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Science, Tradition, and the Science of Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Joseph Mali
Joseph Mali
Affiliation:
The institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and IdeasTel Aviv University
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Abstract

Science consists in progress by innovation. Scientists, however, are committed to all kinds of traditions that persist or recur in society regardless of intellectual and institutional changes. Merton's thesis about the origins of the scientific revolution in seventeenth-century England offers a sociohistorical confirmation of this revisionist view: the emergence of a highly rational scientific method out of the religious-ethical sentiments of the English Puritans implies that scientific knowledge does indeed grow out of – and not really against – customary modes of thought.

In tracing the intellectual origins of this view back to the religious controversy between Protestants and Catholics, the essay demonstrates that the essential conflict between them with regard to natural science stemmed from their antagonistic conceptions of tradition and its function in the production of genuine knowledge – of religious as well as of natural affairs. Whereas the Protestants believed only in those truths that are immediately revealed by God to each man through his reason, the Catholics adhered to truths that are related to men or “made” by them through culture and history.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , Spring 1989 , pp. 143 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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