Historians: What do you think of this?...

In the fourth chapter of Ways of Knowing, John Pickstone explains the emergence of the technique of scientific analyzation as a "way of knowing" and compares and contrasts this technique to traditional "ways of knowing" such as hermeneutics and natural history. He argues that a multitude of circumstances and events served as models for new analytical disciplines. Some of the circumstances and events include Galileo Galilei's interest in dissecting the parts of a machine, Newtonian mechanics, the engineers' desire for analyzing the "flow" of the elements of a machine, and the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

To me, there have been abrupt changes in views of the universe over time due to the emergence of different "ways of knowing." I think that the "ways of knowing" which Pickstone identifies are interdependent. Hermeneutics involves finding clues to eternal truths of the universe. Natural history and analysis are used to prove certain interpretations of these eternal truths. For example, if people today did not use hermeneutics as a starting base for researching the location of the Earth with respect to the surrounding planets, then obviously they would not have known about the theories proposed by Plato, Aristotle, or Copernicus. I believe that people who lived closer to the "beginning of time" have the best interpretations of eternal questions such as the meaning of life. As time progresses, however, people find new ways to approach these eternal questions. To me, natural history involves compiling facts of the world by forming disciplines such as biology or chemistry. People can only understand more about the universe by taking as many approaches as possible to registering facts of the world. In the article "Ice Memory" by Elizabeth Kolbert, glaciologists in Greenland take a different approach in order to find out what happened in the past by examining the chemicals of pieces of ice that have been recovered from underground by means of a drill. However, without breaking down each of those pieces of ice into different chemical elements, the glaciologists would have never found out when particular ice ages occurred. Therefore, I believe that using analysis is just as important as studying hermeneutics and natural history.

By analyzing the people of a culture in the past as elements of a compound, scientists have already discovered precursors to new inventions. For example, Pickstone mentions that the sets of slaves who built the pyramids should be seen as precursors of mechanized production. Analyzing increases the chance of discovering new phenomena or even new disciplines. To me, analyzation revises interpretations based on hermeneutics or natural history.

The chapter mentioned positivism, which is a doctrine contending that sense perceptions are the only acceptable basis of human knowledge and precise thought.