Quotes from David Wootton

The case of medicine is, at first sight, rather more intractable than that of astrology, for it is hard to disprove astrology: one would need to compare the lives of a group of people all born at the same moment.

he thought that human beings are, by and large, rather nasty. They can rarely be bothered to help one another, he noted, but are quick to seize any opportunity to do each other down.9 Moreover there was a bias in the world of which he had become acutely aware: most people were ignorant, and nothing provoked the hostility of the ignorant as much as people who knew more than they did.10 Although

furnaces for dyers and brewers, which when known will be used without

Quid vitae sectabor iter?

The social and technological process by which we establish facts becomes invisible to us because we naturalize it. Language-dependent and institutional facts come to seem like brute facts to us: this is true for social institutions, like money, but even more so for claims about the natural world which are, in truth, theory dependent: we have naturalized the idea that the heights of mountains should be measured from sea level, an idea that would have made no sense in the Middle Ages.

The problem, it is claimed, with grand narratives is that they privilege one perspective over another; the alternative is a relativism which holds that all perspectives are equally valid.