Dear Francois and Jude,
There are several excellent sources of information on the development
of science in China, together with consideration of cultural context and
guiding metaphors.
The major source is Joseph Needham’s 24-volume masterpiece, Science
and Civilization in China, published by Cambridge University Press. The
Press officially divides the book into seven volumes, but many of these
comprise more than one part. This is a challenging and difficult
question, so there is no single answer. Rather, you’ll find a rich
exploration of these issues in Vol. 1: Introductory Orientations, Vol.
2: History of Scientific Thought, and in Vol. 7: The Social Background
– Part 1, Language and Logic in Tradition, and Vol. 7: The Social
Background – Part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections.
Cambridge University Press maintains a useful web site for the series
at URL:
http://www.cambridge.org/aus/series/sSeries.asp?code=NCSC
For each of the twenty-four volumes in the series, CUP offers has a
careful description along with individual PDF downloads containing 1)
the table of contents, 2) an extensive excerpt, 3) the full index, 4)
copyright, and 5) front matter. In some cases, the excerpt may
constitute an important chapter while the front matter may run to
several dozen pages with illustrations and lists of plates.
With a web site this extensive, interested readers can become familiar
with this masterwork and get an understanding of the scope and
philosophy of Needham’s achievement by investing a half a day at the
CUP web site.
In 1981, Needham summarized several of the key cultural issues in a
short book from Harvard University Press, Science in Traditional China.
He examines philosophic, scientific, and social issues. This book is
especially relevant to Francois’s question because Needham offers
comparisons in this book with Arabic, Greek (Hellenistic), and Indian
cultures.
One reason for Needham’s expertise in understanding the development
of science in China is the fact that Needham was himself a scientist. He
had a distinguished career as a chemical embryologist before moving to
the history and philosophy of science.
In 1986, Robert Temple distilled the grand sweep of Chinese science
into a readable, single-volume narrative titled The Genius of China:
3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention.
Daniel Boorstin offers good introduction to these issues on a global
scale with a reasonable amount of cross-cultural comparison in his 1985
book, The Discoverers.
One of the most interesting aspects of Chinese science and technology
over the past 5,000 years is that China was responsible a vast number of
number of influential discoveries, creations, and inventions that
vanished repeatedly even as they changed the world. To offer a single
example, China supported an iron industry in the eleventh century that
produced roughly 150,000 tons of iron a year. This tonnage would not be
surpassed in the West for seven centuries. China gained and lost
astonishing technological leads a dozen times over the centuries.
Some hypothesize that this had to do with a circular concept of time in
which the dominant metaphor was knowledge won and lost, only to
reappear. But it also involved starting the calendar anew with each
imperial accession, as well as a pattern that occurred on several
occasions when emperors had the records and libraries of prior reigns
destroyed. In contrast, as Jude noted earlier, the Church established a
record of cumulative learning and scientific scholarship. However
difficult the debate between science and theology occasionally became,
the dominant metaphor was a metaphor of progress leading toward the
teleological end of history. For this reason, the West gained ground and
usually held it while the East made huge advances only to relinquish
them voluntarily, at least until the 1500s when Western technology and
military power gave the West an opportunity to colonize the East for
Western purposes. It is my belief that the current administration of
China with its huge investment in science and a sense of progressive
history will make enduring gains. One need merely look at the rise of
China’s universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities to
see this.
To understand the development of science in a civilization – and a
nation – that has been here in a relatively coherent form for some
five thousand years, one requires a sense of macrohistory. Ian
Morris’s 2010 book, Why the West Rules – for Now, offers such a
story.
While I understand the semiotic approach to this question, I’m
reluctant to use it myself. These issues are so huge and the cultures
involved so many that one needs several perspectives to understand these
developments over time. For science in China, Needham is a comprehensive
guide, while Temple and Boorstin explain enough for most of us to get a
clear sense of the issues. But history has many reasons and side-paths,
so Morris offers helpful reading.
Best regards,
Ken
Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished
Professor | Dean, Faculty of Design | Swinburne University of Technology
| Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 |
Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design
--
Francois Nsenga wrote:
—snip—
would you by any chance know which was the arabic and chinese
‘interpretant’ (s) that gave impetus and ‘confidence’ within
those two other intellectual poles to study nature?
—snip—
Jude Chua Soo Meng wrote:
—snip—
I’m not familiar with the Arabs, but I’d venture a guess re the
Chinese.
This will need to be checked, but for the Chinese within Daoism there
was always the (religious) belief that nature had a certain order that
led to various forms of beneficial flourishings especially when not
interefered with. They credited all this to the Dao, some creative power
behind the scene that was invisible and unknowable. Some scholars argue
that the Chinese therefore saw in this a basis for inferring similar
ways to act and to behave. The suppressed premise here must be therefore
the belief that the Dao is some kind of model for behavior or action;
unless we think so we would not bother reading off nature various
strategies like wuwei (non-action) for action. So this may be the
interpretant we are looking for, but this seems to me a very unstable
premise, unlike in the Christian theological framework where God is not
only the creative agent but a morally responsible one who is consistent,
etc. Also I’d be hesitant to say that this afforded them the
confidence to study nature with a view to discovering speculatively the
truth about nature, (in comparison with say an Aristotelian, who might
wish to know nature as it is in itself). One reading is to see the Dao
as a model to imitate and therefore indicating general practical
strategies when dealing with the world : precisely by not over-engaging
it. Hence the talk of wu wei. You’d notice that we can develop
general heuristics to guide behavior even if we cannot with certainty
know what exactly the world is like. You can see I’m rambling and do
no justice to your question or the topic. This is a good research to
embark on. Maybe something worth working on. Now I’m interested. The
other thing is that there are complications in deciphering how the
Chinese commentators really read the Dao de Jing text. My own study of
WangBi suggests that his reading of the Dao de Jing basically stuffed
his own social scientific insights into the text by exploiting the fact
that chinese phrases have more than one possible meaning. So for one
commentator at least, he was not at all studying nature or the Dao and
informing his practice. He was simply developing some pragmatic
observations about human behavior and using the ancient text as a
mouthpiece for his own ideas. And perhaps one could say that even if
one can predict human behavior, one need not know the truth of things in
themselves. My paper appears here: . So the interpretant you are
looking may not be easy to locate. I mean the Chinese typically have
“models” of processes of nature, but their account of nature
(both physics and metaphysics) in itself is almost naive and imagined.
—snip—
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