Generally, the controversy regarding the universality of modern science does not, typically, have to do with the actual constituents of scientific phenomena but rather, the propositions given to the account of those phenomena. No one doubts the motion of falling bodies to the centre of the earth. For instance, an Orange falls from its tree to the ground and not in an upward movement because of the active force that pulls it downward. Precisely, the question of universality of science arises from the nature of propositions given to account the fall of the orange and the values we attach to the motion of the fall of such orange. According to Cobern and Loving,
The question of universality does not arise over the phenomenon of falling. The question of universality arises over the fashion of the propositions given to account for the phenomenon of falling, the fashion of the discourse through which we communicate our thoughts about the phenomenon and the values we attach to the phenomenon – including the account offered by a standard scientific description.364
The important fact reiterated here is that science consists of a body of knowledge about the world. However, this does not imply that scientific knowledge progresses steadily with the expansion of the accepted propositions that are given to account for the scientific phenomena. In the first place such understanding makes science appear as if its propositions capture wholly the true nature of physical things. This positivist understanding of science would maintain that the meaning of a scientific theory is exhausted by empirical and logical considerations of what would verify or falsify it. A
363 See Joseph Rouse, ¨What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?¨, Configurations, 1992, 1 (1), 1-22
364 William W. Cobern & Cathleen C. Loving, ¨Defining ´Science´ in a multicultural world¨, Reconsidering Science Learning, eds. Eileen Scanlon, Patricia Murphy, Jeff Thomas & Elizabeth Whiteleg (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) p.195
scientific theory, then, is a condensed summary of possible observations. Hence, scientific theories are built up by the logical manipulation of observations365, and scientific progress consists in increasing the correctness, number, and range of potential observations that its theories indicate. It is such understanding of science that has given credence to the universality of modern science.
For the logical positivists, theories develop through a method that transforms individual data points into general statements. This indicates why positivists tried to develop a logic of science that would make solid the inductive process of moving from individual facts to general claims within the context of discovery.
They maintained this stance on the basis that the justification we have for believing a scientific theory is based on that theory´s solid connection to data. It is an empiricist reducibility thesis according to which all terms suited to describe actual or possible empirical facts are full definable by terms referring exclusively to aspects of immediate experience. However, if meanings are reduced to observations, there are many
¨synonyms,¨ in the form of theories or statements that look as though they should have very different meanings but do not make different predictions. In An Introduction to Science and Technology studies (2010), Sergio Sismondo, gave an example of such. He wrote that Copernican astronomy was initially designed to duplicate the (mostly successful) predictions of the earlier Ptolemaic system; in terms of observations, then, the two systems were roughly equivalent, but they clearly meant very different things, since one put the Earth in the centre of the universe, and the other had the Earth spinning around the Sun.366
365See Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, New York: Dover, 2nd ed., 1952[first published 1936].
The reprinted version with a new introduction, London: Penguin, 2001 is used. In this work the concept underlying Ayer's discussion is the "principle of verifiability," which defines a statement as being
"literally meaningful" only if it either is logically necessary ("analytical") or can be empirically verified as being either true or false. Under this definition, metaphysical statements are not literally meaningful, and so are properly part of theology rather than philosophy. See also, Rudolf Carnap, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin-Schlachtensee: Weltkreis-Verlag. (English translation by Rolf A. George, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo-problems in Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) By utilizing logic and radical reductionism, Carnap tried to show how one's knowledge of the world can be reduced to sense data and how our talk about the external world is built up from our immediate sense data.
366 Sergio Sismondo, An Introduction to Science and Technology studies. 2nd ed. (West Sussex:
Blackwell, 2010) p.2
In fact, many apparently meaningful claims are not systematically related to observations, because theories are often too abstract to be immediately cashed out in terms of data. Likewise, that a claim cannot be unambiguously verified or falsified does not mean that no meaningful debate about its truth can be conducted. On the contrary, virtually all the great scientific debates concerned ambiguous metaphysical statements.
These debates focused on metaphysical generalisations which were in principle untestable.
Very good examples of such propositions are: Newton´s view that the world consists of discrete particles with central forces acting between them; Faraday´s view that the world is a continuum of forces, the quantity of which is conserved; and the view of the molecular biologists that with growing knowledge of the chemistry of life the phenomena of evolution will be reducible to molecular biology. More still, Newton´s assertion that the whole is simply the sum of its component parts provided the crucial foundation stone for his pivotal work on gravity. But from where did he get the idea?
The assertion cannot, of course, be proved. As we could see in section 2.9 Boris Hessen went far to demonstrate that the rise of capitalism after the demise of European feudal society provided the underlying principles that fomented Newton´s Principia.
Consequently, it is as a result of the logical inconsistencies implicit in positivism that the Shapin and Kuhnian theses described such understanding of science is implausible (See sections 2.11, 2.11.2, 2.11.3, 2.12, 2.13.1, 2.13.3 and 2.13.4). Michael Reiss shared similar perspective thus,
It is not too much of a caricature to state that science is seen by many as the way to truth…. The advance of science then consists of scientists discovering eternal truths that exist independently of them and of the cultural context in which these discoveries are made….Truth is supposed to emerge unambiguously from experiment like Pallas Athene, the goddess of wisdom, springing nature and unsullied from the head of Zeus.367
367Michael Reiss, ¨What is Science? Teaching Science in Secondary Schools¨, in Reconsidering Science Learning, eds. Eileen Scanlon, Patricia Murphy, Jeff Thomas & Elizabeth Whitelegg (London:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) p.4
The understanding of science as a truth-seeking enterprise is traceable to its mathematical reductionism. However, the hypothetico-deductive methodology of Christian Huygens (1628 – 1695) suggested that science and mathematics were actually different fields, and could not be treated the same way. The distinction he made between the two was the idea of proof. He stated that mathematics and geometry could prove something beyond doubt, whereas science can never prove something emphatically.
Science, merely, gives a probability that a certain finding is true. Although the facts from which scientific knowledge is constituted are derived from accurate observations and careful experiments that can be checked by repeating them, such knowledge is still conditioned by the experience and guiding principle of the community of the scientist that work it out. Besides other socio-cultural factors like the technological or economic needs (see sections 2.8, 2.9 and 2.9.1) of the society also affect the direction of the research whereby those facts are studied. But the fact that science and society are inevitably, and inexorably, intertwined does not necessarily require one to abandon all belief in the objectivity of science. Alan Chalmers writes thus,
The natural world does not behave in one way for capitalists and in another way for socialists, in one way for males and another for females, in one way for Western cultures and another for Eastern cultures.368
In essence, the behaviour of the natural world is not ambiguous but our understanding of it may. A scientist´s perceptions of the natural world, as well as his or her interpretations of it, are conditioned by the aptitude of his or her senses and the culture that nurtured them. Therefore, there can be no single, universal, acultural science. The implication is that all sciences of various civilizations are tainted with unique ethnographic colourations which explain their usual identification within such civilization. But if science and its content are so ethnographically determined how can we explain the ´universality of modern science´?—a science whose presumed universal practice is still invisible, and often misunderstood in most locations in Africa, East-Asia and South-America? Why is it that in most parts of these locations one could find many scientists and students that are very good in mathematics and physics but lack the
368Alan Chalmers, Science and Its Fabrication (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) p. 112