Also, maybe the US is different, but in all the Canadian schools I’m aware of, most schoolchildren learn at a young age that Columbus was not the first European to reach the Americas.  The media narrative is different, of course, but most younger people who remember their schooling know better.

Also, there’s the issue of many scientific disciplines becoming so
precise and specialized that their jargon is impenetrable to other
scientists from different fields.

So it’s not so easy to pay attention to “real” scientific literature
in within a given field if one is not a scientist currently working in
that field.

Are you proposing that research scientists should write papers at a level of prose that could be published in the NYT?

The first is simply that some claims are true and some are false, which is reason enough to prefer [true claims to] claims that are false

You seem to presume that I take an “arrogant” and “dismissive” view of other cultures, without ever showing us where I have done this.  In point of fact, the inhabitants of non-industrialized cultures are often quite knowledgeable about a sort of “folk biology”, a body of facts and heuristics helpful for figuring out what to eat, how to obtain it, and (less reliably) what to do in case of illness.  Often, but not always, linguistic terms also track genetic relationships when they can be inferred from visual taxonomy.  I have said this before.

The remainder of your comment seems to be driven by some reflexive desire to defend the honor of indigenous peoples–or really, some romanticized ideal of indigenous peoples–against imagined slights.  In doing so, you run a real risk of condescension towards the very groups you feel obligated (for reasons which remain unclear to me) to defend.  Indigenous people are typically highly capable at navigating and coping with their environments, but it is farcical to compare wilderness survival training to modern molecular biology.  Molecular biology explains why quinine works, but knowing that a certain tree bark sometimes prevents infection does not help to predict or explain the mechanism of other antibiotics that may be present in the environment, let alone to synthesize novel drugs.

Suggesting that the truth of claims about the natural world is a function of a given culture’s interests, cause it’s all relative man, is mistaken for several reasons.  The first is simply that some claims are true and some are false, which is reason enough to prefer claims that are false.  Molecular biology is the way things are, whether you believe it or not.  It is true that plague is caused by bacteria, and false that is caused by an angry god, and so on.

Secondly, scientific theories that accurately describe the world tend to be useful no matter what your interests are, by virtue of the fact that they are true.  You mention atomic bombs as an example of the misuse of science.  I agree that atomic weapons are deplorable, but you cannot simultaneously believe that (1) scientific accounts of physical phenomena are not “more accurate” than folk accounts, and (2) condemn scientists and engineers for using their highly accurate theories to build highly effective bombs!  If nuclear physics is not more accurate than the folk concept of matter, it is a miracle that an atom bomb could ever have worked in the first place.  Show me a folk theory which predicts under what conditions fissile materials will undergo chain reactions.

Thirdly, your descriptions of the interests and attitudes of indigenous cultures are unrecognizable to me.  The idea that native peoples just want to appreciate

the local ecosystem in a holistic sense of understanding its interconnectedness with the other flora and fauna

is just the 19th century conceit of the Noble Savage.  Paleolithic cultures are not abject hellholes, and their inhabitants are not stupid.  It remains false, however, that they demonstrate any particular interest in “holistic ecosystems” and “interconnectedness”.  Those are just words that sound nice.  In fact, human migration has been associated with the collapse of autochthonous megafauna throughout pre-history, and plenty of groovy paleolithic societies have run themselves into the ground through environmental mis-management.  Being serious about paleolithic cultures requires us to refrain from patronizing them.

The rest of your comment is merely a list of abuses of technology, which by the argument above actually supports the claim that scientific theories more accurately describe reality than folk theories, rather than undermines it.

For the rest, I think the central issue is not what is specifically meant by the term “discovery” (which I maintain does not in itself imply universal lack of prior knowledge), but rather the entire context in which Columbus’s landing in America is tranditionally framed by western historians or more broadly western culture’s tendency to frame all historical events in reference to itself.

And I mentioned the difference in using the term colloquially or with a somewhat different inflection, so I’m not sure why people are working themselves up as if I implied any use should be banned that doesn’t fit one definition.  People really like to talk about how people complaining (or in this case, using their brains a little bit and thinking about) social occurrances are just “looking to be angry,” but I’m trying to see how completely disregarding what was written to make a hyperbolic statement isn’t “looking to be angry.”

And frankly, what you say about “the speaker” and framing the discovery in reference to yourself?  DOES change the implications.  If Christopher Columbus himself rises from the grave and says “when I discovered I’d landed on a new continent….” there is a very different implication being conveyed there than when history books across the world say “when Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492.”