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How Did Carolyn Merchant Criticize The Conventional Narrative Of The Scientific Revolution?

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2. Historian Carolyn Merchant has criticized the conventional narrative of the Scientific Revolution by arguing that modern science is not as progressive as it is portrayed; Rather in circumstances it has regressed the course of society and environment. Merchant argues that the technological discoveries of modern science caused harms to the nature as well as introduce sexist terminologies in scientific research. Merchant argues that modern science has been responsible for some of the major problems in human history such as World Wars and Global warming. Chemical and nuclear pollution affected men and women's reproductive system. It shows that scientific discoveries in modern science were not exactly beneficial for society and environment. …show more content…

Nature was seen as a woman needing to be forced to reveal the secrets; this was the motivation behind experimentations in the Scientific Revolution. 12 Merchant argued that the metaphors used for nature and science proved to exclude women from science and encouraged the exploitation of nature. Francis Bacon, as Merchant argues, was a lead character in encouraging the exploitation of nature and sexism while referring to nature. Bacon was seen to use words such as spy on, bind, mold, straiten and constrain for experimentation of nature. `13 Nature was given a female gender in the works of Francis Bacon, who wanted to force the nature to give up its mysteries and related it to the torturing of a witch in medieval times; modern scientific methods seemed to be seen as a masculine symbol of power. This reflects on the argument that Scientific Revolution's research was not politically and socially motivated. There is a question if the methods in modern science were originally 'pure science'? Or do their origins have personal motives behind

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During the Scientific Revolution and even much before it, Women were seen as weak minded, distracted if not wanting a husband,and that they were not speaking truth if they had their own ideas about different topics. Women of the time were often quiet towards the ideas of speaking up or out about ideas that were against those of a man or those of the catholic church. The heliocentric idea of the universe, although was published in 16th century, it was still widely disowned by the Catholic Church, who believed in a geocentric view of our solar system because there was “no proof of the Earth moving”. This lead to the development of the Scientific Method which was developed by both Francis Bacon and René Descartes. The scientific Revolution allowed women to increase equality through creation of accurate theories through theses, mostly accurate data, and it made Men consider Women’s ideas and not just think that they were crazy because they decided to have different views than the Men.

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The following passage from the Last Child in the Woods delivers a well thought out explanation for for the irrelevance for “true nature” and how it is indeed not even looked at nowadays. Through the use of logos, pathos, and parallelism Richard Louv develops a meaningful argument that gives insight to the deterioration between people and nature. Throughout the passage Louv describes the dying relationship of people and nature through a mocking tone to give make it clear that he is against this new revelation. Logically Louv delivers a sound argument as to why this movement is not good, but it’s also detrimental to the mind of the young. Like Louv has stated, “Americans say they want their children to watch less TV,” but as a whole we “continue to expand the opportunities” to do so and this logic is clearly hypocritical.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote many gothic short-stories related to the boundaries between nature versus science, and whether science should be used to change a person’s nature for the better. In the stories Heidegger’s Experiment and The Birthmark Hawthorne compares nature and science by having two scientists alter something in someone’s life. In many cases the stories claim that science is used to alter human nature tragically, and rarely used for good. Hawthorne supports this by showing two totally different examples in each of his stories. In the stories Heidegger’s Experiment and The Birthmark it is argued that science is used for the selfishness of those who wanted to alter human nature with science.

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