Cognitive Thrift 6 – Proto-Science
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/11
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some subtleties can be added to this. For instance, a generalized spirit world or any manner of afterlife seem different than any of ghosts, devil or Satan, spirits inhabiting animals, and so on.
Rick Rosner: If you go all the way back to the beginning of religious beliefs, they are in a way scientific. By coming up with several gods that are responsible for aspects of the world, you are dividing it into a variety of phenomena or characteristics and assigning causes to it. Even though you are doing it religiously, you are taking a stab at establishing a system of the world.
Jacobsen: That sounds different than system as a process and more akin to science as a taxonomy.
Rosner: Yea – but taxonomy is one of the first steps of science. You can’t do science without taxonomy.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: And back when people 3, 4, 5 thousand years ago were coming with up a zillion god. There wasn’t much in the way of science and you could probably argue that the coming up with gods and investigating the world in a proto-scientific way were not too different things.
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