Errol Morris Refutes It Thus
In what may be a case of Baader-Meinhof, I just came across the term &quot;Whiggish&quot; for the first time, reading Steven Weinberg&#x27;s _To Explain the World_ (pretty good so far). He also has a dig at Kuhn, recounting a time when they met briefly and Kuhn gave a defense of Aristotle that he found incoherent.<p>I&#x27;m no expert in the field of scientific thought, but my sympathies fall with Morris and Weinberg and the like. I agree with Weinberg that Aristotle understood physics worse than many schoolchildren do today. Which is not to say that Aristotle was stupid, but just that your knowledge is a function of the times you live in and the volume of past human thought you&#x27;ve had the privilege to learn from.<p>There are legitimate social and ethical concerns for everyone to keep in mind with the advancement of scientific knowledge. But this shouldn&#x27;t be conflated with the idea that we don&#x27;t understand the natural world better than we used to. We do.