What is scientific culture?

Jiangyang Yuan

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,China

What is scientific culture?Scientific culture is a form of rational culture.The fundamental characteristic of rational culture lies in solving cognitive and practical problems based on rational analysis and empirical inquiry.In the past,logical empiricists attributed human rationality to logic and experience;today,human rationality is perceived as the ability of humans to think and reason and make empirical inquiry.The ability to think and reason includes not just logic but also imagination,analogy and other contingent modes of reasoning,while the ability to make empirical inquiry refers to the ability to do experiments and develop abduction or critical reasoning based on them.In this sense,it is fair to say that science is a manifestation of human thinking and empirical inquiry,and scientific culture is a manifestation of rational culture.

Historically,rational culture originated in ancient Greece.Spanning more than 2000 years across all civilizations,rational culture paved the way for the birth of science and scientific culture in the modern sense.John Wilkins (1614–1672),John Wallis (1616–1703) and other natural philosophers introduced the process of scientific inquiry in Invisible College at Oxford in 1645 and established the Royal Society in London in 1661,bringing scientific culture onto the stage of human history as a new group culture.These scholars established the Royal Society because they shared and gathered under Francis Bacon’s(1561–1626)philosophy of empiricism and hisutopian blueprint depicted inThe New Atlantis:developing the kingdom led by the House of Wisdom and rebuilding a Garden of Eden by reconstructing nature with scientific and technological knowledge.Moreover,they named their new natural philosophy ‘experimental philosophy’ to distinguish it from the old natural philosophy of the scholastic era since the 13th century and other new natural philosophies of their times (such as Descartes’system of natural philosophy).

Such a group culture of natural philosophers that takes experimental philosophy as its core is not only a culture of truth-seeking—it demands that truth be set up by reason and reason be corrected by experiment.It is also a culture that integrates truth-seeking and goodness-seeking—it resets the relationship between natural philosophy and moral philosophy in the scholastic philosophical system.For example,Bacon(1884: 24) proposed that ‘knowledge is power’;‘a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism,but depth inphilosophy bringethmen’s minds about to religion’.Boyle,by emphasizing the‘world−church’and‘natural philosopher −priest’analogies,concluded that the mission of the natural philosopher was to explore nature in order to celebrate God.Newton(1730:406)fervently hoped that ‘if natural Philosophy in all its Parts,by pursuing this Method[referring to Newton’s method of empirical inquiry named as‘analysis −synthesis’],shall at length be perfected,the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will be enlarged’.

Scientific culture was destined to step beyond the boundaries of the community culture of natural philosophers and to get rid of the traditional religious and theological culture using its distinctive rational spirit,scientific ethos and methods.It was destined to have a profound impact on the development of Western culture and that of the whole of humankind.Newton’sMathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy(1687)is not only a symbol of the birth of new science but also the starting point of the European Enlightenment.Later history shows that science is the template for the disciplinary development of social sciences and humanities,such as economics and sociology,and even Leopold von Ranke’s positivist history.

However,beyond what the early proponents of scientific culture anticipated,Bacon’s utopia of scientific−societal evolution was not fully realized.The modernization of Western societies eventually manifested itself as a process of continuous expansion,bringing wealth and world hegemony to Western societies but poverty and slavery to non-European nations.Such a result deviated from Bacon’s utopian ideal;much less was it an inevitable product of scientific advances.What Bacon envisioned inThe New Atlantiswas not a kingdom that kept expanding and winning world hegemony,but a new Garden of Eden formed by transforming nature with knowledge.In the modernization of Western societies,policymakers and leaders in Western societies took Bacon’s ‘knowledge is power’ statement out of its complete narrative and used it as a slogan.They used science as what Max Weber (1864–1920)called ‘instrumental rationality’ and reversed the Baconian scientific−societal evolution schema and value theory established by the early proponents of scientific culture,turning into reality Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s(1712–1778) prediction that science and technology aggravate the inequality between men,and building the‘freedom and democracy’ of the citizens of European empires based on the deprivation of freedom and democracy of the African,American and Asian peoples.

A review of the process of the emergence of science and scientific culture in the modern era helps us to understand the phenomenon of the division and confrontation between the two cultures (i.e.scientific culture and the culture of the humanities),which were made famous by Charles Percy Snow’s Cambridge speeches and continue to be confronted by our society today.This type of Snow phenomenon does not exist in every civilization or every era.Modern science was not incompatible with its humanistic contemporaries at the time of its birth.The split between scientific and humanistic cultures occurred only after the beginning of the modernization process.The fundamental reason is that the territory and structure of human knowledge,as well as the position and status of each knowledge branch in it,have been fundamentally changed in the modernization process.Human society has always been a knowledge society,and the only thing that changes is the knowledge at the core:first religious theology,then moral and ethical doctrines,and now scientific knowledge.

In monotheistic societies,especially after the adoption of peripatetic philosophy as the basic framework of their knowledge traditions,natural philosophy was accepted as an inner component of theology and developed under the wing of theology.As such,it was both subject to and,in a sense,guided and protected by theology.That is why the philosopher Isidore Comte(1798–1857)divided the overall development of human culture into the age of theology,the age of metaphysics,and the age of science.

With the further evolution of modern science,the theological background behind Boyle’s or Newton’s natural philosophy morphed into a picture of the secular world.Natural philosophy,which was transformed into science,not only changed the world of people’s spiritual lives but also reshaped the world of their material lives through the advance of technology.It was at this time that the scientific culture had expanded from a group culture of scientists into mainstream culture with society-wide impact,and that the phenomenon of science−humanities division and confrontation became prominent.

After the end of World War II,postmodernists interpreted the value and social consequences of science from a negative perspective.They indicated a causal relationship between the negative effects happening in Western societies since the beginning of the modernization process—from imperial colonization,ecological pollution and moral degradation to the successive outbreaks of world wars—and the advance of modern science.Some radicals even argued that modern science is purely a ‘science for power’ and that Bacon and Newton had committed a neworiginal sin.Arguments like these aroused public sentiments against science and reason and also led scientists and rationalists to question the academic nature of postmodern scholarship,thus aggravating the division and confrontation between science and the humanities.

In fact,science and the humanities are not inherently antagonistic.The humanities are about the thoughts,actions and results of human beings,and science is itself a kind of humanity as it is no more than a complex of the thoughts,actions and results of humans’exploration of nature.While science explores nature,the humanities seek to understand human nature and human society,but that does not mean that the quest for the meaning of life is a task reserved for humanities scholars;still less is its resolution completely cut off from science.

The history of the science −humanities relationship is a history of the natural philosophy −moral philosophy,rationality −virtue and rationality −faith relationships.In such a history,there are two points in time that deserve a brief analysis here.

First,about 2500 years ago,the Greeks first developed systematic natural philosophy and moral philosophy that followed the same cognitive rules and standards,based on the integration of the intellectual achievements of the ancient Babylonian,Egyptian,Indian and Persian civilizations.Therefore,how to balance the relationship between natural philosophy and moral philosophy was an important question for Greek thinkers to answer.Socrates argued that‘knowledge is virtue’and emphasized that the judgement of the human values of good and evil must be premised on‘knowing’.Inheriting the Pythagorean doctrine of soul cleansing (the Pythagoreans pursued the doctrine of eternal life and believed that it was not enough for one to just cleanse one’s body by vegetarianism and abstinence,but that one must also cleanse one’s soul by learning mathematics),Plato used mathematics as a means of cleansing the soul and put up a sign that read ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter’ at the entrance of his academy.In hisTimaeus,Plato spent much of the opening chapter telling the story of Atlantis,which was an advanced civilization that sank into the sea due to an earthquake,suggesting that the relationship between man and nature is fundamental to the relationship between men themselves.Aristotle(1999: 174–175) claimed that the life of rationality is the life of God for man,that ‘I love my teacher but I love truth more’,and that the fundamental difference between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Sophists was that he relied on the truth while the Sophists relied on sophistry.These three ancient Greek philosophers shared the same ideological lineage,and they all regarded reason as the fundamental path to virtue.Therefore,the theory of the relationship between natural philosophy and moral philosophy and the theory of reason and virtue advocated by the Greek philosophers can be summarized here with the phrase‘identifying the goodness based on knowing the truth’.

Second,centuries after the establishment of scholastic philosophy in the 13th century,the emergence of new arts,new religions and new sciences since the Renaissance indicated that the kingdom of human knowledge went through a new round of integration and innovation with the renewed convergence of the spiritual and material achievements of humankind.Bacon,Boyle and Newton,the advocates and founders of new science in the 16th and 17th centuries,saw new science as the foundation of Bacon’s‘third nature’ (the Garden of Eden created by men),which was a reaffirmation of the Greek philosophers’beliefs about the relationship between natural and moral philosophies.

Human civilization evolves with time goes by,and the growth of human reason is the key to humankind’s emergence from the stage of savagery.Even today,scientific culture that is underpinned by rational and empirical inquiries remains the basic resource and key driving force for the sublimation of human culture and the development of human society.There is no reason to assume that the evolution of human civilization is a process in which science and reason keep progressing while morality keeps decaying.The philosopher Bertrand Russell(1872–1970)once observed that:

The power of reason is thought small in these days,but I remain an unrepentant rationalist.Reason may be a small force,but it is constant,and works always in one direction,while the forces of unreason destroy one another in futile strife.Therefore every orgy of unreason in the end strengthens the friends of reason,and shows afresh that they are the only true friends of humanity.(Russell,2004:100)

On the whole,the advance of science and technology has raised the baseline of the Malthusian population trap,bringing the total population that the Earth can support from about 150 million in 1 AD to 7.2 billion today.Does not this fact,to some extent,manifest the goodness caused by the progress of science and technology?

Ultimately,there can be no clear-cut distinction between scientific progress and moral development.It is often counterproductive to examine or deal with the development of human society based on the premise of separating the pursuit of truth from the pursuit of goodness,or to consider only the pursuit of goodness while ignoring the pursuit of truth.

Therefore,in order to better answer the question at the beginning of this essay,we must ask again:What is the ideal form of science and scientific culture?

The ideal form of science is a science that integrates truth-seeking and goodness-seeking,and the ideal form of scientific culture is a rational culture that abides by the principle of ‘identifying the goodness based on knowing the truth’,which had ever been followed by Aristotle,Bacon and Newton.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.