Picking up from last episode… my dissertation challenges this approach by delving into the socio-epistemic reasons behind the pilots’ rejection of many of the cosmographers’ nautical proposals. Far from being passive actors with no historical agency, pilots are the main characters of my narrative.
In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that pilots and cosmographers performed their professional activities in different and incommensurable epistemic frameworks. Being a true early modern cosmographer, I explain, consisted of fully adhering to the Ptolemaic philosophical and epistemological program. A main feature of this program is the explicit link between the apprehension of truth (ἀλήθεια) and the concept of ἀκρίβεια—which, in English, has etymologically evolved into accuracy. For Ptolemy, accuracy—and therefore truth—could only be achieved through mathematics and astronomy.
This philosophical aspect is also fundamental in his cosmographical program. As he explains in the Geography, only those sciences would lead to a true depiction of the cosmos. For the respectable early modern cosmographer, both the way to apprehend truth and the notion of accuracy were essentially Ptolemaic. When they thought about the truthful procedure to depict the cosmos or about the proper way of using astronomical instruments, they did it drawing from such basis.
For their contemporary pilots, truth and accuracy had a completely different philosophical and epistemological dimension. Broadly speaking, they operated these categories within a very specific artisanal epistemic framework. This affected both the way they performed their profession and the way they used and constructed their professional instruments. Nautical charts, for example, were not conceived as attempts to capture the geographical truth of the Earth—in a Ptolemaic sense—, but as navigational instruments; therefore, they were constructed based on notions of accuracy completely different from those followed by cosmographers to draw their maps. [José María Moreno Madrid]
