> ^^^^^
>
> Calling the knowledge production in a hunting and gathering society
> "science" is like an American calling cricket "baseball". In each
> case,
> the observer takes familiar cultural practices and falsely imposes
> them
> on a different set of social practices that have some superficial
> similarities.
>
> Miles
>
> ^^^^^^^
> CB: I'd say it's closer to an American calling cricket a ballgame, but
> the analogy breaks down. It's not cultural differences, but the basic
> human materialist method which has fundamentally common characteristics
> from the invention of the first tools to the inventions of computer
> chips. Observation, hyppthesis, test the hypothesis, all done as
> _social_ labor, and passed down across generations with language and
> culture. Science is a fundamental aspect of social labor and material
> culture, which is at the origin of the human species.
I agree that if you define science as broadly as you do above, science exists in every human society. I just don't think this loose definition of science is useful. The social relations necessary to produce practical knowledge in hunting and gathering societies differ dramatically from the social relations necessary to produce scientific knowledge in industrial societies, and your broad definition gets in the way of analyzing those differences. (How can we understand all the different types of fruit if we name them all "apple"?)
Miles