Discussion In a World of magic would science develop well?

Which renders it an unhelpful word to use or debate on.
The misunderstanding is generally that people that say magic is not science don't mean to say it's fully chaotic just that it would not resemble the specifics of how our natural sciences are studied which is likely true.
Obviously the dichotomy between magic and IRL science makes sense only insofar as the setting creates one, but not everyone seem to be that imaginative and consider that this is a variable factor.

 

The main problem is that people tend to have a poor understanding of science. They usually think of it as a field or a groups of fields of knowledge when it is actually a process. The former assumes that only certain types of knowledge can be considered science whereas the latter understands that anything that adheres to the scientific method is science. And so if magic existed, why wouldn't it be studied just like everything else? Why wouldn't it be considered a scientific field?

 

Except that it is closer to the other way around.
The scientific method is not what makes something a science. It helps yes, but necessary no. It is not as strong with Social sciences as Natural Sciences. It is also much more recent.
Science comes form the Latin for knowledge, that is what it means. The method is a tool for obtaining that knowledge.

That only works if it has a recognizable and consistent internal logic, that is repeatable.
Would it be studied, more then likely. (witch hunts existed and all)
Would it more of an art with individual expression being more important like Music, blacksmithing, Architecture (these are all fields where there are scientific principals behind them, but the expression of self is more important to the final result). Much more likely.
You are also forgetting that it took millennia for people to even discover and implement the scientific method, the nature of Magic could easily be sufficient to prevent it ever being discovered or adopted.

You can say it could be treated the same as science, but you can not reasonable ay that it would, which is what you are consistently getting wrong in this thread.

The problem is that without detailed specifications for the nature of Magic, we can not begin to comprehend how it would affect development, as there are to many variables that could throw out all predictions, and to many unknowable factors that could cause the same setting to go from extreme development to complete stagnation.

 

And any knowledge that doesn't come from the scientific method doesn't count as science. Which is my point - that the process is the key element rather than nomenclature.

Sure, you can probably conceive magic that is inconsistent and nonrepeatable. But I'm pretty sure you know that this isn't the kind of magic that we're talking about.

 

Why would it necessarily be considered a scientific field? The fact we have a formal thing called science is something that is not actually necessary to us advancing our knowledge(we did fine for millennia), another world's society might not have such a label to begin with and classify their different fields using other smaller criteria without any overarching label and magic while having patterns might look so different from the rest of the world's phenomena that it could be considered distinct, even if we from our PoV call its study a scientific field.

 

You're getting caught up in science as a label again.

 

It IS a label, you also talked about how you think other people would CONSIDER magic, not just how they would STUDY it.

If you asked wether people from X world would study magic by experimenting and trying to see what patterns they can spot and what model they can build to explain those patterns, then yes they would use what we know as the scientific method.
But when you ask whether they would classify their fields using the same criteria as us and explicitly call things "science" or an equivalent world then we are talking about labels.

Basically you can study something using what we call the scientific method without defining all fields using said method under the same label, especially as we can get creative in how crazy the physical world gets and even how irreducible we make its natural phenomena(thus possibly rendering the connection between some different fields impossible even in theory) to the observers.

 

You're still arguing about labels when science isn't about labels.

 

Whatever you say, I literally explained to you that there is a difference between describing something using your modern PoV(like saying the study of magic is a scientific field to us) and saying everyone in every universe imaginable will have your exact perspective on their own world(we didn't have a universal definition of science ourselves before the early modern era).

 

Science is a logical approach. If magic does exist and you approach it logically, it's science.