Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification. And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By constantly observing the results of their field experiments and retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other fields, “practice has long preceded theory.” And indeed some of these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood by the techniques of science.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 305–06