When I've thought about the more limited question "what is physics?" I'd sort of settled on something that reads like (Definition I) together with (Definition II), a draft of which might read like "A system in which we construct mathematical models to explain and predict the relations between matter, energy, and motion, together with the set of results obtained from such models." (Except that this is a theory-centric definition, and I'm an experimentalist, and, as the theorists always remind us, physics is an experimental science.)
So perhaps you could combine your three definitions into one: "A process for generating reliable models of the world, together with the body of verified knowledge this process has created, as carried out by a collection of institutions and formal practices associated with the people who perform this process."
I think to some extent most people really are working with an aggregated definition combining all three elements I talk about. But when it comes to arguing about the nature of science, they tend to prioritize one element over the others to such an extent that it's useful to disaggregate them to clear things up.
"at least some categories of “indigenous knowledge” ... have been generated through the iterative trial-and-error process of Definition I. That process is truly universal, practiced by basically every human culture at some level."
Feels like there's some equivocation going on in your application of Definition I. You can do lots of "iterative trial-and-error" and learn lots about what works when, without trying to build any models or even being interested in "/why/ those phenomena happen in that way".
Isn't the latter ambition critical in the progression to what we think of as modern science, and do we really have evidence of its universality? (I'm not sure, but it feels like a much bolder claim than the idea that people have always been trying stuff and keeping on with what works...)
The problem with "Why?" questions is that the depth you can reach with them is strongly limited by available measurement technology, in a way that can get you stuck for long periods until some new tool becomes available and allows deeper exploration. In a lot of areas of "indigenous knowledge"-- folk medicine, pre-Colombian agriculture, naked-eye astronomy-- the tools needed to get to a deeper level of "why" than they had are extremely recent developments, and the causal models they worked from were not a whole lot worse than what Europeans were dealing with at the same stage of technology. A lot of the metaphysical stuff that comes along with traditional medicine looks like superstitious twaddle when it's placed next to modern medical science, but it's not clear to me that it's any sillier than some of the ideas that were state-of-the-art thinking until shockingly late in the European scientific revolution. That's because none of those cultures really had access to the tools needed to get to the next level of understanding the "why" of biological functions, so all the "why" models got stuck in weird local minima until the tech caught up.
Thanks, makes sense. But also, leaves me less happy with the "universal" Definition I view. Isn't the difference between trial & error with, and without, access to instrument technologies that allow you to make real progress with your models & explanations, and the origin of said technologies, pretty important in the whole story?
The historian Gyan Prakash has an interesting, if challenging, book titled Another Reason, on claims of Hindu nationalists that precolonial Indian systems of knowledge and inquiry constituted "science". Prakash's answer is basically "Not really, but it's complicated."
When I've thought about the more limited question "what is physics?" I'd sort of settled on something that reads like (Definition I) together with (Definition II), a draft of which might read like "A system in which we construct mathematical models to explain and predict the relations between matter, energy, and motion, together with the set of results obtained from such models." (Except that this is a theory-centric definition, and I'm an experimentalist, and, as the theorists always remind us, physics is an experimental science.)
So perhaps you could combine your three definitions into one: "A process for generating reliable models of the world, together with the body of verified knowledge this process has created, as carried out by a collection of institutions and formal practices associated with the people who perform this process."
I think to some extent most people really are working with an aggregated definition combining all three elements I talk about. But when it comes to arguing about the nature of science, they tend to prioritize one element over the others to such an extent that it's useful to disaggregate them to clear things up.
"at least some categories of “indigenous knowledge” ... have been generated through the iterative trial-and-error process of Definition I. That process is truly universal, practiced by basically every human culture at some level."
Feels like there's some equivocation going on in your application of Definition I. You can do lots of "iterative trial-and-error" and learn lots about what works when, without trying to build any models or even being interested in "/why/ those phenomena happen in that way".
Isn't the latter ambition critical in the progression to what we think of as modern science, and do we really have evidence of its universality? (I'm not sure, but it feels like a much bolder claim than the idea that people have always been trying stuff and keeping on with what works...)
The problem with "Why?" questions is that the depth you can reach with them is strongly limited by available measurement technology, in a way that can get you stuck for long periods until some new tool becomes available and allows deeper exploration. In a lot of areas of "indigenous knowledge"-- folk medicine, pre-Colombian agriculture, naked-eye astronomy-- the tools needed to get to a deeper level of "why" than they had are extremely recent developments, and the causal models they worked from were not a whole lot worse than what Europeans were dealing with at the same stage of technology. A lot of the metaphysical stuff that comes along with traditional medicine looks like superstitious twaddle when it's placed next to modern medical science, but it's not clear to me that it's any sillier than some of the ideas that were state-of-the-art thinking until shockingly late in the European scientific revolution. That's because none of those cultures really had access to the tools needed to get to the next level of understanding the "why" of biological functions, so all the "why" models got stuck in weird local minima until the tech caught up.
Thanks, makes sense. But also, leaves me less happy with the "universal" Definition I view. Isn't the difference between trial & error with, and without, access to instrument technologies that allow you to make real progress with your models & explanations, and the origin of said technologies, pretty important in the whole story?
(Maybe that's all in the book!)
The historian Gyan Prakash has an interesting, if challenging, book titled Another Reason, on claims of Hindu nationalists that precolonial Indian systems of knowledge and inquiry constituted "science". Prakash's answer is basically "Not really, but it's complicated."