Abstract
Thousands of years ago in Greece, shepherds looked out at a spray of stars in the night sky and imagined a meaningful shape. They saw in the sky something they worried about and named the constellation we call Leo for the lion that stalked their flocks. The pattern they fit to the face of nature was drawn from their cultural matrix. Today, when we look at the night sky, we see the same pattern and teach our children how to see it.
There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature. … Most of us are unconscious of our perpetual habit of reading the language of the external world and translating as we read.
—Whewell, 1837
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Lawton, M.F., Garstka, W.R., Hanks, J.C. (1997). The Mask of Theory and the Face of Nature. In: Gowaty, P.A. (eds) Feminism and Evolutionary Biology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-5985-6_4
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