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Post-Modern Negative Impact On The
Study Of Science
Post-modernism has left its extremely narrow, irrational, parochial
impact on the question of studying modern science. The scientific
tradition of thinking about the coinciding of reality and truth is
challenged. The set of doctrines often referred to as ‘social
construction of science’ or ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ claims
that like any other way of knowing, scientific methods are wholly
relative to a theoretical framework and a world-view: we know what we
ourselves construct and there can be no justification that our
constructs can progressively come to map the world as it really is. Thus
truth is a matter of how we "garland consensus with authority."[David
Bloor, "Knowledge and Social Imagery", Chicago, p.42 Quoted in
Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real : Rethinking Social Constructivist
Theories of Science, In Socialist Register, 1997, K.P.Bagchi & Co.,
Calcutta, 1997, p. 302] By this, facts once seen as due to the world’s
own determination are instead seen as projections upon a much thinner
world by the cultural practices of communities of inquirers. This way
culture and power get a privileged position over each and every
scientific enquiry. Meera Nanda has summed up such views from writings
of various authors, which can be paraphrased as (1) What makes a belief
true is not in correspondence with an element of reality, but its
adoption and authentication by the relevant community of enquirers. (2)
Science is socially located praxis that creates the reality it
describes; it is not at all a detached description of a pre-existing
reality external to its own practice. Thus science does not just
describe or unravel ‘facts’, but actually constructs them through the
active, culturally and socially situated choices scientists make in the
laboratory. (3) Such theories admit of no analytical distinctions
between knowledge and society, the cognitive dimension and the
socio-cultural dimension: people’s knowledge of the world and their
organisation of life in the world constitute each other, the two are
‘co-produced’. With such views theorists "tend to deny any meaningful
distinction between what is inside and outside of science and between
things natural and social."[Meera Nanda, Ibid p. 303] Many
post-modernists/ post-colonial critics of modern science consider that
the challenge to the traditional order being armed with "Western
Science" is an act of conspiracy against the local tradition. They
consider such rational, scientific minded people as "internal
colonizers" bringing the diverse local narratives under the sway of
a Eurocentric meta-narrative. Foucault, Rorty, et al guide them to
reject such efforts. This approach is basically premised on the
post-modernist concept of discursive knowledge, power and
inaccessibility of reality. The concentrated expression of this
Post-modern view has been projected by Alan Sokal, a theoretical
physicist at New York University, who strung together the statements of
post-modern theorists like Derrida, Lacan, Leotard et al to declare how
Post-modern social theory has shown that, the reality physicists study
is a social and linguistic construct.[Meera Nanda, Ibid. Foot
note, p.346]
Under the post-modernist influence this extreme view in the name of "social
construction of science" or "sociology of scientific knowledge"
denies that scientific facts have any necessary relation to casual
processes and theoretical entities, which they claim to describe. This
new breed of theorists regards science as mere construction but not a
discovery of reality. Thus our knowledge is said to be our own
construction and so fails to present the reality itself.
Post-modernism/Post-Structuralism dismisses truth and sermonises that
truth is nothing but our acceptance of it with authority.
It goes without saying that science has been often misused and
scientists have shown biases and material interests to impose the
existing social order upon the order of nature. This is some scientists’
bid for naturalization of an unequal order. Recent history testifies to
the abominable fact how the majority of U.S. physicists were pressed
into service for the gargantuan programme of Star Wars in the 1980s. It
is a fact that in the name of research and development millions of
dollars have been spent in the USA alone and huge amount of it has gone
towards building up sophisticated lethal weapons. Also in the field of
medical sciences, notwithstanding its big advances, it has been
vulgarised and debased due to the maniacal drive for profits, creating
an atmosphere amongst the post-modernists to negate allopathy totally —
taking the idealisation of herbal treatment to extreme levels. It was in
Mao’s China where aq more rational approach was adopted of combining the
two — i.e. using the best in allopathy, together with maximum efforts to
advance indigenous remedies.
So, the question comes up whether we can dismiss or impute an absolutely
negative role to science and that scientists always and on all occasions
working at the diktat of the powers that be. When Bernal writes that
under colonial rule Indian scientists must "be subjected to the
patronizing and insulting habits of the English to their subject races"
[J.D.Bernal, The Social Function of Science, Routlegdge, London,
1939, p.208] should we not invariably consider the scientific space
created outside and against the hassles and impediments under the
imperialist system had a different role. It was definitely difficult but
was presumably natural to develop dialectical opposition to colonial
science.
India has a long tradition in medical science. Ancient tribes invented
the primary method of alleviation of various maladies obviously through
exclusive experiment towards a scientific way of treatment. The
archaeology of medicines that we inherit from the past does not
necessarily justify the Foucaultian concept of power always at work
towards scientific researches whatever may be their level. Traditional
medicines, written and unwritten, have a very long history. The use of
neem, turmeric and numerous things as medicines has a very very long
history in India, originating at a time even remotely can be conceivable
as evolved in the arenas of powers. What is very much known that
practising medical men or researchers on human body were looked down
upon by the Brahministic big and small rulers in India. The great
pioneer in the medical science in Europe, Hypocrat had to practise
steathily lest he should pollute others and draw the ire of the
controllers of society. The examples are cited in order to refute the
claim of Post-Modernism/ Post-Structuralism that science is always a
tool in the hands of the powers that be.
Under the British colonial system there always remained a dilemma,
western science was introduced without any distinct science policy along
with structural limitations for research and development. The British
Govt. sponsored science for the very reason of its existence; geography,
geology, botany, zoology, archaeology, medicine and even astronomy were
introduced primarily on the grounds of political and commercial
gains.[R.K.Kochhar, Science as a Tool in British India, EPW,
August, 1993] To combat the shameless apathy of the imperialist rulers
towards scientific education, Indian scientists’ inventions in various
fields was a certain amount of defiance. But in general what was
transplanted in Indian society as science was not for the indigenous
social needs but for imperialism itself. Yet one can not dismiss
J.C.Bose’s contributions in the field of science and its popularization
against enforced difficulties under the colonial regime. Against
colonial science there emerged a counter trend. One historian recorded
the role of a pioneer of technology in 19 th
century Bengal, Sitanath Ghosh for his invention of the cotton spindle
of a new type, an air-pump, a power loom, a weaving machine, a wheat
pounding mill, a mechanical plough, etc. Those inventions, however, were
not produced on a commercial scale.[Chittabrata Palit, "Sitanath Ghosh
the Forgotten Pioneer of Technology in Bengal", In Science,
Technology, Medicine And Environment In India, (eds) Chittabrata
Palit, Amit Bhattacharya, Bibhasa, Calcutta, 1988 pp. 89-98]
While denouncing positivism Bernal attempted to present a social
responsibility to the scientists. He was also hopeful that an
appreciation of historical relation of science and society by the
scientists would make it possible for them to counter the efforts of
those who misuse science.
Natural philosophy fragmented into separate domains of enquiry like
natural and human science only in the 17 th
century. And only at this crucial period science assumed an independent
status. With the emergence of capitalist society, the increasing
connection between science and the production process and research
through funding science, a tendency becomes clear: science is used for
profits and fabrication. And designing tools of Drawin, Newton, Faraday,
et al, were driven by the internal momentum of science getting inspired
from within the tradition of science itself. It is scientists’
motivation to fathom how nature works and how to do things more and more
easily. And the long technical tradition is nurtured by the scientific
tradition. But we cannot but admit that the most flourishing period of
science coexists with flourishing economic activities and technical
advance.
Marxism strongly refutes the sweeping conclusion of this idealist
doctrine that there is always a merging and mutual constitution of the
social order and the order of knowledge. If it is accepted that the
content of natural sciences is not merely conditioned but constituted by
the culturally endorsed social practices, the entire scientific
knowledge turns into a matter of prevailing and ever changing
conventions. Then there remains no necessary relation with the natural
order, nor the critical relation with the social order. When this
extremely idealist doctrine dishes out the view that reality is nothing
but a constructed image, we are then left with no way out of this
created image to verify our findings and beliefs in relation to the
objective reality. Also if it is taken for granted that all rational
views and practices work within the four walls of the power nexus and
inevitable biases then we are reduced to mere programmed robots which
always fail to do creative work or get at the objective reality.
It is a fact that sometimes what is passed for truth is created by the
powers that be with definite interests, but these Foucault followers go
to extremes by declaring that truth is always and on all occasions is
the creation of power. They reject the possibility of forming knowledge
transcending the barriers imposed by culture, local contexts and power.
Such orthodox doctrines in the Post-modernist heritage, would then
dismiss the possibility of People’s Science movements being carried on
by various organisations in India and other countries making the people
aware of irrational ideas and practices rooted in societies and the
possibility of overhauling the system of exploitation being armed with
the findings of science. It must be kept in mind that people, freed of
superstitions and abominable practices, and the organisations working at
the grass roots with rational, scientific consciousness are the actual
force to expose the anti-social scientists power-broker nexus against
human civilization itself.
Simultaneously it is absolutely wrong to reject forever and for all
times scientific findings that have any inherent scope and possibility
of universal application. If the USA and some other powers showing off
their infinite arrogance and possessiveness to declare ban on the
acquisition of atomic knowledge developed by physicists in other
countries is blown-up to equate with all instances of scientific
findings, then we have to reject every invention of science as
anti-people. History, however, testifies to the universality of
scientific findings in numberless instances. Those hypocritical critics
of science try to project themselves as truly opposed to western
imperialism by equating the whole of modern science coming from Europe
as a sign of western imperialistic domination. This sermonisation is
also a narrow, reductionist notion conveniently evading to discriminate
between the elements of domination and the contributions of science to
people’s life. They also reject the possibility of "Trans cultural
appropriation of the methods, theories and world view of modern science"
Scientific knowledge proceeds through continuous self-correction in the
light of fresh findings from the natural order. But those so-called
pundits hold that the evidence from nature can never be free from
contextual values and the scientists’ cultural moorings. The
ever-changing scientific theories and rival theories in similar
contextual and cultural situations substantially belie such fixed and
extremely irrational ideas. We do not dismiss the fact that cultural
meanings and social power play an important role even in the field of
science. But we reject such views that scientific rationality is solely
or ultimately decided by them and that all the reality we can ever
really reach is the reality that is internal to our system of
representation in the Post-modernist/post-structuralist sense. Thus in
that sense such representations are merely our constituted reality and
moving towards truth is an illusory venture. In the same fashion things
remaining outside our representation are things-in-themselves as Kantian
agnosticism explained. Marxism is not positivism but considers truth as
relative. This extremely narrow view under Post-modernist influence
rejects the boundary line between science and superstition and
thoroughly dismisses any possibility of truth outside the power
structure. This dangerous trend reaches its nadir through the
relativistic logic of post-modernism in the writing of physicist Alan
Sokal. He writes:
"It has become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less
than social "reality" is at bottom a social and linguistic construct,
that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and
encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that
produced it, that truth claims of science are inherently theory laden,
and the discourse of the scientific community."[Alan Sokal’s
writing In A Callari and D.Ruccoio, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover
and London, 1961, Quoted in Meera Nanda, ‘Restoring the Real :
Rethinking Social Constructivist Theories of Science, In Socialist
Register, 1997 ibid] It is one type of agnosticism separating
substance from appearance. It limits science, rejects logical thought,
and distracts attention from cognition of the objective laws of nature
and society. The best refutation of such superficial view is practice
and material production. Kant differentiated between real ground and
logical grounds. In his early works he restricted formal deductive
methods of thinking in favour of experience. Ultimately Kant was led to
agnosticism stating that the nature of things as they exist of
themselves in principle is accessible to human knowledge. To him true
theoretical knowledge is possible only in mathematics and natural
science. And it is determined by the fact that in man’s mind there are
apriori forms of sensuous contemplation of reason and there is a
connection between sensuous contemplation and the concept of reason. In
Kant’s view sensation stems from the action of an unknowable "
thing-in-itself" on the sense organs as ordered by means of a priori
forms of sensibility (space and time) and reason (categories of unity,
plurality, causality, possibility, necessity and other). He also
believed that striving for absolute knowledge is rooted in reason. Man’s
reason thus seeks to solve the problem. He accepted God as necessary
postulate of faith, on which the moral order of the world rests. Marx
and Engel’s exposed the idealist contradictoriness in Kant and in his
philosophy of thingishness and idealist view on reason. Hegel believed
that reason does not go beyond static definiteness, abstract identity,
abstract universality fixed opposites separated from one another
(essence and appearance, necessity and chance, life and death, etc.)
Discursive or simple reason-based thought is not enough, it is merely
the necessary step which allows one to rise higher, towards the
intelligible forms of cognition. The dialectical negative-intelligible
aspect of thought resolves the problem of one-sided and limited
definitions of reason. Cognition is a dialectical process having
different stages of development. It starts from "living perception"
bringing human beings to external qualities of objects. The data of "living
perception", experience are processed and generalised by their
higher cognitive ability, abstract-logical thought which forms concepts.
The logical activity of thought is affected in various forms: induction
and deduction, analysis and synthesis, construction of hypothesis and
theories. Yet this creates only subjective ideas, yet to become the
objective truth. Truth is arrived at by a process by removing error, and
limited by the given stage of development in technological level,
potentialities of production and such other factors. Here lies the
strength of Marxism and baselessness of the Post-modernist attack
against all rationality, not to speak of absence of verifiable principle
of practice in the dictionary of that idealist trend.
Popper placed his non-relativist view on the progress in science by
referring its movement closer and closer to truth through successive
falsification. T.S.Kuhn criticised it by positing both continuities and
discontinuities in the evolutionary process of science with the
absorption of earlier ideas and newer findings.[T.S.Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press,
1970] Many later writers like Richard Boyd, Philip Kitcher, etc. while
admitting the role of contextuality of knowledge attempted to show that
this problem can be overcome to a great degree.[Richard Boyd,
‘Constructivism, Realism and Philosophical Method’, In John Earman(ed),
Inference, Explanation and Other Philosophical Frustrations: Essays
in the Philosophy of Science, Berkley, 1992, Philip Kitcher, The
Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without
Illusions, Oxford University Press, 1993]
To end this part, it is necessary to fight tooth and nail the gigantic
state apparatus exploiting and utilising science against humanity.
Simultaneously we must expose and lay bare the haughty fad of the
pretentious Post-modernists/Post-structuralists to dismiss science per
se as internal to our system of representation, discursive and always
remaining within the bounds of power and culture. What is needed is to
put science in use for the people’s needs.
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