Does science oppress people? Does it liberate them? Many Western academics think the former. Many in the Third World think the latter.
Meera Nanda on Science as Liberation
In terms of what Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom call the “Third World” and much else, we can ask if science causes (or creates) oppression or does it bring about liberation? (There are many other binaries which could have been chosen here.) Many academics and theorists in the Western world (from Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard to Rupert Sheldrake) think it causes specific political hegemonies and helps embed political power. Yet many people in the Third World believe it brings about liberation.
In their book Why Truth Matters, the philosophers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (henceforth “B & S”) focus on the case of Meera Nanda when they write:
“Science for her was a liberation from the traditions and narrow opportunities available to most provincial women. When she moved to the USA and went for a second PhD, in philosophy of science, she was shocked to find herself ‘drowning in platitudes about cultivating the ‘alternative sciences’ of women, non-Western peoples. and other ‘victims’ of the modern age’.”
Meera Nanda (who’s an Indian historian and philosopher of science) sees science (or the scientific mind) as a means of liberation. Many Western academics and theorists see it as a creator of non-Western, as well as some Western, victims. Some of them believe that women and non-Western cultures have their own sciences (in the plural) too.
Let Nanda speak for herself. Her own introduction for The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is ideal for getting at these issues:
“I am currently interested in the cultural history of science in India, from its early beginnings to the present. During my stay at MPIWG, I hope to work on my new book project, which critically examines the various strategies for harmonization (or ‘hybridization,’ to use a postcolonial term) of scientific theories (from Copernican astronomy and Darwin’s theory of evolution to quantum physics) with spiritualist-idealist strains of Hinduism. My objective is to show how this kind of hybridization covers up contradictions and turns modern science into a source of legitimation for Hinduism and Hindu nationalism.”
Now take the case of the biologist and paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake. He does believe that there are non-Western sciences (if not, specifically, women’s science). For example, he writes:
“In almost every other sphere of human life, there is not one but many points of view. […] Only in the realm of science can we still find the old ethos of monopoly, universality and absolute authority that used to be claimed by the Roman Catholic Church.”
Then Sheldrake is more specific:
“There are many medical systems, including osteopathy, acupuncture, naturpathy and homeopathy, but only one kind, mechanistic medicine, is labelled ‘scientific’ […].”
In much of Sheldrake’s writings, religion and “spirituality” hover in the background. So it’s not a surprise that he believes the following about the future:
“As the sciences free themselves from the constrictions of materialism, many new possibilities arise. And many of them raise new possibilities for dialogues with religious traditions.”
Sheldrake believes that Western science creates victims. He sees himself as the main victim (or “heretic”). Other victims are paranormal researchers, practitioners and theorists of alternative medicine, and “ordinary people” (i.e., because science is “elitist and undemocratic”).
It must be said that you don’t need to take science to be a Platonic form (i.e., Science) to have a problem with this relativism and postmodern scepticism. Just as the philosopher David Chalmers doesn’t believe that the word ‘peace’ can have as its meaning ‘ham sandwich’, so anything does not go when it comes to the word ‘science’.
Sheldrake is just my own example, whom I highlight because he isn’t the usual suspect — a postmodern theorist.
B & S highlight all this in an explicitly political way when they conclude in the following way:
“The situation she confronted was rich in ironies: benevolent ‘friends’ of Third World people helping the reactionary, the rich and the powerful fasten the chains more firmly on women, lower castes, and secularists in India. Intellectuals, ‘in their despair over the world they find themselves in, have helped deliver the people they profess to love-the non-Western masses, the presumed victims of ‘Western science’ and modernity-to the growing forces of hatred, fascism, and religious fanaticism.”
Of course, we need to be given more details on B & S’s political thesis above. Specifically, on exactly how Western intellectuals help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful fasten the chains on women and the poor. As it is, B & S do provide their readers with lots of details elsewhere. But what we do know, even only from this short passage, is that Western science is deemed, by many Western academics and theorists, to actually help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful of the Third World to chain women and the poor to their roles. Yet, as we’ve just seen, Meera Nanda takes the exact opposite position: the embrace of science is the embrace of liberation.
Western Intellectuals and the Third World
B & S wonder why
“[f]or some reason Western intellectuals, and many non-Western too, have decided that people in the Third World do not want or like freedom or change […].”
What if some Third World people don’t like freedom or change, at least not the Western versions of these things? Do B & S simply assume that they do?
To generalise, think here about the “neo-conservative” assumption that all Third World peoples (at least those the neo-cons deemed to live under oppressive regimes) do want (Western?) freedom and change. [See here.] Now think about those academics and theorists who think the opposite. Of course, it all depends on specifics. Some Third World people do want freedom and change; others don’t. Again, it depends on how freedom and change are fleshed out.
The passage continues:
“[T]hat ‘authentic’ Third World people prefer ancient communal ties and oneness with the earth.”
Here too, some Third World people do prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Others don’t. Or, rather, some may prefer communal ties, but not care too much about oneness with the earth. Or they may prefer oneness with the earth, but not care too much about communal ties.
Many academics and theorists in the West do believe that many — or even most — Third World people prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Whether that’s a romantic view or not is another issue.
B & S then become way more rhetorical about Western intellectuals. They inform their readers that such theorists
“tell [people in the Third World] to be what they were born, and stay what they were born, on pain of being accused of inauthenticity and mental colonization”.
It can be doubted that these Westerners have ever been so explicit that they literally tell Third World people to be what they were born. However, that doesn’t stop them from being inexplicit about these matters. And it doesn’t stop elites in the Third World (or those who’ve been educated in the West) from adopting these attitudes. (They often have.) What’s more, Third World elites, either newly in the West or at home, have certainly accused people in their own communities of inauthenticity or mental colonisation.
Now let’s place all this in an historical and philosophical context, as B & S do. The best way of doing so is to focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game.
Wittgenstein’s Language Games and Kuhn’s Paradigms
Firstly, take the idea that non-Western cultures can be judged by scientific standards and values. Now take the alternative idea that other cultures may have their own “sciences” in the plural. This is how Wittgenstein has both helped and hindered here:
“The form of life is the frame of reference we learn to work within when trained in the language of our community; learning that language is thus learning the outlook, assumptions, and practices with which that language is inseparably bound and from which its expressions get their meaning.”
As ever with Wittgenstein, this passage has been interpreted in multiple ways by multiple people. Having just said that, it’s much clearer than many other passages by him. In fact, it’s so clear that interpretation is surely at a minimum here, and simple agreement or disagreement with it is at a maximum.
Thomas Kuhn interpreted this passage (or passages like it) when he stated that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds”.
So just as we have many interpretations of Wittgenstein, so we now have many interpretations of Kuhn’s Wittgensteinian passage. Yet Kuhn was actually talking about science. That didn’t stop philosophers and theorists applying his ideas to almost everything under the sun.
Let’s apply it to science itself.
Don’t Wittgenstein's words above have the consequence that what is science depends on the language game it’s embedded in? More linguistically, is it the case that what the word “science” means is dependent on the language game it’s embedded in? Thus, there may well be women’s science, Māori science, Nazi science, Marxist science, and so on. Rupert Sheldrake (mentioned earlier) certainly thinks so. (He wouldn’t include “fascist science” in his own personal list of sciences.)
B & S comment on this. However, rather than talking about sciences in the plural, they talk about “knowledges” in the plural. They write:
“It is just very easy to employ this kind of argument in order to demonstrate that the ‘knowledges’ produced by indigenous people are every bit as valid, ‘in their own way’, as the knowledge produced by Western science.”
Of course, this passage (at least when taken on its own) isn’t that helpful because B & S need to explain the word ‘valid’ and the phrase ‘in their own way’. For a start, if we go down the relativist road, these so-called knowledges may be valid according to these cultures, but still not be examples of science.
Peter Winch as Extreme Wittgensteinian
Science and relativism have just been mentioned, and B & S conclude by noting where they believe all this leads:
“The threat is, rather, relativism. Put simply, if the scientific form of life runs up against an alternative, incommensurate form of life, perhaps one rooted in religious commitment, then there is no further justification that a scientist can offer for the primacy of scientific truth other than the fact it is truth in terms of the standards and conventions of science.”
The Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch agrees that scientific forms of life run up against alien alternatives, and thus there is no further justification for science. In his own words, at least according to B & S,
“there is therefore little point in trying to understand the beliefs of a culture which is radically alien to the Western scientific tradition”.
(Think here of Wittgenstein writing: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”)
Peter Winch seems to have gone further than Wittgenstein on all this. (Alternatively, perhaps his examples are simply more straightforward and political.) According to B & S:
“[O]ne would just run slap bang into a fundamental incommensurability.”
What Winch says is probably correct. But what has his position to do with facts and truths? Is it a fact, for example, that possessing the heads of one’s enemies means possessing their spirits too? Is it true that “Jews use Muslim blood for rituals”, as many people in some Muslim cultures believe? Perhaps those latter Muslim cultures aren’t “radically alien” enough for Winch’s position; so we can treat them differently to the cultures of head hunters. But where is the line drawn between a radically alien culture and simply a different culture? Moreover, does that line, if it exists at all, matter in this debate about facts and truths?
In any case, exactly why can’t we understand the beliefs of a culture which is radically alien to our own? Isn’t this what anthropologists do? Moreover, much has been written about alien cultures by historians, anthropologists, philosophers, scientists, etc. Surely this constitutes at least some degree of understanding.
More to the point, isn’t there a conflation here between understanding a culture and agreeing with its beliefs? And how does all this impact on the issue of trans-cultural agreement or disagreement?
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