Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"Evidence-Indices [e.g., smoke as a sign of fire] may always have been used in an unthinking way by people going about their daily business; but to elevate them into being a reliable basis for theoretical knowledge..." -- David Wootton, The Invention of Science , p. 427 Here we come to the basis of Wootton's extraordinary claims about the Scientific Revolution replacing a world of abysmal ignorance with one that for the first time contains true knowledge: Wootton does not consider what ordinary people do in their day-to-day activities to be thought at all. But this is wrong: To move from an index to what that index signifies is an act of interpretation . In other words, it is thinking. It may not be great thinking, it may not be theorizing, and the move may have become so habitual that the thinker barely notices the thought involved at all. But nevertheless, it is an act of intelligence, and constitutes a genuine form of knowledge, without which the human species wo...

One of David Wootton's contentions in The Invention of Science is that the Scientific Revolution is the most important even in human history since the Neolithic Revolution . So it is, per Wootton, more important than, for instance, the Axial Age , the discovery of monotheism, or the rise of Christianity. I suspect that if Wootton were challenged on this thesis, he would point to the material transformation of the human world occurring in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. But why should that be decisive? "Importance" is itself not a material concept, and thus Wootton certainly cannot indicate material reasons for giving material transformations priority over spiritual ones.

In The Invention of Science , David Wootton takes a whack at strawman Herbert Butterfield, as follows: "In 1931 he had published  The Whig Interpretation of History...  Butterfield argued... it was not the historian's job to praise those people in the past whose values and opinions they agreed with and criticize those with whom they disagreed; only God had the right to sit in judgment" (p. 21) "It should be obvious that he was not right about this: no one, I trust, would want to read an account of slavery written by someone incapable of passing judgment" (p. 21n). This is a silly caricature of what Butterfield thought. Consider the following quotes from The Whig Interpretation of History : "There can be no complaint against the historian who personally and privately has his preferences and antipathies..." "If he deals in moral judgements at all he is trying to take upon himself a new dimension, and he is leaving that realm of histori...