the non-primitive nature of 'primitive' science

Ancient astronomers sought to predict and retrodict the movement of the celestial bodies. Among these ancient astronomers were the Babylonians, who utilized empirical data to discover patterns about the way these bodies moved. They created what the Greeks called ephemerides: tables of data about the locations of celestial bodies. Here, the Babylonians were looking for patterns in large datasets to predict future events, just as we do now to conduct other kinds of scientific inquiry. However, these efforts by ancient astronomers are sometimes seen as primitive and unscientific. I claim that these statements qualifying Babylonian astronomy as unscientific are incorrect.

In order to prove that Babylonian astronomy is, in fact, real science, we need to provide a clear definition of what “science” and the “scientific method” truly are. While philosophers have not collectively agreed on a solution to the demarcation problem, I define science here as any kind of study that employs the scientific method. As for the scientific method, I turn to Charles S. Peirce, who defines the process as having three key steps: “abduction (making conjectures or creating hypotheses), deduction (inferring what should be the case if the hypotheses are the case), and induction (the testing of hypotheses).” I go on to show that the Babylonians went through these three steps, thus they were doing successful science.

Abduction is the first step in carrying out the scientific method and is the process by which scientists create a hypothesis that they will later test. Peirce’s definition of abduction includes the fact that the hypothesis must also be the best explanation of the phenomena, given current observations. Ancient Babylonian astronomers went through the process of abduction by forming the hypothesis that the position of celestial bodies can be predicted through patterns drawn from recording the positions of these bodies for many years. This was also the best explanation of the phenomena: Babylonians had known for many years that certain stars rose and set in the sky at known intervals — these stars were called ziqpu. The fact that ziqpu exist would be enough evidence for a logical inference that celestial bodies can be predicted through similar patterns.

Babylonians also employed deduction. It follows that if the hypothesis (that patterns in celestial movement can be found by examining large datasets of this movement) is true, then it should be the case that we should be able to observe the location of a celestial body based on this pattern. For example, if the constellation Canis Major has been observed for the last fifty years in the wintertime, according to our hypothesis, we can deduce that the pattern is that Canis Major appears every year in the winter. Further, we can deduce that if we look up at the night sky in the winter, we will see Canis Major. This is why Babylonians wrote out their predictions for eclipses, the length of night and day, and length of seasons in so-called omen texts: they deduced that patterns found in their datasets meant that these previously observed natural occurrences would really happen again in the future.

For our final stage in the scientific process, we must show that Babylonians practiced induction. That is, we need to show that they tested their hypotheses. We know this to be the case because of the Babylonian goal year texts. These texts contained predictions for the locations of celestial bodies and timelines of celestial events in the near future. Astronomers cross-referenced these goal year texts with their actual observations in order to refine their patterns.

We have shown here that Babylonians did practice “real science” because they followed the scientific method. A contrarian might respond that adhering to the scientific method does not necessarily make a pursuit scientific. However, I doubt that anyone will disagree that one criterion for scientific discovery today is developing algorithms to predict future events. This is exactly what the Babylonians did — they derived patterns from big datasets in order to predict celestial events. So, even by this metric, ancient Babylonians were practicing science. Another possible rebuttal could be that the Babylonians only had primitive tools, so they could only do primitive science. However, I choose to answer this without any rigorous philosophical proof: Would we accept it if, in the distant future, humans deemed current science “primitive” due to what they believed to be underdeveloped tools? Likely not — we consider our current scientific endeavors to be truly scientific regardless of what tools may exist in the future.