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1. Modern Science, and the technology based on it, are comparatively new in the history of humanity, only a few centuries old. Science had once to fight for survival against the unjust onslaughts of the dogmatic western religion. That period is now happily over. Science has now come of age, and can stand on its own, not seeking any protection or promotion from religious circles.2. On the other hand, Science itself had been tempted, especially in the light of some of her more spectacular achievements of the end of the last century, to claim certain dogmatic certainties for herself. But as our century draws to its close, dogmatic scientism becomes increasingly outdated and unfashionable.3. Today one notes at least four different attitude to Science and technology occupying the centre of the stage.a) First comes the popular view about science and technology, a view which is a kind of hangover from the hectic days of triumphalistic scientistism. This is the belief widely held, that science and technology are potentially capable of solving all the problems of mankind. This naive view is especially common in the developing countries of the world, where the wide use of modern science and technology is comparatively new, and the marvels of science and technology can still make a great impression on the minds of ordinary people. I think this view is still rather common in India. b) On the opposite extreme, and almost totally irrational, is the view of the Counter-culture Syndrome in advanced industrial societies. Theodore Roszak, says:
Because science dominates the reality game of high industrial society, I am convinced that a hard critique of its Psychology now has everything to do with restoring our cultural health1.Acknowledging his debt to such contemporary thinkers as Abraham Maslow2, Lewis Mumford3, Lancelot Law Whyte4 Thomas Blackburn5 Arthur Koestler6, and others, Roszak charges that
Science is far too narrowly grounded in the personality. It closes out too much experience and in this way drastically distorts what it studies.7His view is that
Science has been lionized out of all proportion by the necessities of urban-industrial life and by the political opportunism of the technocracy.Roszak's solution is the "rhapsodic intellect" in which science is wedded to mysticism and art to produce a revolution of consciousness which restores the "sacramental vision of nature" to Science. But this revolution
will happen, perversely and heretically at the fringes of our culture and work its way in toward the center. The Scientists and guardians of single vision in urban-industrial society and the intellectual Linchpin of the technocracy, may be among the last to hear the news!8c) A third type of view comes from English-speaking philosophers of science. Despite the wide divergence among them, there is growing consensus among Carl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Stepehn Toulmin. While Popper argues for the autonomy of a "third world" of man-made ideas called scientific knowledge constantly in process of revision and evolution9. Feyerabend argues for epistemological anarchism in science10. The second edition of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions11 came out in 1970 with his theory of paradigms further refined. Kuhn sees science as a "way of seeing" through paradigms or picture-analogie, the paradigms themselves being in a process of constant revision and change, change not in accordance with any rational law, but almost haphazardly often by revolutions most of the time through battles between rival paradigms created by congeries of specialists' communities"12. Science is a system of theory choices, preference being for theories or paradigms with greater accuracy to demands also some free creativity, ie. an irrational element as well.All these philosophers, however, agree on one point-- Science is not proven knowledge; it is only a way of seeing reality, quite a successful way, admittedly. But no thinking person would claim infallibility for science, nor would he give it any methodological monopoly over human knowledge. Science is a useful tool, it helps us to predict certain aspects of reality and therefore to control them. It may also help us partially to understand the nature of reality, but cannot give us an adequate picture of it. Such a modest evaluation of science seems to be the one prevalent among most Philosophers of science.d) A fourth view of science is the one held in most socialist countries. It is difficult at the moment to document this view from primary sources, since western language sources are scanty. One of the best recent western studies is Loren R. Graham's Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union13. What we see here is a science-based natural philosophy. Marxist ideology itself claims to be the silence of dialectical materialism, a scientific analysis of social reality. Graham calls contemporary Soviet dialectical materialism “an impressive intellectual achievement". His praise, and let me add that the American Professor Graham is no Marxist or Marxist sympathizer, is rather fulsome in terms of universality and degree of development,
dialectical materialist explanation of nature has no competitors among modern systems of thought. Indeed, one would have to Jump centuries, to the Aristotelian scheme of a natural order or to Cartesian mechanical philosophy, to find a system based on nature that could rival dialectical materialism In the refinement of its development and the wholeness of its fabric14.In other words the Marxist effort to integrate philosophy with science has no contemporary parallel in the West, where the two are kept in fairly watertight compartments even by many philosophers on science. One may question some of the assumptions of Soviet dialectical materialism but its rigorous effort to build an integral system that unites ideology, philosophy and science is more impressive than any other. But this also means that Eastern European scientists and philosophers of science do not share the uncertainty about a technology so characteristic of the contemporary western scientific thinkers. The west feels tempted to call the Soviet attitude 'scientism' -- the belief in the omni-competence of science. The Eastern European would deny that the epithet is merited. He would say that Marxism is the only ideology that integrates science in a larger framework that deals with all aspects of reality. It is a flexible ideology, which can give up a strict Laplacean type of determinism in the light of the insights of modern physics, but sticks on to causality despite indeterminacy at certain levels.It is not a mere platitude to say that all these four views must contain some element of truth, though the degree of verity in each may be different. The third view which is the view of most thinking scientists outside the socialist world today, could be considered more modest and objective than the first or the second, but it does not raise the question of the role of science in the sum-total of human endeavour. It is that question that increasingly rises before us as western civilization itself goes through a measure of soul-searching and self-criticism. The main point of this paper is to sharpen the articulation of this question and some related ones. Some of these questions are