The Invention of Science: The Scientific Revolution from 1500 to 1750 by David Wootton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book matters. It matters generally because of its meticulous scholarship and its well-reasoned articulation of the processes that underpin scientific knowledge. It matters specifically now as an antidote to the forces of counter-scientific thinking that, through ignorance or self-serving lies, are picking away at the fabric of society and academia.

In the context of COVID, a robust and reliable scientific process is life-saving. What I came to better appreciate through reading Wootton is both how recent and also how fragile the processes we call "science" really are. My crude understanding prior to reading the book was that the key transition into modern thought occured with Aristotle. Plato represented antiquity with the proper locus of inquiry being the mind; the objects of the world are no more than interesting approximations of intellectual "forms" and of limited use to the thinking philosopher. However misguided much of Aristotle's thinking may have been, I understood science to have begun with Aristotle's determination to investigate the details of the world through observation and classification.

Wootton argues convincingly that just observing the world and documenting what is seen is not enough to form the foundations of science. What is missing until the 16th and 17th centuries is a true scientific process and a culture of inquiry. And for such a process and culture to exist, Wooton demonstrates, a series of social and technological advances needed to be made. The printing press is necessary because knowledge has to be widely available and documented clearly so that others can test and verify. Advances in technology are important because they provide the precision instruments that allow for the careful and replicable measurement of the natural world. A culture of inquiry built on the social investment in the 16th century voyages of discovery supports the elevation of individual thinkers who can explore the natural world in new ways. Wootton's chapter on the historical evolution of the concept of a "fact" is both exhaustive in its scholarship and compelling in its argument that an enlightenment understanding of a "fact" is qualitatively different to any understanding that preceded it. Before the enlightenment, "fact" had more of the quality of the modern concept of "gossip" relying on hearsay and authority; after the enlightenment, a "fact" requires validation in objective evidence. This is the true origins of modern science.

Most interesting for me is Wootton's explanation of the relativism of the mid 20th century. When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, the post-structural thinking of Jacques Derrida was influential. I found the arguments (to the extent that I understood them) compelling and persuasive but also deeply unsettling as they seemed to uncouple the mind from the world. In the final chapters of his book, Wootton offers a rapprochement by reminding the reader of the "whiggish" history to which Derrida and others in the relativist tradition were reacting.

What stopped Aristotelian philosophy maturing to become modern science were the mechanisms of self-serving social power which permeate language and culture. The post-modern philosophers provide a clear articulation of these processes. What Wootton argues - very convincingly to my mind - is that it's possible to understand the thinking of Derrida and Wittgenstein and others as a useful addition to the history of science rather than as a refutation of scientific process. Scientific thought needs to be understood as both a social and a "factual" process.


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