There is a pervasive notion among science enthusiasts (and unfortunately, some scientists) that science was "done wrong" for some amount of time, and then at one point, everyone collectively stopped being stupid and started doing science correctly. No one who makes this claim seems to agree on when this happened, but it's generally agreed that it was some time after Copernicus and some time before Einstein.

It's all bullshit. Actual study of the history of science will show that the methods and arguments of scientists today aren't any better or worse than the scientists of the past, even dating all the way back past the pre-Socratic Greeks. Yes, their methods and theories had errors, but so do the methods of today, and it turns out that falsifying a theory doesn't stop people from using it. If it did, why would anyone bother learning Newtonian mechanics?

I can confidently state the author of this article has no clue what they are talking about, and I doubt that they have ever made a serious study of either the history of science or the philosophy of science. If they had, maybe they would have made an attempt to respond to some of the arguments of people who disagree with them, such as Thomas Kuhn, who also studied the history of science and arrived at the opposite conclusions: that the scientists of antiquity were just as scientific as the scientists of today, that science does not stop when it is proved wrong, but in fact continues to use the same methods as long as they provide internally consistent answers, and finally (if you're really ready to drink the Kuhn-aid) that science does not progress toward the truth, but in fact progresses toward nothing in particular. Kuhn is obviously still a very controversial philosopher, but to make a historical claim about what is and is not science and to ignore all the previous literature on philosophy of science is just ridiculous.

Oddly, the author does seem to have made a few posts about Kuhn, but they all reference some factual errors made in one of his less famous books. I'd imagine that someone at some point told this author to read Kuhn, and he used the fact that Kuhn made some minor errors once about Copernicus as an excuse not to learn anything. It seems from the few posts I looked at that this is the blog of an amateur historian who is also a poor philosopher, who fixates more on pedantry and "debunking" than on any sort of overarching intellectual ideas.

Certain that I don't.

If you want to design buildings, you have to pass exams and qualifications as an architect.

If you want to design structures, you have to pass exams and qualifications as an engineer.

If you want to practice the law, you have to pass exams and qualifications as a lawyer.

If you want to practice medicine, you have to pass exams and qualifications as a doctor.

If you want to practice science, you experiment.

Muthafukkas was all about experimentation going back to the Etruscans or before.

It's not really about the article, but a bit of a rant.

I'm a bit surprised that it's a yet another article on the topic of "who and when we can call a scientist" that does not mention Sadi Carnot (the one of Carnot's Engine fame). His work in monograph Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (find me a title that sounds more badass! ;P) has been described[1] as one of the first that possessed all of the things that we now take as granted in a proper scientific publication:

- Introduction to the problem and settling on certain 'stipulations' and setting a paradigm for further reasoning.

- Mathematical model followed by using it along with real data.

- Replicable description of the experiment that can be used to verify the hypothesis.

- Conclusions and remarks on the implications of putting theory into practice (Carnot already was recognising that We should not expect to utilise in practice all the motive power of combustibles).

- Bibliography and references.

And all of that before the word scientist was even used for the first time, as francopoli pointed out in his post on this topic.

[1]: In case you find yourself thinking 'citation needed', I'm near certain that it was from at least one of the following:

- History of Physics by A.K. Wróblewski (here is his website for the course of the same name)

- Physicists Look Back: Studies in the History of Physics

- Editor's notes in second edition of (translated to English) Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire

I'll update with any extra details when I'll find something more concrete.

The word did not exist until 1834. And yes, the author mentions that in his article, then dismisses it.

Before then, these types of people were called Natural Philosophers. I'm assuming that most of the nerds here will know this, but Philosophy translates in Latin to "love of wisdome."

The reason we don't use the word "scientist" to describe people before the 1600's is because Francis Bacon first described what we now call the Scientific Method in the 1620's. Were people doing experiments and making discoveries before then? of course they were. With the exception of a few extremely gifted persons, however, the pursuit of knowledge did not have an agreed upon framework. It was once there was a way to quantify knowledge, explore the natural world, create a way of talking about experiments that human information began to grow exponentially.

All of this is common knowledge to people who study science, philosophy and engineering. I'm not sure what the point of the author is. The author wrote a nice article on Galileo

Why not just say that the nature of science has changed over the ages?

It seems like an overreach to say that you can't call fucking Newton a scientist because his job description was different from what we would associate with the term today.

I really picture scientists as people spending inordinate amounts of time on a single subject, pouring through books and repeating tedious experiments, and then making conclusions based on the data. Brahe, Galelio et al. would seem to fit that.

I agree that the job title of "scientist" wasn't defined back then and that science overlapped with what we would consider bunk today. However, the word 'scientist' provides a non-ambiguous way to communicate what they did. Calling Hooke a 'natural philosopher' doesn't really help inform people of what he did. Scientist, otoh, does.

We could go around educating people on the various predecessors to modern scientist, but that would be an excercise in pedantry.