How Science Lost its Body
April 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Conference Abstract, Embodiment, History, Kline, Morris, Mathematics, Science |
This paper will describe how scientific knowledge prior to the late 16th and early 17th centuries was constructed and authenticated primarily by practical experimental means, and that this practice-led knowledge gathering process led to a form of knowledge which was inherently human-centred, sensual, and embodied. In fact it could be said that up to this point in history, the project of science was the organised description of human experience. After this point it will be argued that the object of enquiry shifted away from the human being and toward a depersonalised objectivity, a shift facilitated by an increasing tendency for scientific knowledge production to become mathematised (as noted by Kline 1980). This mathematisation of science proceeding to the point where, in cases where mathematical formulation does not agree with experiment, it is considered most likely that the experimental method is at fault.
A corollary of this mathematisation process is that scientific knowledge becomes increasingly disembodied. The truths proposed by much scientific research are beyond the reach of the senses and beyond any imaginative engagement other than in the abstract language of mathematics. Again, in regarding such knowledge, when mathematics does not agree with human sensibility it is the human sensorium which is considered faulty or inadequate. This means that the subjective, embodied knowledge we gain through lived experience is increasingly at a remove from the objective disembodied knowledge described by science. This paper will discuss some of the implications of this division.
Kline, M. (1980). Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York, New York University Press.