfield and defend the primacy of experiment over theory, what really happened was an advancement of communication technology in the form of Gutenberg’s press, which made it possible to go beyond scholasticism and hermeneutics to directed memetics where selection pressures of a very different character were brought to bear on the memes. Among the pressures was the idea that you could report an experiment and expect many others to reproduce it. This then created pressure for more precise descriptions of experimental setups and results. This created selective pressure for more precise quantitative formalisms. This created selective pressure for more reliance on mathematics. Once mathematics became the lingua franca it created a second revolution that rendered experiments more effective in overthrowing outmoded theories and their ways of thinking.

So, in truth, the revolution in science was as much a revolution in communication about experiments as it was a revolution in thinking.

In practice, ideas can come from anywhere. In practice, methodology does not always guarantee results, but can ensure a systematic reliability, as it were.
As to the distinctions, if any, between science, theory, epistemology, etc., they’re all involved, whether explicitly or implicitly, every time one does anything.

Science involves knowing: so does art. They both involve techne. They are both crafts. Such crafts navigate possibilities into realms of ‘realisation’. It’s a good idea for an artist or scientist to ‘know’what they’re doing, to some degree. But ‘knowledge’ is not a ‘closed circuit’.

Sometimes, discoveries happen through ‘practice’, mistakes, or other unintentional factors, ‘theory’ catches up after. What’s the point of fetishising method? A good scientist is trained to be aware of all that. Let them get on with it.

“Good interpretations. It was a small word-play piece.”

Thank you, Matt.
Unfortunately, in my ignorance, I missed the word-play. It was a bit too sophisticated for me, lol. Thanks for explaining it: sounds brilliant! I haven’t really read every comment on the post, am in the middle of other stuff.
I’m not sure if I understand its significance, as regards the contextual considerations you were responding to, but here are some quick responses.

“modal region”: ‘modal’ has strong musical connotations for me.

It’s interesting that you use the classical Greek antipathy to ‘zero’ in your contrast enabling the progress of ‘positivity’ (‘posit’, ‘position’, etc.). This is something I referred to before – my first comment, here http://www.xenosystems.net/diversionary-history/

Good interpretations. It was a small word-play piece.

cotiere was an intentional malapropism making a play on words regarding Nick’s comment about fusionism and word games, I tried to do the opposite and unpack ‘trifecta cotiere’. The 3-pointed coastal region of Ἰωνία is were it all began. The first modal region. By starting off the blurb wrong and ending with right. I was showing everything emerged from the abyss – nothing – zero – negative to the modalities of being right – positive – future additions.

“The trifecta cotiere of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein was … The little known algorithm Sub specie aeternitatis influenced Spinoza and Leibniz, and it is a static one outside of time running in the background at a base level of all of this…All of this is derivative of Anaximander who was right on number, modality, and emergence.”

Eternity as an algorithm? “running” “outside of time”?
In ‘its’ own time, perhaps?
Only if there is such thing as an absolute Time, would the preceding be contradictory.
Not that contradiction is such a big deal.

‘Staticity’ is always with respect to some ‘motion’, somewhere.

“Good explication here. The will-to-know and imagination will take you everywhere you need to go.”

Thank you, Matt.
I’m just seeing what those faculties describe, what they show, the patterns they form, the economies they outline.

“Gödel seemed to think there were profound insights laying dormant with Leibniz. His project is gloriously overlooked.”

I think you’ve got a good point there.
Perhaps, if it was possible for Leibniz to conceive “the best of all possible worlds”, he might have been on to something.
After all, his monadology was an early theorisation of the hologram.
I don’t much about him, either, but have known of him for a long time. My impressions were always good, from the start.
And yeah, Godel’s opinion is worth considering.

The multiverse is a supernatural theory, and I’m deeply disappointed with Carroll for not realizing it.

if a so-called supernatural phenomenon has strictly no effect on anything we can observe about the world, then indeed it is not subject to scientific investigation. It’s also completely irrelevant, of course, so who cares?

String theory might as well be supernatural.

Evolution is based on reproducible experiments, it’s simply several inferential steps away from them. If it wasn’t, it would be a supernatural theory.

–

The commentators want to socially exalt the scientific and not socially exalt the not-scientific. Absent that impulse, coming to an agreed definition would be straightforward.

Science seems to be a good thing. What does it do that is good? Okay, everything that does that good thing is dubbed science. Or rather, we don’t care about ‘science,’ we care about the result, so let’s drop the abstract ‘science’ entirely and just talk about the result. Also important, such an understanding would promote non-science inquiry and deprecate scientific non-inquiry. (Humans have to dole out social status, so might as well put it something good directly rather than trying to do a bank shot off ‘science.’)

Which is why I don’t I don’t particularly care if you (plural) agree with my definition or not.