The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

by Michael Strevens

I won’t explain science’s late arrival by composing a history of the origins of the Scientific Revolution. My interest is in all the apparently propitious places and times that science failed to appear. That nonappearance is to be explained by something timeless: that the iron rule, the key to science’s success, is unreasonably closed-minded. It works superbly well, but from the outside, it looks to be, quite simply, an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things. The ancient Greeks had poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics—each an expression and an elevation of human nature. Science, by contrast, requires of its practitioners the strategic suppression of human nature, indeed, the suppression of the highest element of human nature, the rational mind. What Greek philosopher could have supposed that this was the route to unbounded knowledge of the world? The mystery is not that science arrived so late, but that as a technique for discovery it was ever hit upon at all.