3.2.a-The Social Context of Science

8/6/2019 3.2.a-The Social Context of Science

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The broad Marxian framework attempts to insert science and technology as variables withinits categories of socio-economic base and superstructure. The socio-economic base, together with the relations of production, constitute the forces of production of a given society, while thesuperstructure comprises social relationships, as well as political and cultural manifestations.The superstructure in the Marxian scheme reflects the production relations of the base and helpsto keep the base intact.

There are certain difficulties inserting science and technology as variables within thesecategories of base and superstructure. For example, are science and technology to beconsidered as part of the productive forces or part of the superstructure? Marxist writersthemselves differ strongly on these issues.

Thus, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, China viewed science and technologyimplicitly as subject to class forces and consequently part of the superstructure. This viewhas, however, changed dramatically in the last few years. Thus the 1979 official view (PekingReview 1979 p. 9) looks at the problem as follows: 'Science and technology have no classnature and belong to the realm of productive forces and we badly need them in our efforts toaccomplish the four modernisations.' (I should here note that the Western tradition, bothMarxist and non-Marxist, has over the last few decades increasingly accepted the view thatscience and technology are strongly influenced by the social context.) Some Western neo-Marxists have recently examined the same question of whether science and technology formpart of the base or the superstructure and have come to the conclusion that 'science spansboth the base and superstructure and has an ideological role' (Lewontin and Levins 1976 p. vii).

The classical view of science as part of the superstructure and reflecting the infrastructure wasprovided by Soviet writers of the 1930s. Boris Hessen's crucial paper 'The Social andEconomic Roots of Newton's Principia' presented at the 1931 International Congress of theHistory of Science and Technology in London was a landmark here. This paper influencedmany British writers on science such as Bernal, Joseph Needham and J.G. Crowther.

Borris Hessen's paper focused on the relationship of Newtonian science to its broadhistorical context. Hessen's view was that Newton's discoveries--whether in optics or the laws of motion--were intimately related to the needs of the mercantile capitalism of the time.Merchants required to knowledge of navigation ('hence' Newton's optics and astronomicaldiscoveries) and of gunnery ('hence ballistics and the laws of motion).

In a similar vein, David Dickson (1979) has related the emergence of calculus to the needsof industrial capitalism. He notes that algebra and its dissemination responded to the needs of merchants by making commodity transactions easy to calculate. With the contraction of thepower of the merchant class, new social forces came into play. Especially in the17th Century,control of the labour process itself was found necessary by the emerging industrial capitalists.This new class found the calculus a useful tool for the control of the labour process and thecommodity. (ibid. pp. 23-4).

Under Hessen's influence, Needham had also taken a long historical view, dating theemergence of modern science at around the period of mercantile capitalism. Needham (1956 pp.320-43) related the growth of modern science to the marriage of mathematics toexperiment; this is said to have occurred from the time of the Renaissance in Europe.Needham dates the real emergence of mathematized science from the time of Galileo. (Weshould, however, note in parentheses that the mathematization of non-experimental sciencessuch as astronomy had occurred much earlier in both the Western and the Easterntraditions.) Needham's general position regarding the emergence of science was that the periodfollowing the Renaissance saw the emerging capitalist social system affecting the intellectual

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climate of the time with the result that there was a qualitative transformation in the practiceof science. Hill (1965) has, in fact, gone almost to the point of interpreting the 17th-Centuryscientific revolution as merely part of an explicit political transformation in which the bourgeoisiecame out on top.

This type of long-range analysis has also been done for more recent historical forces and their effects on key theoretical constructs. Thus Forman (1971) has related the emergence of quantum theory to the particular socio-economic configuration of the German Weimar Republic.

He has argued that after Germany's defeat in World War I, the dominant intellectual tendencyin the Weimar academic world was a neo-romantic, existentialist philosophy of life characterizedby antagonism towards analytic rationality. Symbolic of the mood of the times was theinfluence of Spengler's book The Decline of the West which documented attacks oncausality, conceptual analysis and physics. The Zeitgeist was averse to positivist conceptions;the quantum theory, according to Forman, was 'Primarily an effort by German physicists to adaptthe context of their science to the values of their intellectual environment' (ibid. p. 7). Forman'spaper has been widely discussed and although it has been sympathetically received (for example Mulkay 1979 p. 109), there is an opinion (Hendry 1980) which believes that theexternal social climate facilitated only the acceptance of quantum physics but not its evolution.Yet whether--as is implicit in Hendry's view--the Weimar social climate helped only to legitimizethe quantum theory, rather than nourishing its creation, as posited by Forman, there seems to beagreement about the intimate connection between the historical moment and the emergence of quantum theory.

Long-range historical processes can be discerned more easily--for obvious reasons--inthe social sciences. Thus the shift from mercantilism to industrial capitalism in the late 18th andearly 19th Centuries gave rise to a large number of theories of society, the economy and polity,for example, those of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Comte and Karl Marx.

The Impact of National, Economic and Political Forces on Science

The effect of long-range historical forces on science is difficult to identify and describe indetail. However, as the focus becomes less global, the social and political influences on sciencebecome more obvious, for example in the middle range, at the national level. The scientificcommunity does not exist in a social vacuum and its therefore not socially autonomous. It isbuffeted by the social, political and economic considerations of the society in which it isembedded.

At the time of the birth of modern European science, the impact of politics and the macrosocial context on such key figures as Copernicus and Galileo is well known. These influencesattempted to silence the emerging scientific views, using the powers of the state and religionwhich were committed to upholding existing beliefs. Similar attempts to maintain the simplebelief of a God-governed universe have continued even in this century.

Thus in the American Deep South in the 1920s, several states enacted laws which prohibitedthe teaching of evolution in schools. Consequently a young teacher, Scopes, was found guiltyof teaching evolution (Ruse 1982). The same fundamentalist sentiments are being revivedtoday in the United States under the euphemistic title of 'creation science' in biology, a demandbacked by many powerful figures including US President Ronald Reagan. This has resultedin several US states passing laws providing for the teaching of an anti-evolution God-based 'creation science'. (ibid.).

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At the less cranky, more mundane level too, as Ezrahi (1971) observes, science today isrelated to politics. Thus the scientific enterprise in America is to an 'unprecedented degree'(ibid.) dependent on external material and political support. American scientists are forced tointeract with political groups in order to obtain their support. Thus, especially since World War II, with the emergence of Big Science in Western countries, science has become at leastindirectly dependent on political criteria.

After World War Ii, during the period of the cold war, military-associated science andtechnology were heavily funded; this concentrated scientific efforts into these fields. With thesuccess of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons, physical scienceenjoyed a high degree of political visibility during this period (ibid.). For similar reasons,consequent to intense US competition with the Soviet Union, certain sciences associated withthe space programme (material science, exobiology, certain aspects of astronomy, etc.) gainedhigh funding in the 1960s. Subsequently funding for both these programmes was cut back,partly because of detente and partly because of social protest in America in the 1960s withits demands for more socially conscious policies. Concern about environmental pollution anddoomsday scenarios during the 1960s and 1970s further tarnished the image and reduced thefunding of some physical sciences, while improving the image of certain social sciences.The process is now being reversed again in consequence of the present military policies of President Reagan.

The status and visibility of scientific disciplines have also changed as a result of changes inthe political environment. Thus Ezrahi (ibid.) notes that the high visibility and patronage given tophysical scientists in the 1940s and 1950s were not matched by support for the social sciences;in fact the physics scientists often resented social scientists intensely. Thus, a letter from5,000 scientists to the President of the United States in 1945 stated that it would be a seriousmistake to include the social sciences 'in the proposed National Science Foundation'. Thebelief was current at the time among physical scientists that social sciences were controversialand would make the National Science Foundation vulnerable to political criticism and hencereduce its ability to mobilize resources. But in the mid-1960s, with growing criticism of theVietnam War and the entire military establishment, and consequent criticism of the close linksbetween funded physical science research and the military, these criticisms of the socialsciences boomeranged. The social sciences rose in prestige in the country as a whole andwithin American scientific bodies. The period also saw new disciplines which attempted to lookat the impact of science on society with, for example, university courses on the socialresponsibility of science.

In the socialist countries, for example the Soviet Union, since all decisions are taken directlyby the state, scientific decisions become, in principle, political decisions, which are presumablytaken in the context of central economic planning. Central economic planning, however, is not aneutral machine that delivers science as an output. It is determined by factional politics,political ideology, and the personalities of political leaders, as well as the priorities of sciencefunding. Science is thus far from being politically neutral in the Soviet Union. The heavy stateinvolvement has sometimes meant that false scientific output has had to be legitimized ascorrect; and scientific endeavours have sometimes been prevented from reaching completion bypolitical considerations.

Thus the stimulating debate on socialist and bourgeois science of the 1920s becamecrystallized in the Stalinist era into an official dialectical materialism which tended to givebureaucratic solutions to academic questions. (Rose and Rose 1976 p. 8). Serious errors intheoretical formulations in science consequently appeared from the 1930s, becoming mostfrequent in the last five years of Stalin's rule. Thus complementarity, quantum theory andrelativity in physics were attacked as undialectical and unmaterialist; at one point Einsteinwas under attack in both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (ibid. p. 8). Similarly the big bang

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theory of the origin of the universe, Linus Pauling's resonance theory in chemistry, and thetheories of Jeans and Eddington in astronomy were attacked. The high point of this trendcame with the now discredited genetic theories associated with Lysenko, who replacedVavilov, the Soviet plant geneticist (who was later arrested), as the leading figure in thediscipline (ibid.).

Soviet science is therefore as much pervaded by direct political considerations asAmerican science. Since World War II, the Soviet Union has been in competition with theAmerican military machine. Thus Soviet and American Science and technology both viewith and mirror each other.

At a national level, science is also intimately related to economic considerations. Thus isso especially in the contemporary era of industrialized science and science-basedtechnologies. In the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution, developments in science werenot very closely related to developments in technology. In more recent decades, economicimperatives have dictated the funding of particular scientific and technological developments notonly by the state, but also by large private-sector organizations.

Thus all the major multinational companies have large research and developmentestablishments which turn out scientific and technological products geared to a mass market.Some of these large institutions make very large financial outlays on science and their laboratories are credited with notable advances. These include advances in electronics andmedicine, for example. Often companies have grown very rapidly, when their particular technological products meet definite market needs. In the era of industrial science, a few largefirms may have close control over the direction of science. Commercial economic considerationsthus supplement political ones in determining the directions that science takes.

The influence of macro political conditions and of social interests on how controversiesamong scientists were decided have been commented upon by several writers. Thus,Mackenzie and Barnes (1975; 1979) have written on the biometry-Mendelism controversy,Farley (1977) on the spontaneous generation controversy, Mackenzie (1978) on statistics,and Shapin (1979) on 19th-Century cerebral anatomy.

Blume (1974), after analyzing in detail the political and economic conditioning of scienceconcludes:

The social structure of modern science is highly dependent upon the social, economic andpolitical organization of society and extremely sensitive to changes in this environment. Itseems to follow that the very condition of being a scientist places the individual within a networkof relationships to the economic and political systems with the exact positions in part, a functionof development of his professional career.

The Social Community of Scientists and Science Output

Not only is the scientific community subject to influences from the wider society, but the socialdynamics of the scientific community itself strongly influence the science which it produces.In this sense, the social community of scientists has very much the same social characteristicsas other small communities.

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Schrodinger, one of the foremost innovators in modern physics, describes such groups of scientists in the following words:

It is a relatively small community, though widely scattered, and modern methods of communication have knit it into one. The members read the same periodicals. They exchangeideas with one another. And the result is that there is a fairly definite agreement as to whatopinions are sound on this point or that....In this respect international science is likeinternational sport....Just as it would be useless for some athlete in the world of sport topuzzle his brain in order to initiate something new--for he would have little or no hope of being able to 'put it over' as the saying is--so too it would, generally speaking, be a vainendeavour on the part of some scientist to strain his imaginative vision towards initiatinga line of research hitherto not thought of. (1935) pp. 76-80).

The research output of this scientific community has been formally analyzed by Price. Heshows how research formally advances within a scientific discipline by a process relating thefindings communicated in a research paper to those in other contemporaneous papers. Heuses the image of knitting a woollen garment to describe what occurs within a research front. Ina new research front, a stitch is firmly attached to the previous row of research findings and toits neighbours. 'To extend the analogy sometimes a stitch is dropped and the knitted strip thenseparates into different rows each of them a new sub-field descended from the first' (Price1969). This 'knitting', it should be noted, actually occurs within the scientific communitybetween the minds of individual scientists through the intermediary of their research papers.

There have been many attempts to formally examine the social structure of the scientificcommunity. One of the earliest and more influential writers in this field was Rober Merton(1972) who, using the then fashionable structural functional approach in sociology, painted anideal view of the scientific enterprise. He viewed the scientists' social community as having itsown values, norms and rules which tended to keep its social system continuing in its pre-setplan. The social community therefore was governed by a self-correcting mechanism whichhad internalized such laudable characteristics as universalism, communism, disinterestednessand organized scepticism. In a sense, Merton's community of scientists was an impersonal,truth seeking apparat which operated as a 'smoothly progressing machine' graduallyaccumulating new concepts and discoveries.

But subsequent empirical research has shown that this idealistic scientific community of Merton does not exist in reality. Thus Leslie Sklair (1972) observes that the Mertonian conceptof consensus science is more honoured in the breach than in the observance and thereforebelongs to an ideology of science. Scientists, in their day-to-day behaviour, are notgoverned solely by the norms and values of science held by the group. The impression of acommunity of scientists going through a careful process of assessing a mass of scientific papersand arriving at a consensus on high-quality contributions is only partly true. 'What appears tohappen is that, within a very complicated process in which many variables are at work, thesifting process occurs long before the ordinary scientist opens his copy of the journal' (ibid. p.54).

Science, because of the dynamics of its micro social context, is influenced by 'all sorts of social and psychological distortions' (Dolby 1971). Dolby contrasts the essential ideology of aneutral science with actual scientific practice in which:

A scientist does not establish his own results. There can only be scientific knowledge of what a group of people can agree upon. This immediately removes science from thesubjective level of creative certainty. It also introduces the possibility of relativism in thestandards of those to whom the scientist directs his argument. (ibid.).

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Knowledge, therefore, is established only by reference to an audience of scientists, what thisaudience accepts, and what it considers to be its areas of concern, its standards, and thelegitimate uses of a scientific claim. Therefore, appealing to a particular specialist communitymakes objectivity dependent 'on the consensus of a group of people who share a great number of tendentious assumptions' (ibid.). The audience, therefore, is central in legitimizing a claim.

The specialized scientific community, therefore, filters research output so that only a smallproportion of results become visible and become scientific 'facts' to be recognized as suchwithin the body of scientific knowledge. Ravetz (1971) succinctly notes the paradox thatwhat is considered 'certain, objective and universal can only emerge through the use byfallible individuals of such informal and subjective methods.'

Scientific truth therefore becomes a search for a legitimized scientific consensus reachedat least partially by the social processes which are only too familiar to social scientists inother contexts. Recent detailed observations of groups of scientists in their actual worksituation have confirmed how these processes operate. Thus, Collins (1975) researching oncontemporary scientists working on lasers and gravitational waves has indicated how particular interpretations of science are socially mediated. Similar results have been obtained by other contemporary studies, such as those of Gilbert (1976) on radar meteor research and Pinch(1977) on quantum mechanics. The latter suggested that 'scientific theories themselves aremulti-dimensional and that what constitutes a theory in science is a variable and will meandifferent things to different groups of scientists.' Wynne (1976) on a study of a phenomenon ata sub-atomic level, the so-called J phenomenon, confirms that formal scientific rationality is atleast partially constructed from social commitments.

Among other studies, mention should be made of Latour and Woolgar (1979), whoexplored the social construction of scientific facts within the laboratory, as well as theseminal work of Fleck (1979) which was first published in German nearly 50 years ago. Thesub-culture of a scientific discipline, it now appears, 'is far more than the setting for scientificresearch; it is the research itself' (Barnes 1982 p. 10.).

Theories are both accepted and abandoned by social fashion (Feyerabend 1975 p. 49).Sometimes consensus in science arises from social acceptance of patently false facts.Feyerabend (1975) has given several examples of anomalies in theories accepted by thesocial community of scientists. Thus according to Feyerabend:* the Copernican view was atsuch variance with facts so plain and obvious that Galileo had to call it false. (p. 55); Newton'stheory of gravitation was beset from the beginning with serious difficulties; Bohr's atomic modelwas accepted in spite 'of precise and unshakable contrary evidence' (p. 56). Similarly,special relativity had difficulties. Other examples of theories accepted with anomalies listed byFeyerabend are Newton's theory of light as rays and classical electrodynamics (pp. 47-61).

To Feyerabend's list one could add two other examples of theories which are essential tothe foundations of modern science: the atomic theory of Dalton and the genetics of Mendel.Recent studies of the chemical reactions given by Dalton do not give the simple ratios that histheory should give according to every high-school textbook (Brush 1967). Similarly the simplenumerical ratios predicted in genetics by Mendel are not corroborated by modernstatistical methods (ibid.). Fisher (1936), who tried to reconstruct Mendel's original experiment',noted the discrepancy between Mendel's theory and experimental results. But he reconciledhimself to the discrepancy, thus exonerating Mendel of any wrong doing, in the followingmanner:

________________ * Feyerabend subscribes to an anarchist philosophy of science which we do not have to acceptin order to believe the facts he presents.

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It remains a possibility among others that Mendel was deceived by some assistant whoknew too well what was expected. This possibility is supported by independent evidencethat the data of most, if not all of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closelywith Mendel's expectations.

The social community of scientists controls its members by the same system of rewardsand punishments as other, more familiar social systems. This control system in its turn controlsspecific output. The social filtering system of science, therefore, has its own mechanisms for keeping its members as well as its science under definite structural restraints.

Hagstrom (1965) has analyzed the particular mechanisms by which scientists receivesocial--and therefore scientific--recognition. The process of recognition he finds to beequivalent to gift giving by scientists, who offer information in exchange for social recognition; invery much the same way that anthropologists have observed 'gift giving' in small pre-industrial communities (ibid. pp. 12-22). Because of this need for social recognition, a scientist isinfluenced by his peer set in the selection of problems and methodology, as well as in themanner in which he communicates his results (ibid.).

These factors which Hagstrom describes relate to rewards at the lower levels of science.However, similar social criteria exist for recognition at the highest levels. Thus a study on thesociology of the highest prize in science--the Nobel Prize--has highlighted the social criteria onwhich the allocation of the prize largely depends. Zuckerman (1977) has shown that theallocation of the Nobel Prize partly depends on whether a person is attached to a well-knownuniversity or is a pupil of a former Nobel Prize winner or is active in scientific politics (there issometimes campaigning for the prize with even government's lobbying for a candidate.)

Just as an established scientific community rewards its conformists, it punishes the deviant.When a deviant view which it is not acceptable to the scientific community appears in aparticular field, difficulties begin to occur. The holder of such views may find difficulty in gainingappointment to academic institutions, and may also find access to communication channels suchas journals barred to him. Scientifically deviant applicants for jobs who are unsuccessful aregiven vague reasons for their rejection (Hagstrom 1965). If the deviant develops his specialismfurther, it leads to more overt social conflict and attempts may then he be made to co-opt him.However, given a constellation of other factors, a new discipline may sometimes arise aroundthe deviant findings. But this requires 'leadership of an unusual sort in science--leadershipunwilling to shrink from organizational controversy' (ibid. p. 223).

This social filtering of science occurs in not only the capitalist but also the socialistcountries. I have already indicated earlier several examples of how particular scientificenquiries were either thwarted or frowned upon in the Soviet Union because of politicalconsiderations. Some of these attempts have been analyzed down to micro social factors.Thus Lewontin and Levins (1976) have shown how Lysenko, the fraudulent geneticist sponsoredby Stalin, was essentially a social product of his times, and how his particular ideologicalaberrations in science can be partially explained by the social dynamics arising from this milieu.Due to Lysenko's social origins, in the lower strata of pre-Revolutionary Russia, he came intosocial conflict with the ruling strata of scientists and agronomists who had a higher classorigin. His response was essentially an 'anti-intellectual folk marxism', which attempted tostrait-jacket results into a pre-ordained perspective.

The social mediation of science by the micro-scientific community can best be summarizedin the words of Mulkay (1979):

We will obtain a totally misleading view of science if we infer its social attributes from theformal characteristics of the claims presented in articles, reviews and textbooks. Formal

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knowledge claims have meaning only when they are interpreted by the members of actualsocial groupings. The way in which their interpretations are realized depends on the outcomeof contingent negotiations among those members.

Science thus advances through a social filter. In this filtering process, it takes scientificconcepts and ideas as virtual 'conceptual fodder' and through the social mediation processlegitimizes this fodder as valid fact. The conceptual fodder itself does not come from a socialvacuum. Often--especially at important scientific turning points--this conceptual fodder hasroots in the social domain; key metaphors and analogies themselves arising from the socialcontext.

Social and Other Sources of Scientific Breakthrough

Several writers have explored the particular influences on the development of individualdisciplines and have shown that a particular science is often nourished by an 'intellectual soup'drawn from outside the discipline. These intellectual elements that cross the boundaries of thediscipline and nourish in at its most crucial moment--that is often as paradigm breaks* --constitute a surprising and almost a rational collection. These elements span the a prioriorientations of scientists, which include mystical and 'extra-scientific' beliefs, as well asmodels, metaphors and orientations from other often unrelated disciplines, and perspectivesand belief drawn from the social ideas of the day. These extra-discipline elements havenourished science not only during its formative period in the 16th and 17th Centuries whensciences as a vocation had not been completely separated from religious and other intellectual and quasi-intellectual pursuits, but also in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. Letus document some of these external elements that nourish a discipline.

Detailed studies of hermetic science, alchemy and the philosophical and theologicalassumptions of natural philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries show that there was noclear dividing line between a mechanistic science and 'extra-scientific' elements drawnfrom the social ideas of the day. Several scholars have pointed out by detailed historicalresearch the persistence of these elements at the very core of the natural philosophy of theperiod. Rattansi (1973), one of the most important researchers in this field, has shown theinfluence of Neoplatonism and hermetic science--ideas current in some social circles of thetime--on some of its key scientific figures.

Thus he has demonstrated how the Neoplatonic cosmology is indispensable for anunderstanding of Copernicus's perspectives which supported his heliostatic cosmology (1973 p.152). 'The sun must be at the centre of the planetary system because it was analogous to theking at the centre of his court, or God at the still centre of the Universe' (ibid.). Copernicusappealed to other Neoplatonic orientations, for example in studying astronomy 'as the vehicle for drawing the mind to the contemplation of the highest good' (ibid.); and presenting 'lack of harmony as the strongest reason for rejecting the Ptolemaic cosmology; the sun as the symbolof divine power' (ibid.). Wiener and Noland 1967 p. 296) have also pointed out that particular a priori orientations of a geometrical nature such as the view that the circle was the mostbeautiful figure also influenced Copernicus. Kepler, the other great astronomer, also acceptedthe heliocentric system because he felt if fitted God's design better (Rattansi p. 153).

__________________ * These discussions relate to the major breakthroughs in science, the work of paradigm makers.The majority of scientists work in routines governed by legitimized scientific orthodoxy of the time and are very tightly programmed.

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These neoplatonic influences also allowed a method which relied on analogies betweenthe universe as macrocosm and the world and the human body as microcosm. Paracelsus,the most influential of the early chemists, put forward a program for reforming medicine by'tracing analogies between the macrocosm and the microcosm, between the universe and thehuman body' (ibid. p. 153). It should also be noted in passing that the Paracelsians rejectedthe logico-mathematical method of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo (Debus 1973): animportant fact because of the belief held (by Needham for example) that the marriage of mathematics and observation was the essential starting-point of modern science. To theParacelsians we owe the ultimate parentage of modern chemistry and it is significant to note thatmathematics was not a part of their intellectual weaponry.

Further new historical research indicates that Paracelsus's ideas, especially his spiritualphilosophy, with its 'irrational' elements, had a strong influence on the beginnings of modernscience (Elzinga and Jamison 1981 p. 34).

Rattansi has identified other non-mechanistic influences on the founding fathers of science.Boyle and Newton both defended corpuscular views of nature by reference to the Great Chainof Being (1973 p. 154). Newton spent considerable time during his most creative scientificperiods on alchemical studies and on biblical chronology and prophecy. Rattansi has pointedout that these interests of Newton cannot be separated from his other, more 'scientific'pursuits. These 'extra-scientific' interests and ideas combined with his scientific ideas to form inhis mind an indivisible seamless web, 'an interlocking structure of ideas' (ibid. p. 166). ThusNewton's ideas on the ether as an explanatory variable to describe gravitation, capillarity,cohesion, electrical attraction and combustion are closely related to the Neoplatonic idea of the spiritus of which Newton was intimately aware (ibid. p. 163). Spiritus, an intermediarybetween matter and soul, was for Newton more clearly exemplified by the phenomenon of light,since he believed at one stage that spiritus was light (ibid. p. 164).

Inflows from the social and intellectual climate of the 19th Century fed the theories of another major figure in science, namely Darwin. Several writers have pointed to the impact of externalsocial ideas on the seminal formulation of the theory of natural selection and to the social climatewhich helped it to gain acceptance. Thus, as Young (1973) points out, the 19th-Century'debate on evolution could not be considered in isolation from the theological, philosophical,literary, social, political and economic debates in the same period' (p. 348). These externalfactors and debates permeated the development of the science so that its internal historyintermeshed with its contextual history (ibid.). Young has described how the ideas of AdamSmith, of the theologian William Paley and of Malthus influenced the development of Darwinism (ibid. pp. 373-6). The influence on Darwin of Malthus's views (that humanpopulations grow in geometric proportion while food grows only in arithmetical proportionleading to a struggle between men for food) is well known. In fact Darwin, in the Introduction tohis On the Origin of Species (1859), blandly stated that his theory was 'the doctrine of Malthus,applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms' (p. 5).

Forman (1971) has described a more recent example of social ideas influencing a keytheoretical approach in physics, that of quantum theory. The facts surrounding this, we havealready recalled.

Displacement of ideas from the social sphere has influenced another theory of the early20th Century, in the case of ethnology. Diffusionism was a specially dominant theory inGermany during this period and Smith (1978) has traced its roots to the politics and major socialchanged of 19th-Century Germany. Several significant features of diffusionism, especially theconcept of Lebensraum, of the primacy of agriculture in cultural development and of 'colonization', all developed out of the ambient conservative ideas of the time. These concepts

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reflected the social background of the early theorists who have drawn from sections of Germansociety still untouched by industrial change.

Similar seepages from the external social context have been suggested for other cases. Somethat have been documented are in contemporary organic chemistry. (Slack 1972),thermodynamics (Brush 1967) and relativity (Feuer 1971).

The above descriptions of inflows into the internal social world of scientists or ideas andconcepts from the external social world, were concentrated on the European cultural region.But we have documented in the previous chapter how these regional cultural contexts were attimes themselves fed by ideas from different cultural contexts (for example the Neoplatonismwhich influenced Newton was, in its origin, a product of early South Asian influences).

Not only have ideas been taken from contemporary sources, from the existing social climateor from the metaphors and models of other disciplines, but ideas from the past are often revived.There are several well-known examples from the beginnings of modern science. Thus thecorpuscular hypothesis of atomism--whose roots in the Western tradition go back toDemocritus--was revived by Boyle on his contradiction of the prevailing Aristotelian dogmawhich opposed atomism (Pagel 1973 P. 104). Similarly Galileo turned away from the tradition of Aristotle in favour of the philosophical ideas of Plato (Heisenberg 1973 p. 7) and so 'replacedthe descriptive science of Aristotle by the structural science of Plato.'

Another example from astronomy is Laplace's theory of the evolution of the solar system.He postulated that the collapse of a large dust cloud under gravitational attraction gave rise to thesolar system. This theory was later replaced by others, such as the theory that the planets wereformed as a result of the sun's matter being pulled out by a passing star. Yet the core Laplaceperspective has been revived in the last few decades and the current theory postulates theformation of the planetary system as due to the gravitational collapse of a dust cloud.

Other examples are Boltzmann's revival of atomistic-kinetic theory in more recent times(Wiener 1973 p. 89). Similarly Grimaldi in the 17th Century 'made the first demonstration' of Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle (Schrodinger 1957 p. 92). But this had no apparentscientific relevance at the time and so was forgotten (ibid.) Similarly Newton's corpuscular theory of light was not accepted to take the place of the wave theory until it was revived 150years later by Einstein (ibid.) At a more applied level, Virchow in 1848 proposed a disciplinewhich he called 'political' medicine'; the proposal was not received with enthusiasm, but today, ina different scientific climate, it has been institutionalized as social medicine. (Boehme 1979 p.113).

I have already described how a priori mental constructs drawn from the general socialclimate, such as Copernicus's belief that the circle was a perfect figure, nourished theoreticalconstructs that emerged in the various disciplines. A category of a priori concepts which nourishtheories has been called teleological principles by Feuer (1978). He has documentedseveral other examples of a priori orientations that were realized in science. These includedMendeleev's discovery of the periodic law governing elements, in which he was guided by hismystical values. Feuer has given several other examples of such teleological orientations, themost recent being the theoretical physicist Gell-Mann's injunction which states that 'anythingwhich is possible is compulsory'.

The most fascinating of such a priori orientation themes and anti-themes in science are thosewhich have been documented by Holton (1973). Holton has given evidence to indicate thatfrom ancient Greek times, the number of thematic elements in science has changed very littlealthough the number of individual theories and experiments has changed dramatically. A'theme', according to him, is what informs theory in, for example, science; themes usually

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occur in pairs of opposites such as complexity-simplicity, reductionism-holism, anddiscontinuity-continuity. He believes that no more than 50 couples or triads of themes 'seemhistorically to have sufficed for negotiating the great variety of discoveries in science (ibid. p. 29).

The Flow of Science

Science and scientific theories can be pictured as a sequence of changing maps of reality. According to Kuhn (1962), a given science operates under a specific world-view(paradigm) with definite assumptions and procedures. When it encounters a new set of experimental or observational results that do not fit into this prevailing dogma, the existingparadigm is stretched and strained to accommodate aberrations (a Kuhnian 'crisis' in science)till the situation is resolved by the development of a new paradigm. Science, therefore, in theKuhnian view is a continuous flow of paradigms and is, therefore, by definition relative withrespect to different epochs.

But a Kuhnian view of the changes of science over time looks at science within its own internallogic and internal arguments. I have described earlier how science changes significantlyaccording to the social context outside it. In a long historical perspective, the flow of science isdetermined not only by particular logical system of prevailing philosophies but also by socialand other 'extra-logical' criteria. The flow of science, therefore, becomes a dynamic process withcharacteristics of its own, contrary to the conventional philosophical view of science whichlooks at only, as it were, the statics of science and not its dynamics, as Burian has pointed out(1977 p. 12). Science should be viewed as an unfolding process in a similar way thatbiologists work 'in dealing with species, so that one could delimit theories by historical as wellas formal and structural techniques' (ibid. p. 40).

Any specific scientific discipline develops through relatively autonomous ideas. Yet it isalso porous to external influences, selecting from external cultural realms ideas which, in abroad sense, fit its paradigmatic, as well as its internal social criteria. These cross-culturalselections and borrowings are not only made across contemporary cultural boundaries, but alsoacross the boundaries of time. A scientific image or concept from the past could beresurrected for use at a later time. (This happened during the Renaissance when theemerging science went back to certain Greek sources, while rejecting others, for example,those associated with Aristotle and concretized in the official theology of the time. Morerecently, the view of light as quanta or particles is a return to a view of the nature of light current inNewton's time but later discarded in favour of the wave theory.)

Scientific knowledge and information [are] to be seen, therefore, as a knowledge packetthat constantly interacts with the given socio-economic environment and moves in differentdirections in response to changes in that environment and moves in different directions inresponse to changes in that environment. Additional knowledge that accrues to this body of knowledge and knowledge that is considered 'relevant', 'scientific', and 'interesting' byscientific practitioners, are those elements that respond adequately to the internal andexternal social environment.

At the micro-level of the scientific community, restraints are also placed on the direction of science by the detailed programming which scientists are given as part of their training. Thishas been described by Kuhn (1962) quite aptly as dogma, reminiscent, one should note, of thework of European theologians in the Middle Ages. Only during paradigmatic breaks is the broaddogma questioned by internal forces within a discipline. Yet under the broad dogma, socialnegotiation about a particular scientific meaning and interpretation constantly continues.

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The sub-culture of a science defines a scientific tradition and filters what is given to it asfacts. The sub-culture constantly generates facts and explanations but also reproduces itself asa tradition-bound culture to be passed on to the next generation of scientists (Barnes 1982 p. 7).

The resulting growth of knowledge can thus be seen as a tree which branches out in onedirection or another following changes in the social environment. These knowledge treeshave similarities and parallels with the 'decision trees' used in the information processing andcomputer field. One can also draw an analogy with the tree of evolution in biology wherethe particular growth of a sub-species is the result of a selection of genetic information within aparticular species, with, say, only genetic information that is adapted to a particular environment surviving and continuing in the form of genetic material.

The flow of science, therefore, is buffeted in its search for knowledge by the rulingparadigm, the programming of scientists in the dogma of the ruling paradigm, the ideology of the particular science and the ontological and epistemological assumptions through which thediscipline views reality, the internal social context within science, the external social contextand the mode of production prevailing in the society. All these factors may have varyingcharacteristics. These have changed historically in the cases of actual sciences giving rise to ahigh degree of variation in the permutations and combinations in the modes of explanationof reality possible.

Scientific knowledge therefore becomes, as it were, a tube or snake, which explores itsterritory and is buffeted by external socio-economic and ideological forces and propelled byinternal social and ideological forces. Such a 'snake' sniffs at one morsel of knowledge, leaves itaside and branches off in another direction. This tube of advancing knowledge is, however,highly structured. Heisenberg (1973) noted that tradition and the historical process give usour scientific problems and methods. In the process of scientific development, 'theoriesdevelop and change structure with time that [like biological species] they are historicalentities. Accordingly, both the identification and the evaluation of theories are essentiallyhistorical in character' (Burian 1977 p. 1). The knowledge tube's movements, propelled by internaland external social and other forces, are thus tightly demarcated.

Past traditions received by the sub-culture of a science bear heavily on individual scientistsdoing research (Barnes 1982 p. 7).

Because history structures the flow of knowledge, scientific theories have certain rigidities.Once a scientific explanation or theory is established, alternatives to it are not considered, ashas been noted by Feyerabend (1975 p. 38). A theory now becomes dogma in the Kuhniansense, and once established is difficult to dislodge. There are too many epistemological,social and personal commitments involved. Thus, the measure between an establishedtheory and 'a more recent theory is age and familiarity. Had the younger theory been there first,then the consistency conditions would have worked in its favour. The first adequate theory hasthe right of priority over equally adequate aftercomers' (Feyerabend 1975 p. 36).

Because of the rigidity of the historical process and tradition, development of new insightsand fresh pastures is both helped and hindered (Heisenberg 1973 p. 5). The sub-culture of aparticular science demarcates its boundaries tightly and jealously (Wallis 1979; Barnes1982). Since science is a structured reality, the scientific process is often governed by other aspects of a historical process. A fruitful scientific period 'is characterized by the fact that theproblems are given, that we need not invent them' (ibid. p. 5), and not the other way round. If Einstein had lived in the 12th Century he would not have become a good scientist (ibid.).

I have indicated that a vast 'soup' of theories, orientations and perspectives existswithin every discipline, and in the general social context out of which paradigm makers have

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The future of new directions in science lies not in aimless anarchy, but in fresh paths, innew structured avenues of knowledge.

The tubes of knowledge, the tracks of an advancing path, could equally well be called tubesof ignorance. They structure the path of science but they also restrict its area of search. Ofthevast expanse of physical reality, only particular areas are explored by the existing tracks of science.

At the working edge of the scientific enterprise the scientist's view is essentially aworm's eye view. The scientists crawls through the tunnel that he and others before himhave built and sees what is immediately ahead. He usually does not see what is behind him inthe tunnel--that is, the history of his own discipline nor does he see the whole network of tunnels and tubes which comprise the full range of branches and sub-disciplines of science. Notseeing these, he structures his consciousness to believe in the existence of only one tunnel or,even more narrowly, of only the particular part of the tunnel that he occupies at the moment. Thefact that the tunnel is only one of many and exists in a much larger physical reality is notperceived. Systematic knowledge in its particularism structures ignorance as much as itstructures knowledge.

From this perspective, structure knowledge may amount to tubes of ignorance; yet thisshould not divert attention from the fact that the discoveries of science may be valid of thatscience can progress. Science may have relativist characteristics, relativist in time, placeand social context, yet science progresses. It gives meaning. The meaning may bestructured from almost a priori elements, like the themes and anti-themes of Holton based not on'recently discovered evidence' as Schrodinger (quoted in Newman 1961 p. 13) points out, but on'the natural inclination of the human intellect' to such thought patterns as atomist (ibid.).Science may not give a perfect vision--yet it reveals gleams of physical truth--even if throughclouded spectacles.

The different disciplines and sub-disciplines constitute different tubes of knowledge, thebranches of the knowledge tree. These disciplines have grown up and have becomedifferentiated because of particular historical events. They therefore constitute only aparticular growth and a particular pattern of disciplines, just as an individual discipline is but aparticular historical configuration. The knowledge fronts of the different disciplines constitute across-section in time of the knowledge tree. Therefore, they are a coming together of severalfactors, such as different historical definitions in different disciplines, their perceptions of physical reality, their internal social dynamics etc. Interdisciplinary studies aim to bring together these different petrified definitions to study areas not covered by any one discipline. This isa very difficult process, which may sometimes be an almost meaningless exercise...

As they explore new territory, the knowledge tubes discover universal truths. The realitydiscovered, however, even in the small, demarcated areas of knowledge search, are notsharply defined views of 'absolute reality'. The view of reality is blurred by the ontological,epistemological and social filters that bar a view of 'complete' reality. Though imperfect, thescientific results that the knowledge tube discovers are universally valid, yet the reasons for the particular exploration and the particular terrain of reality explored are unique. Althoughthe search for knowledge and the direction of the search are unique, the outcome and scientificresults of the search are universal. Thus a specific combination of socio-economic forces in the17th Century set the social context for Newton's search and the subsequent discoveries of thelaws of motion but the laws of motion are valid (within their paradigmatic limits) in both 17th-Century Europe and 10th-Century Asia (or, for that matter, in the outer planets).

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Being a structured, historical process, scientific advance rests on the theories and data of past researchers. These are, as Schrodinger (1967) observes, the 'outcome of selectionsformerly made'. These selections were due to a certain train of thought working on the mass of experimental data then at hand. And so, if we go back through an indefinite series of stages inthe scientific advance, we shall finally come to the first conscious attempt of primitive mento understand and form a logical, mental picture of events observed in the world around him'(pp. 87-8).

This retracing to the 'original source' of the knowledge track or the tube of knowledge hasinteresting implications. Looking backward in time from the vantage point of the presentWestern scientific hill--as Schrodinger does--one can trace back the tube and the trails andhistorical turning points all the way back to what Schrodinger calls primitive man's images of his environment. Schrodinger's view of early man may be too simplistic but he is correctwhen he notes that 'the origin of science--[is]--without any doubt the very anthropomorphicnecessity of man's struggle for life' (pp. 88).

This retracing of history from the present ethnocentric, Western scientific viewpoint may givethe superficial observer a narrow view of the growth of knowledge. He could perhaps tracepresent scientific knowledge back through the 19th Century, to the 17th Century, theRenaissance and the ancient Greeks and then, ultimately, to Schrodinger's primitive man asBernal has done to a certain extent in his history. Such a tracing is, however, limiting, ascan be seen if one begins tracing the progress of science forwards in time from different'primitive groups'.

Anthropologists have noted the variety of experimental and conceptual responses to naturemade by hunter-gatherer groups everywhere in the world. Each of these groups could give riseto the seminal scientific thinking which Schrodinger refers to. Given such a wide variety of initial starting-points, one could, in principle, have a wide array of scientific knowledge tracks or historically structured tubes. To put it differently: one could have separate knowledge treesarising from separate starting-points.

In our discussion on South Asian science until the 16th and 17th Centuries, we noted that,starting from the Indus Valley and proceeding through the Gangetic plain, through the major astronomical and mathematical developments from the 5th to the 12th Centuries, the growth of science was somewhat different from that in Europe. In addition to a common area of physicalreality explored in both the South Asian and Western traditions with roughly the sameconceptual tools, there were other knowledge domains explored in South Asia but not coveredin Europe (and vice versa). Because of the particular regional flow of historical factors,both internal and external to the knowledge system, different choices were made in theories andobservations, different areas were found scientifically interesting and different rates of growth were achieved in different subjects. Thus, a different scientific knowledge tree and adifferent set of knowledge tracks developed in South Asia before the 16th and 17th Centuries.Since then, the new, legitimized knowledge from Europe has of course effectively prevented thegrowth of this particular tree.

In the exploration of reality by science, past knowledge shoots are lost and delegitimized,with the result that other, potentially valid knowledge systems are eliminated. These other systems might perhaps have given rise to new nodal points from which fresh knowledge shootsand different explanatory systems could have grown, but the potential is eliminated under thespread of a monoculture.

An elimination of diversity in the scientific field could perhaps result in a situation similar tothe loss of genetic diversity in the world's flora. The loss of diversity in the field of ideas to bemined for science would cause a decline in the different, validated intellectual responses to

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the environment available in the world. Such responses have value and could even be crucialto survival. (Thus, for example, at the present time of perceived ecological crisis, ideas whichemphasize harmony between nature and man, and explanatory systems that emphasizethe cyclic as opposed to the unilinear nature of the world are being resuscitated.)

Viewing physical reality and science with a different imagery, one can picture theseaspects more clearly. The scientific knowledge tube traverses its terrain of physical realityleaving a trail of disciplines and advances in knowledge. Yet a snake's or a tube's view of a flatphysical terrain is not complete. A snake or a worm sees only that part of the terrain which itexplores. The domain of physical reality is very large and the knowledge pathways do not cover the whole terrain and, almost by definition, large areas of the terrain of physical reality are leftunexplored. Physical reality is therefore only marked by branching paths of the prevailingknowledge system.

One could conceive of different knowledge systems (belonging to different civilizations, for example, or for that matter different planets) with different branching patterns and adifferent knowledge tree system where the terrain explored and the answers obtained aboutreality are different. The paths of of knowledge of these different systems may criss-crosseach other. One could have entirely different sets of paradigms exploring different areas of physical reality, arising from initially different historical points of scientific growth, andinfluenced by different socio-economic forces. At the nodal points where these trees of knowledge criss-cross each other, one could have a fair degree of unanimity as to what isobserved and how it is explained. But the two knowledge trees and their respective contentof knowledge remain apart and distinct.

These different scrawls on the 'blackboard' of reality, namely the different knowledgestructures of different civilizations, could be due to different initial knowledge systemsarising at a very early historical period out of the different physical environments which earlyman encountered. They could arise from the historical 'accidents' of individual figures creatingtheir own different maps of reality, perhaps as a reaction to, or against the ruling intellectualand social order. With such possibilities, one is left with many possible systems of knowledge.Thus different civilizations could give rise to a multiplicity of pathways and tubes of knowledge,each providing approximate and partial glimpses at physical reality but never describing it 'fully'.

This possibility raises some fundamental historical questions of hypothetical nature,which are nevertheless very relevant to our topic of sciences in different civilizations. Thusone could pose the following question: if world-wide mercantile capitalism had first emergedin South Asia through its own internal socio-economic transformations (such as the need toexplore the world for profit), what would the shape of the consequent science be? (There isevidence that South Asians not only went eastwards as far as the Philippines (Jocano 1975 pp.136-45) but also to East Africa, probably rounding the Cape of Good Hope and reaching WestAfrica (Panikkar 1959 p. 28), so the question is not entirely imaginary.)

If South Asia had been the hegemonic power which developed science rapidly over the last500 years, modern science would have been entirely different, with different pathways andtubes, because of the different historical and scientific presumptions from which it would havebegun and the different internal debates within which it could have evolved. It would haveresulted in different sciences, whether in the field of 'pure' mental constructs such as thoseof mathematics, or in a purely observational science such as astronomy or in theexperimental sciences such as physics. Different areas of intellectual interest would havebeen emphasized because of social and other forces; different approaches and differentmethodologies would have been attempted and would of course have given rise to a differentset of 'universal laws', valid for a different set of areas of reality.

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The same general question could be posed for the case of China by altering Needham'sclassic question, of why science in the modern sense did not develop in China (although Chinahad many independent discoveries of its own), to: what if it had? If the socio-economiccircumstances were such that science in the modern sense could have emerged in China, whatform would it have taken? The obvious general answer to such questions is that the form,content and areas of reality it would have explored would have been entirely different.

Therefore there is nothing universal about the way in which science has developed in therelatively autonomous, hegemonic Europe of the last 500 years. Knowledge could havefollowed entirely different paths on the blackboard of reality--at least in theory. This leads us tothe extremely abstract possibility of alternatives in the sciences: which alternatives one shouldexplore and what new paths could possibly be made. What are the real alternatives for a non-colonial science in the Third World?

The European-derived scientific enterprise has developed, especially since the 18th Century,as a giant machine. As the growth of modern scientific knowledge occurred in Europeancountries, what were considered legitimate scientific problems and even legitimatemethodologies were those with relevance and significance for the emerging social forces inEurope and the prevailing intellectual climate. In recent centuries, this intellectual climatehas been virile and dynamic and, linked to virile economic development, has provoked very rapidscientific advance. But the knowledge created by Europe has had a stultifying effect on theperipheral non-Western countries that absorbed it.

The new hegemonic scientific culture that emerged and became legitimized from the Westerncentres spread to the rest of the world and was soon assumed to be equally legitimate andnecessary for non-European countries. Although the knowledge created in Europe had positiveand liberating aspects, it also had negative aspects since, once it was adopted, large amountsof the non-European regions' valid, relevant knowledge was delegitimized. Thisdelegitimization applied to very mundane knowledge, like that required for the cultivation of local vegetables or the identification of medicinal plants. The delegitimization also applied tohighly sophisticated, formal systems of looking at physical reality.

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3.2.a-The Social Context of Science

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