Explain the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century and the impact of scientific thinking on traditional sources of authority.
During the 17th Century, a new, inquisitive, perspective of the world emerged within the upper and aristocratic cultures due to the need for technology for shipping, determining lent, and growing crops and the gradual decrease of deliberate church trust.The new perspectives of thinkers like Sir Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes would eventually change the way we view our world and the things around us by using empirical and deductive methods to come to conclusions, what we know as the scientific method. Though not all leaders encouraged the scientific revolution, the scientific method impacted traditional authority of government by bringing about new ways to find prosperity though technology, and therefore improve the state and the lives of the people.The Scientific method, created from the ideas of Bacon and Descartes, produced a new perspective to observe the world around you from and encouraged deductive reasoning and empiricism, which led to improved technology and eventual improvement of the state. Sir Francis Bacon was one of the first to formalize the empirical method. Rather than blindly trusting the church or logic, Bacons new method advocated for validity through experimentation.
Though this meant that many Aristolean scientific law could be disproved putting the church at wrong, the method was accepted within the realms of enlightened despots countries.Descartes was the first to advocate for deductive reasoning. Throughout the centuries, inductive reasoning or trust within the church were the means of reason. Descartes opposed this with his Discourse on a Method were he described and showed the advantages of skepticism and therefore advocating deductive reasoning. Descartes also discusses the “Cartesian Dualism” which justified his work with deductive reasoning. The Cartesian Dualism stated that man has two separate entities: One spiritual and one material.
This allowed scientists like himself to experiment with the physical without betraying the spiritual.These advancements made by Descartes and Bacon, allowed for many to begin to experiment freely and led to economic prosperity of nations by giving the ability to advance technology to achieve higher authority and calmly oppose traditional scripture to do so without producing extreme feelings of hatred from the church. The advancements made by Bacon and Descartes helped many states achieve elevated power and prestige by giving them means to make scientific advancements and therefore increases the prosperity of the state.Within the 1600s, rulers began to realize that the way to gain edge on other countries was advancing scientifically.
Rulers established Royal Scientific Society’s within their countries so scientists could meet and communicate there ideas, therefore exponentially increasing the widely known scientific knowledge. The English Royal Society is was one of the more prominent of the scientific society’s, for the reason of making the scientists involved develop an exact scientific journal so that experiment data was linear and could be assed by anyone who knew the format.When more knowledge was spread so quickly, things like advancements in navigation, the agricultural revolution, and the decrease numbers of “Witches” killed (due to declining belief in magic occurrences) that all benefit the state as a whole. These coalitions of scientist that were a reaction to the new scientific method formed by Bacon and Descartes helped to onset the wave of scientific society’s which inherently improved the prosperity of the state.
Descartes and Bacon are directly and indirectly responsible for developing the scientific method that changed the way many upper class Europeans looked at society by turning a strictly church trusting state, into an inquisitive state, that made use of skepticism, and empiricism. This, in turn, produced the widespread emergence of scientific society’s, which allowed for scientists to communicate their advancements and therefore producing more effective technological advances that improved the state.
