ABSTRACT
Many authors have described how a ‘traditional’ conception of the nature of scientific activity stems from certain materialistic, mechanistic and reductionist assumptions. These can be traced back to the work of Galileo, Descartes and Newton, among others. Galileo provided an alternative view of the universe which did not rely on religious dogma; Descartes assumed that it was possible to render all that was unknown into rational knowledge, and Newton provided an explicit theoretical basis for the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution resulted in enormous social change and was also significant in that it popularized science. This seems to be because it enabled humanity to change the world to such a degree that the science which was the basis of this power was almost reified. Because many of the discoveries could be viewed as almost miraculous, science became a kind of oracle, the source of all truth. This process gathered pace when Darwin’s explanation of the origin of the species gave a material explanation of the origin of humanity in a material world and challenged traditional religious explanations. The strength of this reductionist ideology is still evident today when television programmes popularizing science advance arguments that events are ‘really only’ the consequence of underlying reductionist concepts. (For example, that a rainbow is ‘really only’ the result of diffraction effects caused when light passes through droplets of rainwater.) In fact the reality is the rainbow —the reductionist concepts are models which help us, among other things, to predict when rainbows will occur.
