The boundary between science and myth is porous. Once we left the world of deductive logic and entered the world of inductive logic and beyond, everything we thought we knew was continually expanded in different ways.
Now, Haraway says that “Science is our myth” but If we accept a plurality of distinct sciences, with different speeds, different cultural binders and transmitters, what remains as distinguishing factors between science(s) and myths?
There are some. All sciences regardless of their culture seem to involve some sort of methodology that’s replicable. And yet it’s not simply a repeated ritual because it includes a feedback loop that allows for change. However, rituals are the realm of religious practice, which go beyond myths so this would be a distinguishing factor between sciences and religions.
If myths are stories, the sciences are a kind of authorship. What the sciences write don’t come from divine authorities and prophets but from a set of methodologies that are repeatable, some kinds of observations about the world, some rules to interpret these observations and results of following methodologies whatever they are.
So it can be an indigenous holistic set of practices or a lab-oriented “divorced from breathing reality” to isolate individual factors type of science, so long as they are consistent in articulating their observations, following their own methods in ways that can be replicated by another.
But it really strays close to religion here. Introspective practices in many religions seem to be “kinds of sciences”. When meditating, noticing change is observation. Methods are replicable for similar results by others. It’s similar to the kind of validation in the geese hunting /ecological balance in Colin’s writing about the Cree. Is the geese hunting rules/results religion or science? So a dividing line between sciences and religions might be tricky. Yet we’re not doing that here.
But between myths and sciences, perhaps a little less difficult because of the action-orientation of the various sciences. Myths are created and told as cultural symbols -but they don’t seem to contain within them procedures to create knowledge or validate knowledge as the sciences do.
So, I’d say the sciences act as an active, authorship and/or active knowledge validation tool.
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