Chapter 1
The introduction of written records represents one of the most important moments in the development of
science. One way that we can start to answer why the invention of writing was so significant in the development
of science is by exploring the nature of preliterature civilisations.
Preliterature civilisations = Civilisation before writing was invented.
Characteristics culture without written records according to Lindberg:
1) Their knowledge is confided to 'know-how' without a theoretical understanding of the underlying
principles.
2) Fluidity of knowledge → Knowledge of the actual history of the tribe is limited to two generations and
the function of the oral tradition mainly in the transmission of practical skills.
3) Existence of a collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe, life and natural
phenomena, in which human traits are projected onto objects and events.
Animism = Explanation of the workings of the world and the universe by means of spirits with
human-like characteristics.
- Term introduced by Burnett Tylor that drew a distinction between the thinking of primitive people
as opposed to the then growing scientific thinking in the western world. He believed that
primitives looked at the world like children and endowed all things, even inanimate ones, with a
nature analogous to their own.
In this period of time
Man discovers representation, in which things are denoted with symbols and relations between things are
represented with relations between symbols.
- Language: "The cat chases the mouse"
- Numbers: "2+3=5"
With language a representation can be brought from one head into another. With writing, representations can be
brought into someone's head without the other being physically present. It becomes possible to have shared
representations: ideas can easily spread and can also be sustained over generations.
Lindberg viewed preliterate civilizations' animistic thinking more favorably than Tylor did. He saw myths as
reinforcing community values and providing explanatory principles. Lindberg noted that despite contradictions
and inconsistencies in myths, preliterate societies weren't hindered. Scientific thinking, he argued, emerges with
written records, revealing patterns and resolving inconsistencies.
Social developments
- Through the discovery of agriculture, man can:
- Stay in one place, and thus establish settlements
- Produce more food than is needed to feed everyone, so not everyone has to constantly arrange
food
- There is a possibility of creating a community in which different people fulfill different roles
- A hierarchy typically emerges, in which higher ranked individuals have time
Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures: in China (around 6000 BCE), Egypt (around
3200 BCE), Sumer (3200 BCE) and America (300 BCE). Early writing systems combined pictograms and
phonograms. Egyptian hieroglyphs, deciphered by recognizing spoken syllables, evolved into alphabets. The
Phoenician alphabet influenced Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek. Chinese, though logographic, still reflects word
meanings and pronunciation cues through character pairs.
Pictogram = An information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal or object it
represents.
Phonogram = A sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language; forms the basis of writing
systems.
Logograph = A sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a physical resemblance to the word’s
meaning.
- Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures; in each case it was preceded by
proto-writing.
The importance of writing lies in the external memory written records provide about the knowledge available at a
certain point in time. This is important because it allows an accumulation of knowledge. Written records not only
made more information available; they also subtly changed the way in which knowledge was preserved. Before
the advent of writing, important legends were memorized as verses.
,The rhythm and the rhyme of the poem helped the narrator to remember the correct phrases, so that the
contents did not change too dramatically from one storyteller to the next. Written texts allowed cultures to relax
the formal constraints and concentrate on the content.
For many centuries a large proportion of the population was excluded from acquiring reading skills. In addition,
the early scripts lacked an important characteristic that makes alphabetic languages easier to read: spaces
between the words. Only in the eighth century did writers start to put spaces between the words. Saenger
(1997) argues that this quality of texts made silent reading possible. Before, nearly all readers read aloud or at
least had to mumble while reading (a practice that was still widespread in the nineteenth century).
The influence of orthography → Reading acquisition is easiest in languages with a transparent relationship
between spelling and sound, where most children learn in less than a year. In languages with a more opaque
correspondence, such as English and Hebrew, children need up to four years in order to reach the same level of
performance and are more likely to be confronted with reading difficulties.
Scholastic method = Study method in which students unquestioningly memorize and recite texts that are
thought to convey unchanging truths (no critical thinking).
- The scholastic method was prevalent in schools up to the twentieth century.
Another development that has been crucial for the growth of knowledge is the discovery of numbers. The
possession of goods required the ability to count them. The earliest archaeological evidence of counting dates
back to 35,000–20,000 BCE and has been found in Africa.
- The first written forms of counting consisted of lines (tallies) in bones and stones.
It is reasonable to assume that quite early in their evolution humans could make distinctions up to three, which
were represented by one, two and three markings. Newborn babies and all kinds of animals can distinguish
between one, two and three entities, a phenomenon that is known as subitising. A problem with tallies to
represent numbers is that they rapidly exceed the limits of perception.
- Because it is difficult to discern more than four lines in a glance, the tallies were grouped. The grouping
usually occurred in fives (i.e. base 5 system).
Special status number five
1) The number five is the first entity that really exceeds the perceptual limits (it is possible to grasp a
grouping of four perceptually without counting the tallies, as in IIII).
2) The number five also coincides with the number of fingers on a hand.
- Gradually, the base number five started to get a different symbol.
The fact that all Indo-European languages share the same roots for the numbers one to ten further suggests
that their names already existed before the original language began to split into its many branches around 2000
BCE. Another feature of many of the Indo-European number names is the irregularity of the number names of
the teens (i.e. the numbers 11–19). It is clear that some of these numbers were given their names before the
base 10 of the number system was fully grasped. Once the different numbers had their names, it was a small
step to represent them by different symbols. From 600 BCE the Greeks developed a written system for the
numbers 1–24 based on the 24 letters of their alphabet, going from alpha (1) to omega (24).
Although the Greek and the Roman number notation was a major achievement, it was not the most
parsimonious or transparent system, because the length of the symbol series was not systematically related to
the base 10 structure of the numbers (e.g. 38 was represented by seven symbols, XXXVIII, whereas the
number 50 was represented by a single symbol, L). This resulted in the discovery of place coding in India.
- The Greek and Roman number systems were suboptimal because their notation did not assign a
meaning to the place of the digits. Such a place coding system was developed in India. This required
the invention of a symbol for 0.
Place coding system = System in which the meaning of a sign not only depends on its form but also on its
position in a string; it is used for instance in Arabic numerals.
- Such a place coding system only works properly if there is a symbol for the absence of a quantity at a
certain slot. Otherwise, it is impossible to know whether the digit string 22 refers to the number 22 or to
202, 220. In the beginning this problem was solved by inserting spaces between the symbols.
Eventually, a symbol for 0 was invented.
The presence of written records marks the distinction between prehistory and history. The Sumerian and
Egyptian cultures were part of the so-called Fertile Crescent. One of the many innovations coming from this
region was the use of the wheel in the fifth millennium BCE.
,Mesopotamia and Egypt also started keeping written records and developed a number system. Whether the
inventions in both regions occurred independently, or whether the cultures influenced each other, is still a matter
of debate.
- Ancient Mesopotamia: mathematics (algebra, astronomy, calendar)
- Ancient Egypt: geometrical knowledge, calendar, hieroglyphs.
Fertile crescent = Region in the Middle East with a high level of civilisation around 3000 BCE; included the
Ancient Mesopotamian and the Ancient Egyptian civilisations.
- Contemplating the conditions that made the growth of science possible in the cultures of the Fertile
Crescent, Lindberg identified the following qualities: political stability, urbanisation, patronage and the
availability of a writing system that was easy enough to be learned by enough people so that a critical
mass could be reached.
Without doubt, in the beginning the Ancient Greeks borrowed heavily from Egypt and Mesopotamia. However,
they soon added their own knowledge.
- The start of philosophy around 600 BCE. One of the questions pondered was whether the foundations
of life were constant or ever-changing.
Philosophy = Critical reflection on the universe and human functioning; started in Ancient Greece.
Greek antiquity
The birth of systematic research in Greece. Man encounters key questions in philosophy:
- What is the world like? (ontology)
- How do we know what is true? (epistemology)
- What makes some things beautiful and others ugly? (aesthetics)
- What makes some deeds good and some bad? (ethnics)
Before and after Socrates
- From the presocrats, we only have smaller pieces of text such as Heraclitus
- Socrates
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Philosophy after Aristotle
- The stoics
- The epicureans
- The skeptics
Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.)
- Heraclitus ("the Obscure") doubts whether something every stays the same
- "No man ever steps in the same river twice"
- The only constant is change itself
- This principle is known as Pantha Rhei ('everything flows')
Fast forward in time
- Now much of science actually relies on invariance-principles: e.g., all electrons are interchangeable
- But how about psychology? Can you think the same thing twice?
- Are there psychological invariances? Are people interchangeable like electrons?
Rationalism and empiricism
Rationalism = Knowledge comes from reason, ratio
Empiricism = Knowledge comes from sensory experience
- These two positions are a recurring theme in the history of psychology and philosophy
The ultimate rationalist: Plato
- Central thesis: knowledge comes (at least in part) from the ratio (intelligence)
- Knowledge is only partly based on observation
- Plato claims that real knowledge (about the good, the true and the beautiful) does not come from
observation
- Knowledge from reason is superior to knowledge from experience
- Associated claim: there is innate knowledge (nativism)
, Plato's rationalism
- Real knowledge cannot come from observation; after all, we only see imperfect forms (e.g. drawn
circles).
- Yet we can "see" perfect forms in our mind (e.g. the perfect circle)
- If that idea of a circle does not come from perception, where does it come from?
- "idea" and dutch "idee" come from eidos which means form or image
- Plato's answer: we "remember" these ideas from our divine origin
- Knowledge is recognized and therefore we know it must be true
- Our mind is born out of the world of forms, which is a transcendent world where the perfect forms are
- Plato believed in reincarnation, used this to explain our knowledge of perfect forms
- For real knowledge you should not turn to empiricism; you should remember what you already know
Plato's Cave
In Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," he presents a symbolic narrative to explore the nature of reality, knowledge,
and enlightenment. In the allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave, facing a wall. They have been there
since birth and can only see shadows cast by objects behind them, illuminated by a fire. The prisoners mistake
these shadows for the real world.
One day, a prisoner is freed and exposed to the outside world, discovering the true source of the shadows and
the existence of a brighter reality beyond the cave. Initially, the freed prisoner is blinded by the sunlight but
gradually comes to perceive the genuine forms of objects and the world.
The allegory symbolizes the journey from ignorance to knowledge. The cave represents the world of
appearances and opinions, while the outside world symbolizes the realm of true knowledge and understanding.
The process of leaving the cave and adapting to the light mirrors the philosopher's intellectual journey toward
enlightenment and the pursuit of ultimate truths.
Plato uses the allegory to illustrate the distinction between the visible world (the world of appearances) and the
intelligible world (the world of forms or ideas). The philosopher's role is to seek knowledge beyond mere
appearances, recognizing the eternal and unchanging forms that represent the ultimate reality.
Fast forward in time
- Nativism is still relevant today
- Psychological research suggests that very young children can reason causally and that babies are
surprised when natural laws are violated (e.g. when something falls upwards). See the research of
Susan Hespos.
- Moreover, according to many, language ability is innate
- Contemporary nativism is not rooted in reincarnation but in the evolution of the brain
Empiricism
- Central thesis: knowledge lies in observation
- This is now the commonsense view: if you want to know what is going on, you have to observe
- Associated thesis: if all knowledge comes from experience, there is no need for innate knowledge
Aristotle
- Aristotle is seen as the founding father of empiricism
- He was the first to think systematically about how to gain knowledge from observations
- Rationalist: Self-evident axioms can not be rejected by observations
- But, these axiomas are acquired through experience, they are not innate or shown to us before birth
- Rejects Plato's two-worlds theory: there is only one world we can observe
- Everything around us consists of form and matter
- The forms are not just something in our heads but are the essence of being
Peripatetic principle
- Aristotle walked around while teaching in his lyceum: peripateo in Greek
- That is why Thomas Aquinas called the empirical principle the peripatetic principle: 'Nothing is in the
intellect that was not first in the senses'
- Later known as the tabula rasa theory: the mind is an unwritten tablet (blank slate) at birth
Aristotle's view on knowledge
- What is knowledge based on?
- Sensory experiences = e.g. we observe swans
- Induction = We induce that swans have specific properties
The introduction of written records represents one of the most important moments in the development of
science. One way that we can start to answer why the invention of writing was so significant in the development
of science is by exploring the nature of preliterature civilisations.
Preliterature civilisations = Civilisation before writing was invented.
Characteristics culture without written records according to Lindberg:
1) Their knowledge is confided to 'know-how' without a theoretical understanding of the underlying
principles.
2) Fluidity of knowledge → Knowledge of the actual history of the tribe is limited to two generations and
the function of the oral tradition mainly in the transmission of practical skills.
3) Existence of a collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe, life and natural
phenomena, in which human traits are projected onto objects and events.
Animism = Explanation of the workings of the world and the universe by means of spirits with
human-like characteristics.
- Term introduced by Burnett Tylor that drew a distinction between the thinking of primitive people
as opposed to the then growing scientific thinking in the western world. He believed that
primitives looked at the world like children and endowed all things, even inanimate ones, with a
nature analogous to their own.
In this period of time
Man discovers representation, in which things are denoted with symbols and relations between things are
represented with relations between symbols.
- Language: "The cat chases the mouse"
- Numbers: "2+3=5"
With language a representation can be brought from one head into another. With writing, representations can be
brought into someone's head without the other being physically present. It becomes possible to have shared
representations: ideas can easily spread and can also be sustained over generations.
Lindberg viewed preliterate civilizations' animistic thinking more favorably than Tylor did. He saw myths as
reinforcing community values and providing explanatory principles. Lindberg noted that despite contradictions
and inconsistencies in myths, preliterate societies weren't hindered. Scientific thinking, he argued, emerges with
written records, revealing patterns and resolving inconsistencies.
Social developments
- Through the discovery of agriculture, man can:
- Stay in one place, and thus establish settlements
- Produce more food than is needed to feed everyone, so not everyone has to constantly arrange
food
- There is a possibility of creating a community in which different people fulfill different roles
- A hierarchy typically emerges, in which higher ranked individuals have time
Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures: in China (around 6000 BCE), Egypt (around
3200 BCE), Sumer (3200 BCE) and America (300 BCE). Early writing systems combined pictograms and
phonograms. Egyptian hieroglyphs, deciphered by recognizing spoken syllables, evolved into alphabets. The
Phoenician alphabet influenced Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek. Chinese, though logographic, still reflects word
meanings and pronunciation cues through character pairs.
Pictogram = An information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal or object it
represents.
Phonogram = A sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language; forms the basis of writing
systems.
Logograph = A sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a physical resemblance to the word’s
meaning.
- Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures; in each case it was preceded by
proto-writing.
The importance of writing lies in the external memory written records provide about the knowledge available at a
certain point in time. This is important because it allows an accumulation of knowledge. Written records not only
made more information available; they also subtly changed the way in which knowledge was preserved. Before
the advent of writing, important legends were memorized as verses.
,The rhythm and the rhyme of the poem helped the narrator to remember the correct phrases, so that the
contents did not change too dramatically from one storyteller to the next. Written texts allowed cultures to relax
the formal constraints and concentrate on the content.
For many centuries a large proportion of the population was excluded from acquiring reading skills. In addition,
the early scripts lacked an important characteristic that makes alphabetic languages easier to read: spaces
between the words. Only in the eighth century did writers start to put spaces between the words. Saenger
(1997) argues that this quality of texts made silent reading possible. Before, nearly all readers read aloud or at
least had to mumble while reading (a practice that was still widespread in the nineteenth century).
The influence of orthography → Reading acquisition is easiest in languages with a transparent relationship
between spelling and sound, where most children learn in less than a year. In languages with a more opaque
correspondence, such as English and Hebrew, children need up to four years in order to reach the same level of
performance and are more likely to be confronted with reading difficulties.
Scholastic method = Study method in which students unquestioningly memorize and recite texts that are
thought to convey unchanging truths (no critical thinking).
- The scholastic method was prevalent in schools up to the twentieth century.
Another development that has been crucial for the growth of knowledge is the discovery of numbers. The
possession of goods required the ability to count them. The earliest archaeological evidence of counting dates
back to 35,000–20,000 BCE and has been found in Africa.
- The first written forms of counting consisted of lines (tallies) in bones and stones.
It is reasonable to assume that quite early in their evolution humans could make distinctions up to three, which
were represented by one, two and three markings. Newborn babies and all kinds of animals can distinguish
between one, two and three entities, a phenomenon that is known as subitising. A problem with tallies to
represent numbers is that they rapidly exceed the limits of perception.
- Because it is difficult to discern more than four lines in a glance, the tallies were grouped. The grouping
usually occurred in fives (i.e. base 5 system).
Special status number five
1) The number five is the first entity that really exceeds the perceptual limits (it is possible to grasp a
grouping of four perceptually without counting the tallies, as in IIII).
2) The number five also coincides with the number of fingers on a hand.
- Gradually, the base number five started to get a different symbol.
The fact that all Indo-European languages share the same roots for the numbers one to ten further suggests
that their names already existed before the original language began to split into its many branches around 2000
BCE. Another feature of many of the Indo-European number names is the irregularity of the number names of
the teens (i.e. the numbers 11–19). It is clear that some of these numbers were given their names before the
base 10 of the number system was fully grasped. Once the different numbers had their names, it was a small
step to represent them by different symbols. From 600 BCE the Greeks developed a written system for the
numbers 1–24 based on the 24 letters of their alphabet, going from alpha (1) to omega (24).
Although the Greek and the Roman number notation was a major achievement, it was not the most
parsimonious or transparent system, because the length of the symbol series was not systematically related to
the base 10 structure of the numbers (e.g. 38 was represented by seven symbols, XXXVIII, whereas the
number 50 was represented by a single symbol, L). This resulted in the discovery of place coding in India.
- The Greek and Roman number systems were suboptimal because their notation did not assign a
meaning to the place of the digits. Such a place coding system was developed in India. This required
the invention of a symbol for 0.
Place coding system = System in which the meaning of a sign not only depends on its form but also on its
position in a string; it is used for instance in Arabic numerals.
- Such a place coding system only works properly if there is a symbol for the absence of a quantity at a
certain slot. Otherwise, it is impossible to know whether the digit string 22 refers to the number 22 or to
202, 220. In the beginning this problem was solved by inserting spaces between the symbols.
Eventually, a symbol for 0 was invented.
The presence of written records marks the distinction between prehistory and history. The Sumerian and
Egyptian cultures were part of the so-called Fertile Crescent. One of the many innovations coming from this
region was the use of the wheel in the fifth millennium BCE.
,Mesopotamia and Egypt also started keeping written records and developed a number system. Whether the
inventions in both regions occurred independently, or whether the cultures influenced each other, is still a matter
of debate.
- Ancient Mesopotamia: mathematics (algebra, astronomy, calendar)
- Ancient Egypt: geometrical knowledge, calendar, hieroglyphs.
Fertile crescent = Region in the Middle East with a high level of civilisation around 3000 BCE; included the
Ancient Mesopotamian and the Ancient Egyptian civilisations.
- Contemplating the conditions that made the growth of science possible in the cultures of the Fertile
Crescent, Lindberg identified the following qualities: political stability, urbanisation, patronage and the
availability of a writing system that was easy enough to be learned by enough people so that a critical
mass could be reached.
Without doubt, in the beginning the Ancient Greeks borrowed heavily from Egypt and Mesopotamia. However,
they soon added their own knowledge.
- The start of philosophy around 600 BCE. One of the questions pondered was whether the foundations
of life were constant or ever-changing.
Philosophy = Critical reflection on the universe and human functioning; started in Ancient Greece.
Greek antiquity
The birth of systematic research in Greece. Man encounters key questions in philosophy:
- What is the world like? (ontology)
- How do we know what is true? (epistemology)
- What makes some things beautiful and others ugly? (aesthetics)
- What makes some deeds good and some bad? (ethnics)
Before and after Socrates
- From the presocrats, we only have smaller pieces of text such as Heraclitus
- Socrates
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Philosophy after Aristotle
- The stoics
- The epicureans
- The skeptics
Heraclitus (535-475 B.C.)
- Heraclitus ("the Obscure") doubts whether something every stays the same
- "No man ever steps in the same river twice"
- The only constant is change itself
- This principle is known as Pantha Rhei ('everything flows')
Fast forward in time
- Now much of science actually relies on invariance-principles: e.g., all electrons are interchangeable
- But how about psychology? Can you think the same thing twice?
- Are there psychological invariances? Are people interchangeable like electrons?
Rationalism and empiricism
Rationalism = Knowledge comes from reason, ratio
Empiricism = Knowledge comes from sensory experience
- These two positions are a recurring theme in the history of psychology and philosophy
The ultimate rationalist: Plato
- Central thesis: knowledge comes (at least in part) from the ratio (intelligence)
- Knowledge is only partly based on observation
- Plato claims that real knowledge (about the good, the true and the beautiful) does not come from
observation
- Knowledge from reason is superior to knowledge from experience
- Associated claim: there is innate knowledge (nativism)
, Plato's rationalism
- Real knowledge cannot come from observation; after all, we only see imperfect forms (e.g. drawn
circles).
- Yet we can "see" perfect forms in our mind (e.g. the perfect circle)
- If that idea of a circle does not come from perception, where does it come from?
- "idea" and dutch "idee" come from eidos which means form or image
- Plato's answer: we "remember" these ideas from our divine origin
- Knowledge is recognized and therefore we know it must be true
- Our mind is born out of the world of forms, which is a transcendent world where the perfect forms are
- Plato believed in reincarnation, used this to explain our knowledge of perfect forms
- For real knowledge you should not turn to empiricism; you should remember what you already know
Plato's Cave
In Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," he presents a symbolic narrative to explore the nature of reality, knowledge,
and enlightenment. In the allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave, facing a wall. They have been there
since birth and can only see shadows cast by objects behind them, illuminated by a fire. The prisoners mistake
these shadows for the real world.
One day, a prisoner is freed and exposed to the outside world, discovering the true source of the shadows and
the existence of a brighter reality beyond the cave. Initially, the freed prisoner is blinded by the sunlight but
gradually comes to perceive the genuine forms of objects and the world.
The allegory symbolizes the journey from ignorance to knowledge. The cave represents the world of
appearances and opinions, while the outside world symbolizes the realm of true knowledge and understanding.
The process of leaving the cave and adapting to the light mirrors the philosopher's intellectual journey toward
enlightenment and the pursuit of ultimate truths.
Plato uses the allegory to illustrate the distinction between the visible world (the world of appearances) and the
intelligible world (the world of forms or ideas). The philosopher's role is to seek knowledge beyond mere
appearances, recognizing the eternal and unchanging forms that represent the ultimate reality.
Fast forward in time
- Nativism is still relevant today
- Psychological research suggests that very young children can reason causally and that babies are
surprised when natural laws are violated (e.g. when something falls upwards). See the research of
Susan Hespos.
- Moreover, according to many, language ability is innate
- Contemporary nativism is not rooted in reincarnation but in the evolution of the brain
Empiricism
- Central thesis: knowledge lies in observation
- This is now the commonsense view: if you want to know what is going on, you have to observe
- Associated thesis: if all knowledge comes from experience, there is no need for innate knowledge
Aristotle
- Aristotle is seen as the founding father of empiricism
- He was the first to think systematically about how to gain knowledge from observations
- Rationalist: Self-evident axioms can not be rejected by observations
- But, these axiomas are acquired through experience, they are not innate or shown to us before birth
- Rejects Plato's two-worlds theory: there is only one world we can observe
- Everything around us consists of form and matter
- The forms are not just something in our heads but are the essence of being
Peripatetic principle
- Aristotle walked around while teaching in his lyceum: peripateo in Greek
- That is why Thomas Aquinas called the empirical principle the peripatetic principle: 'Nothing is in the
intellect that was not first in the senses'
- Later known as the tabula rasa theory: the mind is an unwritten tablet (blank slate) at birth
Aristotle's view on knowledge
- What is knowledge based on?
- Sensory experiences = e.g. we observe swans
- Induction = We induce that swans have specific properties
