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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Johnny Angel" data-source="post: 3975454" data-attributes="member: 13334">The important thing to remember about magical thinking and related fallacies is that we are all inclined toward it.  It requires education and discipline to turn our minds from it.That's an important distinction, of course.  Are we talking about magic and science or magic and technology.  Science is not a body of knowledge, though it is often loosely applied to a body of discovered explanations.  But, to quote Gould, "Science, in its most fundamental definition, is a fruitful mode of inquiry, not a list of enticing conclusions.  The conclusions are the consequence, not the essence."  There is no reason to suppose that magic could not be subject to scientific scrutiny.The question about the extent to which magic would co-incide with technology is a very different question.  In many cases, technological advancements were made up of elements that were available for centuries, but had not been put together.  The argument we've been having here has generally assumed that the driving force of innovation is need, and magic will remove the need for innovation.  Yes, innovation arises out of need.  But unless your setting is like that of Robin McKinley's Spindle's End, where "The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust" then magic is going to be the resort of very few.  The vast majority of people who have to get something done -- masons, carters, smiths, cobblers -- must do without magic and will develop new technologies independently.  So even if need or utility were the end-all and be-all of innovation, magic is unlikely to make need irrelevant.But it isn't just need.  Knowledge drives innovation as well.  New discoveries put old ideas in new light, and people put old things together in new ways.  The discovery of microscopic life substantially improved the efficiency of brewing, cheesemaking.  Knowledge drives innovation, which creates new knowledge which in turn drives more innovation. Even if we take it as read that magic eliminates need as a impetus for technological advancement, which I don't think it will to a significant degree, magic would be a profound source of new knowledge and new ideas.  If anything, magic would substantially accellerate the advancement of technology. And still I'm speaking as though there would be a difference between technology and magic, between the study of rerum natura and rerum magica, which of course there wouldn't be if magic were an empircally demonstrable phenomenon which behaved according to observable and predictable rules that were subject to scrutiny and analysis.  On what criteria would we distinguish what is natural from what is magical?</blockquote>

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