Review
But Is He Sure?
The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton
Penguin, 2015
(783 pages, $35.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Graeme Hunter
This innovative history of the scientific revolution is a guided tour beginning at a time a little prior to a.d. 1600, in which learning consisted in the mastery of books, moving through a phase in which certain kinds of experience began to challenge book learning, and passing from there to the present time, when experimental science deliberately brings about experiences designed to challenge reigning theories.
It is slightly ironical that this lengthy celebration of science's victory over book learning should come with a bibliography more than sixty pages long, but the long list is not only window dressing. It reflects the kind of wide reading professional historians love to bring to bear on their subjects. It builds the reader's confidence in the writer's many bald assertions about how things once were and how they are today.
Bald assertions are a hallmark of David Wootton's style. Often they have the ring of authority; sometimes, though, they seem only opinionated. The latter cases do not ruin this book, but I shall return to the way in which they mar it. Still, he adopts this categorical manner for a reason. For one thing, he rejects historicism, the view that the historian must use only the conceptual system of the period he is documenting. Wootton insists on the historian's right to use the lights of the present to illuminate the past. Neither is he prepared to concede to postmodern historians that science is just a social artifact, changing with the times, like fashion in hats or hemlines, lacking any foundation, and therefore not a thing to be categorical about.
Historicism and postmodernism both have difficulty with the idea of scientific progress, and are inclined to deny it. Wootton, however, defends it. And if there is progress, then the science of each period contains more possibilities than the scientists of the period exploit, and these possibilities can only be recognized once science has grown up enough to exploit them, or grown a vocabulary broad enough to acknowledge them. This is why historicism is wrong.
Postmodernism is wrong for another reason. Science does not resemble fashion. When progress is made, science becomes linear. Fashion is always cyclical.
Neither of the alternatives Wootton rejects is all wrong, however. He agrees with historicists that we need to understand the language of the period we are studying, though we still need our own vocabulary, Wootton thinks, to say definitively what the period was all about. He also agrees with the postmodernists that the occurrence of scientific developments is always linked to the material, social, and political realities of the time. But those realities can produce results that outlive them. New experience and new knowledge remain a legacy to science even after the conditions that gave rise to them have changed.
New Concepts for Old
Little of the scope, the charming detail, and the wit of Wootton's survey can be captured in a brief review. Much of it is an account of how old words received new meanings in the early modern
period.
Wootton recounts, for example, how the word "discovery" came to mean an encounter with something not known before, and often not even dreamt of. Originally the word had only the meaning it still has in legal language today. To discover something was not to find it out for yourself, but to disclose it to someone else. That meaning is no longer the ordinary one today. Nowadays you can only discover what you have not previously known.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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