Introduction

• Science and economic needs, other commercial inputs to science

Objectivity and the Growth of Science

• Descriptions of natural objects, personal acquaintance
• Scientific revolution occurred during the “first age of global commerce”
• Medicine and the life sciences, “folk” traditions of local knowledge
• “Head and the hand” reunited in the Renaissance
• Knowledge from tradesmen and common people, not just scholars
• Reports/specimens from travelers: sailors, tourists, doctors, merchants, diplomats
• European middle class, dominant personal, intellectual and economic interests
• Global trade in foreign spices, tobacco, chocolate, coffee and tea
• Collecting strange objects, cabinets of curiosities, elaborate gardens
• Colonial holdings and the “data base” of science, local knowledge
• Manorial production in Low Countries, middle class and other occupations
• Holland, Portugese, trade with East and resource extraction from the Americas

Commerce and Knowledge

• Descriptive knowledge of objects and economic transactions
• Methods for handling objects, trades, science and medicine
• Purchase of objects, knowledge, good taste and social standing
• Knowledge by acquaintance, not scholarly knowledge
• Objectivity: knowledge related to the detailed acquaintance with objects
• Realistic painting
• Early Modern preference for acquaintance over discourse
• Discoveries in new world and renewed exchange with East, questioning of ancients, importance of personal acquaintance

Pharmacy and Medicine

• Apothecaries “hunting” for substances, medical practice
• Hippocratic tradition of detailed descriptions of disease symptoms
• “Pleasure gardens” local and foreign plants, botanical gardens for pharmaceuticals
• Exotics, “cabinets of curiosity” wealthy and powerful
• Anatomy, dissections, direct knowledge of the inner workings of the body

Natural History

• Existing tradition of inquiry nature, natural history
• Pliny the Elder, complex and contradictory work
• Religious tradition of natural history

Scientific Growth

• We have seen a number of arguments that science improves under certain conditions
  Science grows in a democracy (Greece)
  Science grows when spurred on by economic demands (Bernal)
  Science grows when there is a “free space” for inquiry (Huff)
  Science grows when commerce increases (Cook)
• Open inquiry, abstract theoretical knowledge, knowledge of objects