The Latin scientia simply meant “knowledge”; thus any field of study was a “science” since it involved knowledge about the subject. Reducing the meaning of the word science only to studies that followed this particular methodology reflects a fundamental shift in the understanding of what it meant to know things. Now only things that could be tested and confirmed through the scientific method qualified as real knowledge; everything else was dismissed as subjective or irrelevant. Second, the scientific method works well primarily in the natural sciences — in studies of the material world. Thus
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