Cognitive Thrift 6 – Proto-Science
Scott Douglas Jacobsen & Rick Rosner
May 11, 2017
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some subtleties can be added to this. For instance, a generalized spirit world or any manner of afterlife seem different than any of ghosts, devil or Satan, spirits inhabiting animals, and so on.
Rick Rosner: If you go all the way back to the beginning of religious beliefs, they are in a way scientific. By coming up with several gods that are responsible for aspects of the world, you are dividing it into a variety of phenomena or characteristics and assigning causes to it. Even though you are doing it religiously, you are taking a stab at establishing a system of the world.
Jacobsen: That sounds different than system as a process and more akin to science as a taxonomy.
Rosner: Yea – but taxonomy is one of the first steps of science. You can’t do science without taxonomy.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: And back when people 3, 4, 5 thousand years ago were coming with up a zillion god. There wasn’t much in the way of science and you could probably argue that the coming up with gods and investigating the world in a proto-scientific way were not too different things.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Endnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 