I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying. [Wilde 1988]
Long time ago, back in 1971, I have heard about a culture whose members would not immediately call a word for doubting,. When there happened a mismatch between their expectations and received events; or when they faced a fuzzy cogntive scenario where in Western tradition anyone would say I don't know, that culture members would just say something like there is pain between my ears [Willingham 1971]. Interesting enough, albeit untouched by science, they knew where our thoughts seem to be running from -- somewhere inside our head. They also met that uneasy feeling of not knowing, and realizing they did not know, under a circunstance where knowing would be indeed, at least in principle, quite better.
The fact remains that we humans seem to have been built from a vicious blueprint: we are not tailored to certain situations that somehow happen to us all the time. Worse than that, some of the ideas, feelings, concepts, wishes, glimpses, memories, procedures -- much of that which we are not tailored to, are actively produced by us while we go living -- and this is helpless. Our species handles reasonably, for evolutionary purposes, imperfect information. A vast stretch of years has passed till the so called "cognitive switch" turns on. As some flag this bump on somewhere between 100 to 30 thousand years ago [Wayman 2012], only in the last 10 thousand years our history was started records; philosophy waited longer than 7 thousand years from our history starting. Science has taken more than 2 thousand years to pop up after philosophy. Technology started 200 years ago and high technology is not older then a century. The highest levers of technology count from a couple of decades. If we wonder how was it like to be a human 240 milenia ago; passing through all that fuss of inventing the Western culture through our days, it is irresistible to entertain that sensation, expressible by an exortative hailing: what a progress! We moved from darkness to enligthteenment; we swapped superstition with causation; we raised ourselves from mysticism to science and invented technology as an offspring of magic. During our daywalks we can chose to see our world as unravelled. The current laymen can spend their entire lives without having to face some sort of deep mistery as our ancestors did. Either they have a word for every object or event, an explanation for every puzzle, or they silently rest confident that some expert would: in a sense, this is a newborn king of deep faith.
Cosmology is often referred to as a science. Yet if we ask what is it for, a maze of questions can be intentionally unfolded. Cosmology aims at
Understanding the universe we live in and what it is like to be us living in that universe
Attaining a higher kind of knowledge about how we get to know what both we and the universe are
Wondering what’s that all about we being around
are some of the oldest concerns of our species, as long as we have records of our species’ cognitive interests. What is characteristic of cosmological studies is, among other aspects, that broad research scope as it yields a theoretical flood. There are ancient cosmological systems older than philosophy. But cosmology as we understand or map the discipline today started with the Greeks. It stumbled across the centuries till being revised at least three times: at the common sense turn by Aristotelian theories about nature, at the rise of physics from natural philosophy during the burgeoning science in the Renaissance, and from the dramatical turn of relativistic physics. The first presocratic philosophy was pretty cosmological, without prejudice for additional focuses it might have entertained, but it had no systematic interplay with experience. Then it had no breakers.
I do not wish to hide the fact that I can only look with repugnance .. upon the puffed-up pretentiousness of all these volumes filled with wisdom, such as are fashionable nowadays. For I am fully satisfied that .. the accepted methods must endlessly increase these follies and blunders, and that even the complete annihilation of all these fanciful achievements could not possibly be as harmful as this fictitious science with its accursed fertility #Kant’s letter to Mendelssohn of April 8th 1766. (Works, ed. by Ernst cassirer, vol. IX, 56 f.), apud Popper 1962(66) The Open Society and its Enemies, p. 13
A curious historical sway can emerge if we take the whole course of cosmology from the Greeks to our century. First, we see general approaches about the world – before the realization that the world presented to a Greek is tiny, smaller than the future realized universe – rising from common-sense natural philosophy. The first creators have taken a lot of things here for granted. They supposed a clear-cut compartmentalization between the world, the one who understands it, and the way one understands himself from within and the world from without. It is as if the fact that we are how we are and we live where we live would not affect the views we might have on our place and ourselves.
The first cosmology could be metaphorically compared to a transatlantic voyage after a first-class ticket, supposed to be a joyous experience. The more the merry passengers are unaware of the workings of the engine room, the sweeter and more refined the passengers’ rewards. This blissfulness concerning methodological limitations and purely intuitive explanations caused the unleashed diversity of cosmological theories put up by the first Greeks, and all echoes through the coming centuries.
What we generally call knowledge searching/building, more specifically accurate science-making with effective technological offsprings, might be metaphorically compared to the upper deck plays on a mammoth ship persistent through time. A worldlike boat whose comforts and cuteness decrease as we move down to the supporting decks or critically peruse the trip’s history from its starting. After all, the engine room is supposed to be silent and keep still; and much of the trip history is forgotten or unrecorded. If the ship is to move, the supporting decks and their tacit deeds should pass unnoticed. Our species has been aboard for such a journey since our obscure emergence. Our species’ origins are fuzzy. All we have are extraordinary posditcive archaeological finds boldly enlivened and seemingly accurate by speculative imagination, with brilliance—but still much is covered by massive past.
The twentieth century brought about a stunning exploration of, so one would say, the “foundations” of knowledge, the “structure” of scientific explanation, and the “methodologies” of research. This winding pathway’s most visible and successful stretch focuses on natural science. The hurdles were clear-cut: checking science as an objective product of the human mind and seeing how it is with an intended philosophical sharpness comparable to the planned scientific sensitivity of the examined theories. Then, reconstruct the science’s ways to show the scientists how they act to produce their best approaches. Finally, to come back to history and check if this reconstruction, once viewed under the light of science’s “realities,” matches the scientific systems’ evolution. If results from this philosophical business were positive “enough” (supposing they are analogical, not digital), then philosophy would certificate science. The certification would include unraveling the foundations of science, which identifies and justifies the scientific goals and shows that scientific methods attain these goals at a “good enough” level (again, supposing this attainment be analogic, not digital). So, in the twentieth century, science replaced philosophy to tell how the world is; while philosophy assumed it was to advance how science should behave to do its job right. Yet philosophy was not supposed to live in the same world as science. There had to be a philosophical paradise, an outer realm from where philosophers got their hindsight to see science, human knowledge (and a vast extent of whatever is human) “from outside.” What a magic-realist place that would be! Such hindsight sounds like those claims that Plato would love to keep hearing. We will see that this scenario did not go so well.
If something is new in the twentieth-first century, that novelty is the naturalist shift. Philosophy moved down to the same world inhabited by philosophy’s subjects. All that philosophical jazz, all that fuss—to check science, to display foundations, to certify aims and techniques, all this is as much a part of the sublunar world as a hard stone. Science itself occurs in the same universe that it stands for explaining. That inclusive shift came with an extraordinary capacity for self-concealing. Many ignored the effects of this inclusion since, for centuries, philosophers regarded themselves as workers from without. The ideas that led this shift to a complete turn had roots in works of the early twentieth century, a whole beating heart heard for some but for many ignored. Yet a fast-paced unfolding of their offspring would have to wait till our third millennium. Some exceptionally sensible authors had advanced the claims and settled tenets, starting with Pierre Duhem. For instance, Thomas Nagel’s agenda, at the overture of his 1986 book:
This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included (Nagel 1986, 13)
Rephrasing this agenda as a question slightly differently while taking good care to avoid infinite regress is like asking: “Is it possible to build an overview of the world which also engulfs the view of the world viewer and the world viewer’s view of the world besides the view of this overview itself?” The slight difference between that question and Nagel’s agenda is that the question pushes the entire “combination” to the same world where the former viewer triggered his first view. That is, there is no view from nowhere. We are captive of the world we try to explain no matter the level of explanation we set to our pursuit. We have to tap a dark room from inside and eventually tap the room’s boundaries.
It is just an extreme ordeal that streamed from the Duhem-Wittgeinstein-Quine-Popper-Kuhn-Feyerabend controversy. That is when the merry and blissful tenants of the first-class epistemological deck start to smell the rages of the engine room and hear the noise of the crippled gears of rusty philosophical tools.
Wayman, Erin 2012 'When did the human mind evolve to what it is today' in Smitsonian Magazine [Internet Source]
Wilde, Oscar 1888 [1962-2009] - 'The Remarkable Rock' in The Happy Prince and Other Histories, p. 93, Penguim Books, London
Willingham, Calder 1971 Little Big Man - Movie Script, p. 25. [My interpretation]