Scientific progress advances mainly through intellectual and political instruments, not material ones
Evidence
It can be said in general that the advance of science cannot be materially documented. The history of the sciences can at most be brought alive in the memory, and that not in all cases, through the description of the successive perfecting of the instruments which have been one means of advance and through the description of the machines which have been applications of the science itself. The principal “instruments” of scientific progress are of an intellectual (and even political) and methodological order, and Engels has written 570 that “intellectual instruments” are not born from nothing and are not innate in man, but are acquired, have developed and are developing historically. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1620
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Establishes Gramsci’s distinction between material and intellectual instruments of science, a load-bearing concept for his critique of vulgar materialism.
- XREF: Connects to the scaffolding-theory goal: the primacy of intellectual/methodological instruments over material ones is Gramsci’s attack on economistic readings of science.
Related
- The science of instruments is historically tied to production and technology (similarity 0.84)
- Technique includes mental and philosophical instruments, not just industrial science (similarity 0.80)
- Each science constructs its own method; there is no universal method (similarity 0.80)
- This selection is incomplete because the paragraph was truncated in the source. (similarity 0.79)
- Modern science advanced by expelling Aristotle and the Bible from its authority (similarity 0.79)
- Material forces of production are the measureable skeleton of historical process (similarity 0.78)