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."
"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 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."
"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 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."