The wanderings of the liberated mind: about the scientific revolution of the beginning of a Modern period

The report formulates some aspects concerning the nature and structure of scientific revolutions. As a reference example, the scientific (more precisely, natural-philosophical) revolution of the 16th-17th centuries (NPR) was taken, which in turn became part of the intellectual revolution of the Early Modern period. It is shown that NPR is not at all monodirectional and not predetermined in its milestones process, when the break with the Aristotelian tradition automatically cleared the way to the new science and philosophy. In reality, there was an intellectual war, the outcome of which was by no means known to any of the opposing sides in advance. In the report eight factors are noted that contributed to the NPR: 1) weakening ideological control on the part of the Church; 2) chaotization and fragmentation of intellectual space; 3) the redundancy of the intellectual resource for the emergence of innovative theories and practices; 4) the presence of intellectual reserve (the legacy of classical Antiquity and the Hellenistic era, as well as the scholastic method); 5) the flow of new information not embedded in traditional world picture and practices; 6) weakening the requirements for the validity of the hypotheses put forward and the rigor of reasoning, declining (dilution) the rationality of cognitive activity and behavior; 7) local breakthrough (as seed impulse) in one of the areas of knowledge (heliocentric theory); 8) the possibility of developments and tendencies of the proper natural-philosophical revolution to develop in the tideway (in a shell) of innovative concepts, methodologies and practices that have arisen in unscientific spheres (culture, politics, economics, theology, etc.); the experimentalist methodology for studying nature, coupled with the collective nature of research activities and the semantic heterogeneity of explanans and explanandum of scientific theory, led to the fact that natural-philosophical and then scientific research became more and more expensive, which became especially clear in the 19th century and later. The consequences are known. This circumstance allows us to express a hypothesis about the existence of a socio-economic limit for the development of science (at least, on the basis of a Baconian methodology in its genesis).