What is Worth Knowing?

This is the question that Peter Dear asks in his book 'Revolutionizing the sciences' (see right hand side under Just read) for two points in time: around 1500 and at the start of the 18th century. From the differences between both answers he builds a picture of the changes that brought about modern science in the period usually referred as the Scientific Revolution.

The fact that the term Scientific Revolution, coined by the French/Russian Koyre with the Russian Revolution in mind, and eagerly adopted by young American historians with their own 1776 revolt against the British Crown in mind, hardly can be applied to a period of several hundred years, and taking place in the entire western world of that time, does not mean however that no major changes took place in scientific thinking.

The biggest being the change from a vita contempliva to a vita activa, of learning Gods motives for Creation by direct observation and thought, to actively seeking out new things by experiment, i.e. mediated observation using tools and apparatus, and hypothesizing, in order to control the world.

This also encompassed a change from a qualitative approach to get to know the world in which we live, to a quantitave, more mathematical, approach. A third change is that science became focussed on application. Practical use of new insights became highly important, driven by mercantile nations like England and the United Provinces of the Netherlands to further their control of the seas and thus increasing their wealth and power.

Two hundred years before, in contrast, science and artisanship were totally different things, now Know how and Know why essentially became the same question. Not a revolution maybe, but certainly a major paradigm shift!

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Now this is all very interesting but why am I posting it here? Because it brought to my mind the question of "What is worth knowing in the early 21st century?" Are we on the brink of a new paradigm shift in science?

The emergence of different kinds of social sciences in that last 5 decades or so, brings qualitative approaches once again to the limelight. Fields like genetics generate ethical and moral questions by the truckload, that do not fit well at all into the current scientific world, as they can't be fit into mathematical rules and constructs.

In my own studies, philosophy of science, so called 'sociological detours' are often used to get a grip on the complex interaction between technology (and its development) and society as a whole. Does the ever increasing defragmentation of scientific fields into ever more specialized subfields mean we have depleted the taxonomy of our current scientific paradigm? Much like it was in 1500 when the Aristotelian world view conveyed the impression that all the important things were known, stifling innovation?

Most of these things are changes placing man back into the center of the scientific world view, instead of the cosmos ruled by laws of nature, of which mankind is a tiny and insignificant part. Also in management styles de-mechanization surfaces. Knowledge management, not looking at the IT-stuff, is based on this: how to give people the space and time to do their work to the absolute best of their ability, in line with organisational goals?

People like Goleman places emotional ripeness at the basis of succes, where as we all grew up being thaught that intellectual prowess was all that mattered. Is this the foreboding of another major paradigm shift in our appreciation of what science is and should be? I don't know, but it would certainly mean that a lot of exciting developments are ahead of us!