The intellectual history in Sagan's
Cosmos is pretty much all at least a bit rubbish, but the parts surrounding the pre-Socratics (‘Ionians’), Plato, and Aristotle are especially awful. It has no connection to history, instead having lazily shoe-horned some moralising pap that has no relevance to what it purports to talk about.
Learning history from Sagan is a bit like learning astronomy from a creationist, I suppose: not all of it may be wrong, but it's always distorted through an agenda-driven lens. In Sagan's case, there is always an over-arching narrative of a grand battle of science/empiricism, democracy, and freedom, against mysticism tyranny, oppression, etc. Because of this, there is no nuance, as the identification of scientific and social progress (as specifically conceived by Western democracies, naturally) is axiomatic, needs no justification, and cannot be challenged in any way.
Hence, Sagan simply lies about thinkers like Plato and Aristotle (as well as misrepresenting pretty much everyone else), because they don't at all fit into the clean dichotomy he's building. For example, Plato as an anti-empiricist, but in many ways he was an anti-traditionalist, completely contrary to Sagan's claims (his role model was executed for intellectually challenging the morality of the times, even). Aristotle's role as the arch-empiricist of the ancient world is not even acknowledged; instead, he's implied to have a soporific effect on the development of sciencedemocracyfreedom for centuries. The history reality is very inconvenient to this narrative. Scientifically, that Western science ‘woke up’ within a relatively short time of translating Aristotle's works, that Galileo was critically dependent on Aristotelian scholastics like the Oxford calculators, and key Newtonian concepts like momentum had direct precursors in scholastic commentaries on Aristotelian physics. Socially, values like universal human rights and equality before the law arose directly from the Western theological tradition, which itself was a direct lifting of Greek and especially Aristotelian conceptions of ethics, interpreted through a monotheistic lens, as a lot of early Christian theologians had Greek educations.
If one insists, as Sagan implicitly does, that there are only two buckets, sciencedemocracyfreedom and mysticismtyrannyoppression, and sorts every person and concept into those buckets, one inevitably gets a picture that's not even a crude caricature of historical realities. Then again, perhaps it's not so surprising of Sagan, since the production is firmly American Cold War-era.
Marketing and psychology: both social sciences that in the right environment could've blossomed. I think it wouldn't be hard in any sufficiently large market with guilds/institutions that retained and taught both sciences.
This needs a more capitalistic and debt-driven economic system to be plausible, because marketing science has no reason to exist without a consumerist culture. A lot of these things (including QM to some degree) are kind of obvious in hindsight, but can't plausibly develop on their own without either a lot of other pre-cursors or a blatant alien space bat/unicorn. ... BTW of an interesting note is that Heisenberg himself viewed Aristotelian scientific concepts are closer to QM than Newtonian ones.