Science as a product of culture

Scientists cannot just make stuff up. Their hypotheses have to be tested again and again by different kinds of experiments. The results of experiments have to be made public and evaluated with commonly accepted methods by the wider scientific community. Moreover, assumptions that could prevent a hypothesis from being refuted cannot be accepted unless there are legitimate scientific grounds to do so. These are just some of the many checkpoints that, when passed, provide evidence that a hypothesis offers reliable knowledge about the world.

Of course, this does not mean that science is not a cultural activity. Scientists interpret their hypotheses and develop their theories in a way that is embedded in and influenced by the culture within which they live. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our understanding of nature is largely determined by what we have been taught, by our background beliefs and assumptions, and often by our individual or collective expectations.

For example, most ancient Greeks didn’t consider the movements of the planets to be anything other than circular.¹ They took the circle to be the perfect shape and, given that the heavens were the realm of the divine, they expected planetary movements to be equally perfect. Similarly in the 16^th and 17^th century, a mechanical view of nature was largely adopted in Europe that demanded changes on objects to only occur by direct exertion of force. Put simply, it was commonly believed that there couldn’t be any action at a distance; a rock cannot move unless something pushes it. So when Newton proposed his theory of gravitation there had to be something that acted as the medium for gravitational forces: this was the aether.