Aaron Frank

I have to agree with what Hardy wrote previously about the reading, A Textbook Case Revisited - Knowledge as a Mode of Existence. It is something that I've never really thought about until the last couple of years, but the idea that our fact is based on a logical conclusion that someone else came up with. What makes something fact vs. opinion? It is how we center the world around ourselves, and give ourselves supreme authority to create fact. As it says in this reading, "But if you now propose to say that the objects of science themselveshad a history, that they have changed over time, too or that Newton has "happened" to gravity, and Pasteur has "happend" to the microbes, then evreyone is up in arms, and the accusation of indulging in "philosophy" or worse in "metaphysics" is soon hurled across the lecture hall"(page 3). The idea that all these things were here long before we were (gravity, microbes, etc.) but we coined them. It goes on to say, "It is taken for granted that "history of science" means the history of our knowledge about the world, not of the world itself."
Our whole world is based around these ideas that our predecessors came up with. But these are things that exist without them. What is the impact of their discovery on our world? Is it anything at all? Or are they just giving it a name?