If the pre-Socratic philosophers have taught me one thing, it's that motion is impossible. Also that the scientific method is not something lying around that any civilization would see were it not for attitudes of mind. It's a technology with a lot of prerequisites which must be developed. It's still being developed. We didn't get falsifiability until the 20th century.
If there is an attitude of mind that you have to get rid of, I'd say it's the attitude that induction is cheating or doesn't count towards knowledge. That if you thought really hard about things you could deduce the teleological reasons behind them. It takes a really long time for people to give up on this idea, but I'm skeptical that you'd get the scientific method much sooner by deciding to give it up.
Amateur philosophy of science now ends.
Tue Oct 10 2006 21:06:
Achievements of Ancient High Civilizations. Really interesting, but:
[T]hese ancient people achieved much, yet were clearly prevented from achieving more by reason of a certain attitude of mind which seems to have been responsible for their failure to develop the scientific method.
Tue Oct 10 2006 21:23 Flame Design:
Sumana reads aggregation websites like Reddit and shows me cool things like the candle flame in microgravity. I tell her she should bruise these things. She says, "no, you should!" Even though she's the one what found it. Anyway, candle flame. More generally, Microgravity Combustion Science. I dunno, man. It is really neat, but I'm sad that microgravity is such a scarce resource that you can still do high school science fair-type experiments and get interesting results.
