Lienhard's How Invention Begins
How Invention Begins, by John Lienhard (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006) was a fascinating book. I picked it up because the cover looked nice when I was shelf surfing at the library. It was a fortunate if serendipitous choice, because I really enjoyed reading it.
Lienhard is an engineer, and he takes an in-depth engineering look at the process of invention. Not the process of the "canonical inventor", the person designated by history as the inventor, but the cultural process that expresses a social zeitgeist and builds the technological matrix of progress that can bring the invention into being. There are stories after stories of the precursors and almost-rans who contribute mightily to an invention's creation. (More, naturally, at my book note.)
Now, on to the leftover quotations. This first hints at huge changes about to sweep across Europe and lays groundwork for a major shift in epistemological outlook, including the rise of science in later centuries.
The French scholar Pierre Abélard seized on the new logic [when Christian Europe rediscovered Greek learning through Muslim Spain in medieval times] as he turned Aristotelian dialectic loose on Holy Scripture. "By doubting we come to inquiry," he said, and "by inquiring we perceive the truth." Abélard wrote four rules for inquiry:
- Use systematic doubt and question everything.
- Learn the difference between rational proof and persuasion.
- Be precise in use of words and expect precision from others.
- Watch for error, even in Holy Scripture.
[p. 147]
In the next we learn that there is less rarely something new under the sun than we think, but we also find that an amazing woman of an earlier time affirmed our educational philosophy at Ars Hermeneutica.
After the Civil War, Marcet's natural philosophy [expressed in her book, Conversations on Natural Philosophy, for the edification of young women] remained in print, but the many copycat textbook writers no longer included descriptions of machinery in the subject. Machines dropped out of liberal education, and the focus shifted to principles. Those principles became a specialty with a new name: natural philosophy was now replaced with the word physics (from the French physique).
Even then, however, Marcet's subject layout remained. It is apparent in physics texts today. But when the name of natural philosophy became physics, it ceased to lie at the center of liberal education, where Marcet knew it belonged.
Since women were not admitted to college, she had set out to create a home liberal education for them. Before she was done, she'd provided courses in chemistry, natural philosophy, economics, botany, and geography. Today, however, we barely remember that natural philosophy belongs in the core of a liberal education, and we completely forget that such an education must include the machines we live with every day. Today we might well find marcet's ideas to be very provocatie as America falls behind in technical and scientific education. [p. 210]
Finally, for this miscellany, a brief reminder that universal education in America is not a modern, commie-liberal idea but one in which our democratic traditions are steeped, not to mention that science and technology at the time were clearly part of the liberal arts, something that everyone would benefit from learning.
Ever wondered why they used to be called "land-grant colleges"?
In 1862, for example, Congress had passed the Morrill Act, which mandated a grant of 30,000 acres of federal land, per congressional representative, to each state to be sold to provide an endowment for "at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other cientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts."
Here we clearly read America's determination that we would be a free people, with a liberal education–a truly liberal education, that is–one focused upon the agricultural and mechanical arts but not excluding the rest of what we see today as necessary for a healthy general education. [p. 224]