In two earlier posts I traced the path from Aristotelian to Galilean thinking as a way of understanding how testing developed as a discipline: how competing models of quality, and the slow maturation of experimental method, gave rise to something we might actually recognize as testing today. This post sits in that same current of thought, but takes a step back to ask a prior question: what is it that makes any of that development so difficult in the first place?
Category: History and Science
Testing: From Aristotelian to Galilean, Part 2
In this post I’ll continue on directly from part 1 where we ended up with a lot of models and a recognition of competing interpretations of quality along with a need for testability.
Continue reading Testing: From Aristotelian to Galilean, Part 2
Testing: From Aristotelian to Galilean, Part 1
Any discipline can focus along a spectrum of thinking. That’s no less true of testing, of course. The spectrum I want to introduce from history is that of moving from an Aristotelian to a Galilean way of thinking and “doing science” which, in many ways, is synonymous with “doing testing.”
Continue reading Testing: From Aristotelian to Galilean, Part 1
When Testing Questioned Orthodoxy
When Testing Questioned Philosophy
In the first post in this series, I ended by focusing a bit on Galileo who started to make the idea of testing what it eventually would be recognized as today. That’s the same thing as saying Galileo effectively produced one of the first attempts to make science as it is known today. Let’s continue this path of investigation.
When Testing Became Scientific
As I’ve been teaching the history of science and religion recently, some interesting ideas have formed in my head around how to present certain topics as they relate to testing. This is crucial since testing is the basis of effective experimentation. So here I’ll talk very briefly about how testing truly became testing.