One would think, then, that a fundamental and ever-operating aim would be to translate knowledge of the subject-matter of physical conditions into terms which are generally understood, into signs denoting human consequences of services and…
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Because they enter life and modify experience in imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech about them is technical; communication is by means of peculiar symbols.
The sunlight, rain, air and soil have always entered in visible ways into human experience; atoms and molecules and cells and most other things with which the sciences are occupied affect us, but not visibly.
Even physical knowledge which does affect human conduct, which does modify what we do and undergo, is also technical and remote in the degree in which its bearings are not understood and used.
All merely physical knowledge is technical, couched in a technical vocabulary communicable only to the few.
When we say that a subject of science is technically specialized, or that it is highly “abstract,” what we practically mean is that it is not conceived in terms of its bearing upon human life.
Chemistry waited on the advance of physics; the sciences of living things required the material and methods of physics and chemistry in order to make headway.
Physics advanced when ideas worked out in connection with the solar system were used to describe happenings on the earth.
That for the past three centuries energy should have gone chiefly into physical inquiry, beginning with the things most remote from man such as heavenly bodies, was to have been expected.
The mind still draws a sharp separation between the world in which man lives and the life of man in and by that world, a cleft reflected in the separation of man himself into a body and a mind, which, it is currently supposed, can be known…
The isolation of the humane subjects from one another is connected with their aloofness from physical knowledge.
Discoveries and improved methods are so recorded and organized that constant exchange and intercommunication take place.