I think you could argue that there was no actual science before the scientific method was developed. There were things that approached science, but without testing theories through experimentation, and without others testing those same theories to confirm them, it isn’t really science.
It’s not just that they didn’t have a scientific method, it’s that empiricism was a swear word. You were supposed to understand the universe through intellectual extrapolation of the Bible or of greek philosophy - not by dumbly testing out things in the real world until you found a consistent pattern. The scientific method is kind of the first instance of the Bitter Lesson.
Ironically, occultists had no such snobbery, that’s why people like Paracelsus were able to be so influential even though their whole framework was basically fantasy. Just the fact that they would perform structured experiments and consign the results and use those results to establish theories put them head and shoulder above the rest.
You were supposed to understand the universe through intellectual extrapolation of the Bible or of greek philosophy - not by dumbly testing out things in the real world until you found a consistent pattern.
That is fundamentally not true. Especially since it implies that science wasn’t practiced outside of Christian institutions and Greek society. It completely omits things like the Islamic golden age, discoveries involving mathematics and astronomy in India, Chinese chemistry, and medicine throughout many parts of Africa
You’re right, my comment only applies to the setting depicted in the comic. Seems to be late middle age Europe, with the Inquisition still going hard, not a good time and place to be an empiricist.
I think you could argue that there was no actual science before the scientific method was developed. There were things that approached science, but without testing theories through experimentation, and without others testing those same theories to confirm them, it isn’t really science.
It’s not just that they didn’t have a scientific method, it’s that empiricism was a swear word. You were supposed to understand the universe through intellectual extrapolation of the Bible or of greek philosophy - not by dumbly testing out things in the real world until you found a consistent pattern. The scientific method is kind of the first instance of the Bitter Lesson.
Ironically, occultists had no such snobbery, that’s why people like Paracelsus were able to be so influential even though their whole framework was basically fantasy. Just the fact that they would perform structured experiments and consign the results and use those results to establish theories put them head and shoulder above the rest.
That is fundamentally not true. Especially since it implies that science wasn’t practiced outside of Christian institutions and Greek society. It completely omits things like the Islamic golden age, discoveries involving mathematics and astronomy in India, Chinese chemistry, and medicine throughout many parts of Africa
You’re right, my comment only applies to the setting depicted in the comic. Seems to be late middle age Europe, with the Inquisition still going hard, not a good time and place to be an empiricist.