Epilogue

Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.... Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed ... a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was ... all they possess are fragments ... parts of theories unrelated either to the other bits and pieces of theory which they possess or to experiment. alasdair macintyre, “a disquieting suggestion”1 What is the most disturbing aspect of MacIntyre's disquieting suggestion? He rightly reasoned that the specter of murdered scientists and burning laboratories would be shocking to a society that prized knowledge of the physical world above other forms. Yet, from a philosophical perspective, it is the thought that science might not be recoverable from written sources alone that is surely the most troubling. MacIntyre mused that a revivalist movement might have children “learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations some of the theorems of Euclid” (1981, 1) with little or no real sense of their former meaning. The remaining textbooks and journal articles might even be made coherent within a new, pseudo-scientific tradition, but science as we know it would have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. This suggestion is disquieting because it challenges the assumption, deeply held in the Western metaphysical tradition, that scientific truth transcends culture. If something incommunicable through the written word is required to make science recoverable, then our best-verified theories and most secure forms of reasoning must be reliant to some extent on tacit skills and sensibilities carried within science's own culture. Once that tradition is broken, even the most intelligent reader will fail to find scientific truths self-evident. Both the value and practical limitations of this conclusion are illustrated by the rise of natural knowledge in the West. Scholars in medieval and renaissance Europe took more than four centuries to assimilate and transcend the most advanced mathematical and astronomical works from the ancient Greek and Islamic worlds. That they did so at all was a function of the size and longevity of the scholarly community that developed within and around the cathedral schools and universities.2

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