1 The Birth of Science - MSRI

130 5. Medicine and Other Empirical Sciences
preexisted or were obvious from the component parts. The words simply
indicate all creatures that share the characteristic in question: all segmented
creatures or all those having sheath-like wings. This is therefore
only a preliminary step toward the introduction of a conventional terminology:
the novelty in Aristotle’s new names — an important one from the
perspective of zoology, of course — has to do not with the meanings of the
terms (which are understandable in the intended sense even by someone
who has not been told about them), but with their systematic use in classification.
Even Democritus, though having offered several arguments for the conventional
origin of names, does not seem to have fully overcome the traditional
view, 28 which in the modern age only started to lose ground in the
seventeenth century. Tullio De Mauro writes:
Starting with the seventeenth century, the experimental method and
[zoological and botanical] classifications revealed to the avant-garde
of European culture that there are scientifically knowable things . . .
for which nonetheless there had never been a name either in the “perfect”
Latin language or in any other. 29
The freedom with which Herophilus introduces his anatomical nomenclature
is analogous to that with which Hellenistic mathematicians introduce
new mathematical terms. 30 This freedom would have been inconceivable
not only in classical Greece but also after the decline of Hellenistic
civilization, all the way to the seventeenth century. And note that the
avant-garde of European culture of which De Mauro speaks had been
studying Hellenistic works intensively for centuries — works containing
on the one hand ideas underlying the classifications and the experimental
method, and on the other the memory of scientists like Herophilus, who
identified new objects of study by giving them a name for the first time.
Thus the notion of a conventional terminology is not at all trivial. In
anatomy, in particular, it is even less so than, say, in systematic zoology:
indeed, new animal species are fairly easy to identify as such, but there is
28 These arguments are reported in a passage of Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Cratylus (Democritus,
fr. 26 in [Diels: FV], vol. II, p. 148). They are based on the existence of homonyms and
synonyms and on the possibility of changing names, but the only example proposed for the latter
possibility was of a proper noun. It would be hard to explain why a conventionalist like Democritus
would fail to mention in this context the creation of conventional terms if that practice already
existed in his time.
29 [De Mauro], chapter II, section 3.
30 Archimedes systematically defines mathematical concepts by introducing new and conventional
names for them (for example, geometric terms in the On conoids and spheroids and arithmetic
ones in the Arenarius); so does Apollonius of Perga, to whom we owe the terms ellipse, parabola and
hyperbola, among others.
Revision: 1.9 Date: 2002/09/14 19:12:01