ABSTRACT
Here is a possible story about how science developed. Science originally arose in the area where humans displayed the most knowledge and interest—namely, themselves. Gradually, the human cognitive grasp moved outward: first, toward the nonhuman things with which they had the most in common, then to the more remotely nonhuman. Ultimately, humans made sense not only of nonearthly things (e.g. the heavens), but made sense of a perspective that was literally a “view from nowhere.” Such was pure objectivity (cf. Nagel 1987). The general strategy behind this outward reach would be for humans to model the nonhuman as much as possible on facets of themselves and then use the points of disanalogy as the basis for an autonomous body of research that eventually issues in a full-fledged science. Thus, on our story, biology would be expected to have spun off from sociology after a critical number of nonhuman properties had been recognized in animals. The newest science should be the most nonhuman study of them all, cosmology, which conceives of reality as a “universe” of which humans are an infinitesimal part.
