"It stinks of the classic romanticist argument against science. if we could *just* get rid of society, then we'd be closer to nature and understand it better. the problem is modernity, is society; it's corrupt and we need to get rid of it, via method, via whatever, but whatever it is, if we can unburden ourselves of the shackles of big, bad evil society, then we can get as close to nature as possible and hear it speak to us in the pureness of our near-state-of-nature-union-being-as-one-and-having-overcome-this-horrible-alienation-blabbedyfuckinblah-we-can-at-once-be-reunited-in-wholeness-with-nature. amen."
Newton did not of course discover that objects fell. He discovered, amazingly, that when an apple fell to the ground it 'obeyed' the same law as the moon did in its orbit around the earth.
And to do this he had (as he was explicitly conscious of) to invent an entirely new kind of TIME and an entirely new kind of SPACE. Abstract time and abstract space were wholly new in human thought, and nothing in direct experience could _ever_ have 'diccovered' either.
Actually, I no longer claim (or at least I try to refrain from claiming) that I have the foggiest idea of what "science" (as an invention of the 19th-c) "really " is. This science, entirely new in humabn history, bears only a very general resemblance to the science (_scientia_) of Aristotle, Aquinas, or even Galileo, though he 'sort of' was the inventer of it. I think (though I invite correction on this from anyone who is more acquainted with the history of science) that of the giants of modern science, Darwin was the first to self-consciously think of himself as being a SCIENTIST rather than merely pursuing some branch of natural philosophy.
Carrol