Higher Seminar in Theoretical Philosophy: Ana Maria Mora Marquez "Medieval Accounts of Demonstration as Epistemologies of Scientific Knowledge Transmission"

A narrative that goes back to the seventeenth century tells us that scientific progress in the late Middle Ages was thwarted by a scholarly method that encouraged blind belief in authority. In the words of Francis Bacon, “[t]he error is both in the deliverer and in the receiver. He that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such form as may be soonest believed, and not as may be easiliest examined.” In fact, Bacon’s criticism points to a salient aspect of the scholastic method that reigned in European universities from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century: its focus on methods of knowledge transmission to the detriment of methods of knowledge generation. However, far from encouraging blind belief, medieval scholars examined thoroughly the methods that maximise epistemic quality in knowledge transmission. In so doing, some of them delineated noteworthy epistemological accounts that can be appraised with the tools offered by recent developments in social epistemology.  Among such recent developments, John Greco’s account of knowledge transmission is remarkable for its commonalities with some medieval epistemologies of scientific knowledge. Using the broad lines of Greco’s epistemological account as theoretical framework, my general aim in this is study is to show that some key thirteenth-century accounts of demonstration are compatible with a non-reductionist epistemology of scientific knowledge (scientia) transmission, which is suggestive of a positive epistemic contribution of trust. I finish the study showing that John Buridan’s fourteenth-century account eludes this non-reductionist interpretation and explain the historical and doctrinal reasons for Buridan’s rupture with the thirteenth-century.