David Christian Comments on Current Discussion

Dear WSN,

Upon the posting of some of the most recent messages by Alexander, Popolo, Prugovecki, (and now John Landon on “History and Evolution”), I had the opportunity to write “Big Historian” David Christian to get his response to our discussions.   The following text (per his permission to post it on the World Systems Network) contains his impressions and input on the topic.  I hope it helps to further define, outline, describe, and explain the social scientific elements of this discussion.  Please give it a read and tell me what you all think.  And, I’ll relay the responses onto him.

The bracketed portion is an inclusion he made the point of emphasizing in his second email to me.  I include it here in his original comments to make the text flow more clearly and explicitly clarify his statements about scientific and pre-scientific conceptual maps of reality.  Enjoy!

Luke R.

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The discussion you mentioned looks absolutely fascinating. I checked it out briefly, and would love to have time to look more closely at it, but at the moment I've got a lot of other things I need to deal with. I'll try to get back to it in a few days time. I have ideas on these subjects, but I'm not sure I can claim anything like expertise. I think it is a given that absolute prediction, like absolute certainty, is unachievable. The problem of induction is very simple; we always have a sub-set (and generally a tiny sub-set) of the available information. Generalising from that sub-set is often a remarkably successful strategy, but its success can never be guaranteed simply because it is a sub-set. Our minds are small and the Universe is large. I find it helpful, at least in teaching situations, to talk of knowledge (including scientific knowledge) as consisting of maps of reality. The maps of Australian aborigines or Palestinians 2000 years ago or of scientists today count (each in their respective eras) as the best maps available at the time. The crucial difference between scientific maps and earlier 'maps' (e.g. the Ptolemaic maps of cosmology, or the Australian maps of the dreamtime) is not that the scientific maps are 'empirical' and the others were not. No map could have survived for long or been taken at all seriously if it did not solve a lot of important and practical problems; dreamtime stories told people a lot about relations with other peoples, appropriate behaviour, and they even had, embedded in them, a huge amount of hard empirical knowledge about botany and biology, migration patterns, etc. The difference, I believe, is in the scale of the testing procedures by which they are judged.  Science is a map of knowledge that is tested globally, not just by a particular community in a particular region. The tests to which it is subjected are, in an important sense, far more stringent than those to which earlier and more parochial 'knowledge systems' were subjected.  [{The} maps of knowledge of earlier communities were as good as possible in their eras; which implies of course that, in important senses they have now been superceded.] It's no accident, I think, that modern science is usually thought of as appearing in Europe; Europe was the hub of the first global system of intellectual exchanges, and it was the astonishing and unprecedented flow of new information which undermined old certainties in Europe, and forced serious thinkers to think more deeply than before about the foundations of knowledge.  This, I suspect, is the key to the 'scientific method'--a certain scepticism about traditional knowledge derived from painful experience of having to deal with a flood of new information.

        But none of these ideas count as serious expertise--just the ideas on science of someone who has tried hard to see history as embedded in other maps of reality, including those of science.  I have tried to write these ideas up more formally in a paper that will be published later this year in I.H. Stamhnuis, T. Koetsier, C. de Pater and A. Vvan Helden, eds., 'The Changing Image of the Sciences', Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, pp. 143-171.

        David Christian

 

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