Chapter 1: The Wider Picture

Historical Issues

When did the first writing systems appear?
When did the first number systems appear, and what did they look like?
Did the Ancient Greek civilisation end after being conquered by the Romans?
How did information from the Greek and Roman cultures survive the Dark Ages?
How long did the Middle Ages last?
Why did countries such as the UK, parts of Germany, and the Netherlands become more productive than other European countries at a certain point?

Conceptual Issues

How does the availability of written records change human thought?
How do current writing systems differ from the first ones? Is this an improvement?
Can education change the way we read texts?
How does arithmetic depend on the code used to represent numbers?
Why were Christian schools after the fall of the Roman Empire unable to prevent a sharp decline in scientific knowledge?
Is it possible to write a complete history of science?
To what extent does our current scientific knowledge depend on the contribution of a small number of geniuses who achieved the major scientific breakthroughs?

Introduction

Human life has changed profoundly in the last few centuries due to the impact of science.
Science is ubiquitous in society, providing solutions to social problems.
The book explores the growth of psychology as an independent discipline.
It begins by discussing the invention of writing and numerical systems, critical for accumulating knowledge.
A short account of the ancient civilizations—Greeks, Romans, Byzantine, and Arab empires—and their role in the evolution of knowledge is presented.
The focus is on key figures whose ideas strongly impacted Western civilisation.
A brief description of the Renaissance is included.
The review starts thousands of years ago and ends on the eve of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.

1.1 The Invention of Writing

Written records represent one of the most important moments in the development of science.
It's important to know when and where writing systems were invented and what is important about them.

Preliterate Culture

Preliterate civilisation: A civilisation before writing was invented.
Lindberg's research (1992) revealed three important characteristics of knowledge in these kinds of cultures.
- Skills are based on practical rules of thumb rather than an understanding of how things work ('know-how' without theoretical understanding).
- Knowledge of history is limited to two generations, with oral tradition mainly transmitting practical skills.
- Myths and stories explain the world through spirits with human-like characteristics (animism).
Animism: The belief that objects and nature are inhabited by spirits with human-like characteristics that cause events to happen.
- Introduced by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917).
Lindberg viewed animistic thinking as reinforcing community values and providing explanatory principles.
Myths often contradict each other, but this doesn't hinder preliterate people.
Scientific thinking cannot occur without written records because patterns emerge and incompatibilities become visible only when information is written down.

The First Writing Systems

Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures:
- China (around 6000 BCE).
- Egypt (around 3200 BCE).
- Sumer (around 3200 BCE).
- America (Olmec and Mayan, 300 BCE).
These written languages were preceded by protowriting, the use of symbols to represent entities without linguistic information linking them.

Characteristics of Writing Systems

Writing systems were a combination of pictograms and phonograms from an early stage.
- Pictogram: An information-conveying sign that consists of a picture resembling the person, animal, or object it represents.
- Phonogram: A sign that represents a sound or a syllable of spoken language; forms the basis of writing systems.
- Logograph: A sign representing a spoken word, which no longer has a physical resemblance to the word’s meaning.
Egyptian hieroglyphs could only be deciphered when scientists realised that most hieroglyphs represented spoken syllables.
Phonograms were gradually replaced by simpler signs symbolising meaningful sounds in the language (phonemes) or syllables.
Alphabetic writing systems started with the Phoenician alphabet, which formed the basis of the Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets.
Chinese has remained closest to pictograms but has become logographic.

Writing and the Accumulation of Knowledge

Writing provides external memory about knowledge, allowing accumulation of knowledge.
New thinkers do not have to rediscover what was previously thought; they can read what their predecessors wrote.
Socrates believed that the availability of books made students lazy and discouraged them from properly studying.
Written records changed how knowledge was preserved, allowing cultures to relax formal constraints and concentrate on the content.

The Reader

Written records only have an impact if there is somebody to read them.
For most of human history, the number of people who could read was relatively small.
Early scripts lacked spaces between words (scriptio continua).
Saenger (1997) argues that spaces between words made silent reading possible.
Aurelius Augustine (Saint Augustine) expressed surprise when he saw the bishop of Milan reading silently in 383 AD.

The Influence of Orthography

Reading acquisition is easiest in languages with a transparent relationship between spelling and sound.
- Examples: Spanish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, German, and Korean.
In languages with a more opaque correspondence, children need up to four years to reach the same level of performance and are more likely to face reading difficulties.
- Examples: English and Hebrew.

Reading Without Critical Thinking

Readers in the past were taught to read and understand texts exactly as they were, without questioning or comparing them with other writings.
Scholastic method: Students unquestioningly memorise and recite texts that are thought to convey unchanging truths.
The success of the scholastic method depended more on students’ perseverance than on their intelligence.
Currently, psychology textbooks emphasise critical thinking.
Charles (2008) argues that teaching critical thinking can be flawed if it creates an environment where students reflect the teacher’s critique instead of challenging things on their own.

Interim Summary

Features of the preliterate civilisation:
- Knowledge confined to ‘know-how’ without theoretical knowledge of the underlying principles.
- Fluidity of knowledge.
- Collection of myths and stories about the beginning of the universe (animism).
Written language appeared separately in at least four cultures; in each case, it was preceded by proto-writing.
Writing consists of a combination of pictograms and phonograms.
Written records form an external memory, which allows an accumulation of knowledge.
For a long time, the number of readers was limited. In addition, they were not encouraged to think critically about what they were reading (scholastic method).

1.2 The Discovery of Numbers

The discovery of numbers has been crucial for the growth of knowledge.
The history of numbers and numerical operations remained largely unexplored until Georges Ifrah's research (Ifrah, 1998).

The Limits of Visual Perception and the Special Status of the Number Five

The possession of goods required the ability to count them.
The earliest archaeological evidence of counting dates back to 35,000–20,000 BCE and has been found in Africa.
Humans could make distinctions up to three, represented by one, two, and three markings.
Newborn babies and animals can distinguish between one, two, and three entities (subitising).
Some isolated tribes have a number naming system consisting of three terms: one, two, and many.
Tallies to represent numbers rapidly exceed the limits of perception.
Grouping the tallies was a first solution, often with a base five.
The number five is the first entity that exceeds perceptual limits and coincides with the number of fingers on a hand.
The Etruscan civilisation used the following symbols for the numbers one to five in the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE: I, II, III, IIII, Λ.

Giving Numbers Names and Symbols

An analysis of the origin of the number names gives some indication of the struggle humans had before they could come up with a handy numerical system.
The number nine is related to the word ‘new’ in the Indo-European family of languages.
Indo-European languages share the same roots for the numbers one to ten further suggests that their names already existed before the original language began to split into its many branches around 2000 BCE.
Based on the similarities of the number names in over 20 languages, Ifrah (1998: 32) postulates the following original number-set:
1. oino, oiko, oiwo
2. dwo, dwu, dwoi
3. Tri