ABSTRACT
It is commonplace for historians of science to acknowledge the near inescapable conclusion that the adoption of a scientifi c mindset was a fundamental ingredient in the social, political, and intellectual ascent of the West. These Whig-centric historic accounts, as they have been characterized, reach their apogee in the writings of Timothy Ferris, who viewed the rise of the scientifi c method in the West not as an effect of the Enlightenment, but as the necessary cause of social progress and the growth of freedom and human dignity that characterized this period of incredible ferment (Ferris, 2010). He contended the standard account, in which the Renaissance gave rise to the scientifi c revolution, which ultimately resulted in the Enlightenment, was shortsighted and causally backward. Rather, pride of place belonged to the scientists and protoscientists whose insights, which grew out of an elemental break in the ways in which the world was understood, at least in the West, made the Renaissance possible. The transformation of Western science was made possible by the more ready availability of books and translations, communication in short, which served as
a continuing stimulus to new visions, despite the efforts of the establishment to reign-in or control it. Western democracies and the recognition of inalienable human rights did not emerge magically through an aberrant conjunction of humanistic and scientifi c thought; rather, science gave rise to the possibility of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and all that followed. 1
Ferris consistently emphasized the primacy of the experiment, because the logic and openness of the experiment, with its insistence on data-constrained feedback rather than preordained authority, fostered an unyielding and unremitting reliance on objective evidence in defi ning truth (Crano & Lac, 2012). The experiment’s nonnegotiable and obstinate requirement of a special kind of knowledge of truth unprivileged by hereditary succession, divine right, or other forms of authority was resisted by the often incompetent and always selfinterested leaders of societies engineered to maintain established positions of wealth and power.
