Evan Osborne
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780804796446
- eISBN:
- 9781503604247
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804796446.003.0003
- Subject:
- Economics and Finance, Economic History
Beginning in the 1600s, primarily in Britain, the Dutch Territories, and France, people not only tried to think about how the world worked (a pattern of thought as old as human civilization); they ...
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Beginning in the 1600s, primarily in Britain, the Dutch Territories, and France, people not only tried to think about how the world worked (a pattern of thought as old as human civilization); they also agreed that there was much that was yet unknown and collectively built procedures for how to know more. The construction of the system for defining such knowledge and evaluating claims to be adding to it has been a gradual evolution that continues to this day. Among the landmark events discussed are the development of the ideas of hypotheses, the experimental method, free competition among scientific ideas, the use of the (growing number of) mathematical tools to arbitrate scientific claims, the development of modern research universities, the establishment and improvement of the peer review system, and the more recent addition of techniques beyond traditional scientific experiments as ways of supporting or falsifying scientific claims.Less
Beginning in the 1600s, primarily in Britain, the Dutch Territories, and France, people not only tried to think about how the world worked (a pattern of thought as old as human civilization); they also agreed that there was much that was yet unknown and collectively built procedures for how to know more. The construction of the system for defining such knowledge and evaluating claims to be adding to it has been a gradual evolution that continues to this day. Among the landmark events discussed are the development of the ideas of hypotheses, the experimental method, free competition among scientific ideas, the use of the (growing number of) mathematical tools to arbitrate scientific claims, the development of modern research universities, the establishment and improvement of the peer review system, and the more recent addition of techniques beyond traditional scientific experiments as ways of supporting or falsifying scientific claims.
