Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science 2021006244, 2021006245, 9780367461379, 9781032042633, 9781003027140

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Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science

In bringing together a global community of philosophers, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science develops novel perspectives on epistemology and philosophy of science by demonstrating how frameworks from academic philosophy (e.g., standpoint theory, social epistemology, feminist philosophy of science) and related fields (e.g., decolonial studies, transdisciplinarity, global history of science) can contribute to critical engagement with global dimensions of knowledge and science. Global challenges such as climate change, food production, and infectious diseases raise complex questions about scientific knowledge production and its interactions with local knowledge systems and social realities. As academic philosophy provides relatively little reflection on global negotiations of knowledge, many pressing scientific and societal issues remain disconnected from core debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. This book is an invitation to broaden agendas of academic philosophy by presenting epistemology and philosophy of science as globally engaged fields that address heterogeneous forms of knowledge production and their interactions with local livelihoods, practices, and worldviews. This integrative ambition makes the book equally relevant for philosophers and interdisciplinary scholars who are concerned with methodological and political challenges at the intersection of science and society. David Ludwig is an associate professor in the “Knowledge, Technology and Innovation” Group of Wageningen University and Research (Netherlands). His work combines philosophy of science and transdisciplinary research in addressing epistemological, ontological, political challenges in scientific practice. Inkeri Koskinen is a senior research fellow at Tampere University (Finland), and a member of the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (TINT). She works on scientific objectivity, democratization of scientific knowledge production, social and cognitive diversity in science, demarcation, and philosophy of the humanities.

Zinhle Mncube is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg and a PhD student in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She works on issues related to personalizing medicine, the role of genes in phenotypes, and philosophy of race, broadly construed. Luana Poliseli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI), Austria. Her work approaches general philosophical questions through empirical knowledge of particular sciences, including themes of visualization and imagination in scientific understanding; mechanistic explanation; model-​ building; and knowledge production for sustainability sciences. Luis Reyes-​Galindo is an independent researcher and an associate editor for the journal Tapuya. His research includes the sociology of science and technology, scientific communication and open access publishing, and the role of experts in policy making.

History and Philosophy of Biology Series Editor: Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

This series explores significant developments in the life sciences from historical and philosophical perspectives. Historical episodes include Aristotelian biology, Greek and Islamic biology and medicine, Renaissance biology, natural history, Darwinian evolution, nineteenth-​century physiology and cell theory, twentieth-​century genetics, ecology, and systematics, and the biological theories and practices of non-​Western perspectives. Philosophical topics include individuality, reductionism and holism, fitness, levels of selection, mechanism and teleology, and the nature–​nurture debates, as well as explanation, confirmation, inference, experiment, scientific practice, and models and theories vis-​à-​vis the biological sciences. Authors are also invited to inquire into the “and” of this series. How has, does, and will the history of biology impact philosophical understandings of life? How can philosophy help us analyze the historical contingency of, and structural constraints on, scientific knowledge about biological processes and systems? In probing the interweaving of history and philosophy of biology, scholarly investigation could usefully turn to values, power, and potential future uses and abuses of biological knowledge. The scientific scope of the series includes evolutionary theory, environmental sciences, genomics, molecular biology, systems biology, biotechnology, biomedicine, race and ethnicity, and sex and gender. These areas of the biological sciences are not silos, and tracking their impact on other sciences such as psychology, economics, and sociology, and the behavioral and human sciences more generally, is also within the purview of this series. Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science Edited by David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli and Luis Reyes-​Galindo For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​ History-​and-​Philosophy-​of-​Biology/​book-​series/​HAPB

Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science

Edited by David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli and Luis Reyes-​G alindo

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli and Luis Reyes-​Galindo; individual chapters, the contributors The right of David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli and Luis Reyes-​Galindo to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Ludwig, David, 1983– editor. | Koskinen, Inkeri, editor. | Mncube, Zinhle, editor. | Poliseli, Luana, editor. | Reyes-Galindo, Luis, editor. Title: Global epistemologies and philosophies of science / edited by David Ludwig, Inkeri Koskinen, Zinhle Mncube, Luana Poliseli and Luis Reyes-Galindo. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: History and philosophy of biology | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021006244 (print) | LCCN 2021006245 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367461379 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032042633 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003027140 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Science–Philosophy. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC Q175 .G534 2021 (print) | LCC Q175 (ebook) | DDC 501–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006244 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006245 ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​46137-​9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​04263-​3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​02714-​0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of figures  List of contributors 

x xi

Introduction: Reimagining epistemology and philosophy of science from a global perspective 

1

DAVID LUDWIG

PART I

Rethinking philosophical practices 

13

1 Philosophy or philosophies? Epistemology or epistemologies? 

15

INKERI KOSKINEN AND DAVID LUDWIG

2 Linguistic diversity in philosophy 

26

CHUN-​P ING YEN

3 Anti-​colonial feminisms and their philosophies of science: Latin American issues 

39

SANDRA HARDING

4 Philosophy of science in China: Politicized, depoliticized, and repoliticized 

51

YUANLIN GUO AND DAVID LUDWIG

5 Experimental philosophy  JORDAN KIPER, STEPHEN STICH, H. CLARK BARRETT AND EDOUARD MACHERY

61

viii Contents PART II

Reconfiguring scientific methods  6 Developing transdisciplinary practices: An interplay between disagreement and trust 

75 77

LUANA POLISELI AND CLARISSA MACHADO PINTO LEITE

7 Sustainability science as a management science: Beyond the natural–​social divide 

92

MICHIRU NAGATSU AND HENRIK THORÉN

8 “Science must fall” and the call for decolonization in South Africa 

106

CHAD HARRIS

9 Structural epistemic (in)justice in global contexts 

115

INKERI KOSKINEN AND KRISTINA ROLIN

10 Excess and indigenous worldview: Philosophizing on the problem of method 

126

CARL MIKA

11 Radical alterity, representation, and the ontological turn  134 MARK RISJORD

PART III

Negotiating science in/​w ith society 

143

12 The democratization of science 

145

FAIK KURTULMUŞ

13 Science and values: Multi-​strategic research and traditional saberes 

155

HUGH LACEY

14 Science and industry funding 

164

MANUELA FERNÁNDEZ PINTO

15 Innovationism North and South 

174

MARCOS BARBOSA DE OLIVEIRA

16 Post-​truth and science: Looking beyond the Global North  LUIS REYES-​G ALINDO

183

Contents ix PART IV

Situating the living world 

197

17 Environmental thinking in African philosophy: A defence of biocentrism using the notion of nma ndu 

199

JONATHAN O. CHIMAKONAM AND L. UCHENNA OGBONNAYA

18 Cultural evolution: A case study in global epistemologies of science 

208

AZITA CHELLAPPOO

19 What is an appropriate philosophy of human science for 21st-​century indigenous psychologies? 

220

JAMES H. LIU AND PITA KING

20 On local medical traditions 

231

ZINHLE MNCUBE

21 Revisiting the question of race and biology in the South African social sciences 

243

PHILA MFUNDO MSIMANG

PART V

Reimagining abstract and physical worlds 

255

22 Philosophical cartography 

257

RASMUS GRØNFELDT WINTHER

23 Modeling the apparent spread of science: Some insights from the history of science in Japan 

265

KENJI ITO

24 Buddhist logic from a global perspective 

274

KOJI TANAKA

25 Perspectives on the Indian mathematical tradition 

286

SMITA SIRKER

26 Science as craftwork with integrity 

296

HARRY COLLINS

Postscript 

308

LUIS REYES-​G ALINDO, LUANA POLISELI, ZINHLE MNCUBE, DAVID LUDWIG, AND INKERI KOSKINEN

Index 

313

Figures

6.1 Hierarchical network representing a transdisciplinary collaboration proposed by E1   82 6.2 Interactive network across scales  83 7.1 The contrast between hard and soft systems stances  96 22.1 Surrounding landmasses are distorted to fit around China in Da Ming Hun Yi Tu (Amalgamated map of the Great Ming empire)  261 22.2. Square rebbelib used by the Marshallese to navigate the Pacific Ocean by canoe off the coast of the Marshall Islands  262

Contributors

H. Clark Barrett is a professor of Anthropology at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture. His research uses experimental methods to examine similarities and differences in human thinking across cultures and across the lifespan, focusing on intuitive ontologies, theory of mind, and moral cognition. For over 20 years he has conducted research in collaboration with Indigenous communities in Ecuador, and with other researchers at sites around the world. He is the author of The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve (OUP, 2015). He is co-​PI for the Geography of Philosophy Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Azita Chellappoo is a postdoctoral researcher in “The Return of the Organism in the Biosciences” Group of Ruhr Universität Bochum. Her doctoral thesis explored conceptual challenges within cultural evolutionary theory, including questions of explanation, social learning biases, and non-​ epistemic values in these frameworks. Her current work centers around emerging trends in biomedical research and the implications this has for our understanding of social categories like gender, race, and fatness, as well as for concepts of health and disease. Jonathan O. Chimakonam PhD teaches at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He taught at the University of Calabar, Nigeria (2013–​ 2018) and was a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg (2017–​ 2019). He aims to break new grounds in African philosophy by formulating a system that unveils new concepts and opens new vistas for thought (Conversational philosophy). He is editor and author of many books including Atuolu Omalu: Some Unanswered Questions in Contemporary African Philosophy (2015); African Philosophy and Environmental Conservation (2017); Ezumezu: A System of Logic for African Philosophy and Studies (Springer, 2019); Logic and African Philosophy: Seminal Essays on African Systems of Thought (2020).

xii  List of contributors

Harry Collins is Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. He is an elected Fellow of the British Academy and winner of the Bernal prize for social studies of science. His 25 books cover, among other things, sociology of scientific knowledge, artificial intelligence, the nature of expertise, tacit knowledge, and technology in sport. His contemporaneous study of the detection of gravitational waves has been continuing since 1972 and he has written four books and many papers on the topic. He is currently looking at the impact of the coronavirus lockdown on science due to the ending of face-​to-​face conferences and workshops. Manuela Fernández Pinto is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Applied Ethics at Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. She received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Notre Dame in 2014, and then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Helsinki in 2015, before moving back to Colombia. Her latest research aims to understand the epistemic and social consequences of commercially driven research today, particularly in clinical trials conducted by the pharmaceutical industry. Her research interests include social epistemology, the science and values debate, the history and philosophy of economics, and feminist philosophy of science. Yuanlin Guo is a professor of philosophy of science and technology at Tianjin University, China. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics from Beijing Normal University, his master’s degree in philosophy from Tsinghua University, and his doctorate in philosophy from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He was a visiting scholar in the USA in 2012–​2013, and in Netherlands in 2019–​2020. His fields of research are the epistemology of science, the relation of science to politics, and the history of science. His most recent article is ‘The Chinese Practice-​Oriented Views of Science and Their Political Grounds’ (Zygon, September 2020). Sandra Harding is a Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. She co-​ edited the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2000–​ 2005, and is the author or editor of 17 books, including Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (2015), The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (2011), and Sciences From Below: Feminism, Postcolonialisms, and Modernities (2008). Chad Harris is a senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is director of the department’s African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS) and works under the ACEPS project “Rationality and Power.” His other research interests are in the methodology of social science, especially the problem of external validity. His previous publications have looked at traditional medical practices and how they can be reconciled with mainstream medicine.

List of contributors  xiii

Kenji Ito is an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, the School of Advanced Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies) in Hayama, Japan. He investigates production, movement, and materialization of expert knowledge through historical cases centered around nuclear sciences in Japan. His recent publications concern material aspects of science diplomacy, focusing on Japan’s import of uranium and radioisotopes after World War II. He is currently finishing a biography of Nishina Yoshio. His other research topics include the early history of high-​energy physics in Japan, Japanese scientific journals, and reorganization of science in Japan during the occupation. Pita King is a Kaupapa Māori Lecturer in psychology at Massey University, Albany, Aotearoa New Zealand. He descends from the indigenous northern tribes of Te Rarawa and Ngāpuhi. His training has been in analytic philosophy, and community and indigenous psychologies, and maintains a research focus on issues of urban poverty, social inequalities, indigenous philosophies and psychologies, coloniality, and theoretical psychology. Pita King is also a research fellow with Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga –​New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence, Auckland University—​ and is affiliated with the Māori and Psychology Research Unit (MPRU) hosted by The University of Waikato. Jordan Kiper is an assistant professor of anthropology and human rights at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and consultant for the “Geography of Philosophy Project.” His work centers on human cooperation and conflict with specializations in political and legal anthropology, human rights, cognitive science, and religion. To research these, he has undertaken post-​ conflict ethnographic fieldwork in the Balkans, experimental research, and various cross-​cultural studies in experimental philosophy. His most recent publications have covered topics related to intergroup conflict, including the influence of propaganda, nationalism, and cooption of religious systems. Faik Kurtulmuş is an assistant professor at Sabancı University. He works on issues that lie at the intersection of political philosophy, social epistemology, and philosophy of science. Recent publications have focused on justice in the distribution of knowledge and public trust in science. Inkeri Koskinen is a senior research fellow at Tampere University (Finland), and a member of the Centre for Philosophy of Social Science (TINT). She currently works in the research project “Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science: An Epistemic Assessment” (2018–​2022). Her recent publications have focused on scientific objectivity, activist research, and the democratization of scientific knowledge production. Her research interests include also demarcation and the philosophy of the humanities, and she has published a popular book on pseudoscientific theories about the history of Finland.

xiv  List of contributors

Hugh Lacey is Scheuer Family Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Swarthmore College (PA, USA), and Research Collaborator in the Group of Philosophy, History and Sociology of Science, Institute of Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo (Brazil). He is the author of Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding (Routledge, 1999). His recent work has been concerned with various aspects of the role of values in scientific activities—​paying considerable attention to issues about the legitimacy of using GMOs in agriculture, and especially to the competing practices of agroecology and the methodological strategies that are adopted in agroecological research; and recently to relations between modern scientific practices and traditional/​indigenous saberes. Clarissa Machado Pinto Leite conducts post-​ doctoral research at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (Brazil) on the construction, implementation, and effectiveness of the inter-​and transdisciplinary processes. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences (2006), a master’s degree in Ecology and Biomonitoring (2010), and a doctorate in Ecology (2016) from the Federal University of Bahia. Her doctoral thesis had as central theme the occurrence of biodiversity thresholds in Atlantic Forest and was associated with a project on effects of the reduction of vegetation cover and historical biogeography on extinction thresholds. She has experience in areas of theoretical and applied ecology, more specifically in experimental design of research, community ecology and landscape ecology. James H. Liu (刘豁夫) is Professor of Psychology at Massey University in New Zealand. He has been influential in the development of Asian social psychology. His work is in social, cross-​cultural, and political psychology, where he has co-​authored over 220 publications, and is currently co-​Editor-​ in-​Chief of Political Psychology. He specializes in social representations of history, as a psychological approach to collective memory. He also has interests in trust, digital influence, and the evolutionary psychology of global consciousness. He is invested in New Confucianism, having absorbed this philosophy for living as an academic from his father, who was a philosopher. David Ludwig is an associate professor in “Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation” (KTI) Group of Wageningen University and the principal investigator of the “Global Epistemologies and Ontologies” (GEOS) project. He works at the intersection of philosophy and social studies of science with a focus on global negotiations of academic and non-​academic knowledge. Recent publications have focused on local biological knowledge of indigenous and peasant communities, on contested categories such as “race” in scientific practice, and on questions of global justice in science policy.

List of contributors  xv

Edouard Machery is Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburg. His research focuses on the philosophical issues raised by psychology and cognitive neuroscience, metaphilosophy, the foundation of statistics, the methods of psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and experimental philosophy. He is the author of Doing without Concepts (OUP, 2009) and of Philosophy within its Proper Bounds (OUP, 2017) as well as the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality (OUP, 2012), La Philosophie Expérimentale (Vuibert, 2012), Arguing about Human Nature (Routledge, 2013), and Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy (Routledge, 2014). He is co-​PI for the Geography of Philosophy Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Carl Mika is an associate professor in the Division of Education, University of Waikato, New Zealand. He has a background in law practice and legal theory, indigenous and Maori studies, and indigenous and Western philosophy. His current areas of research focus on indigenous and Western first principles of thought, as well as philosophical research methods. He is Co-​Director of Centre for Global Studies, University of Waikato. Zinhle Mncube is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg and a PhD student in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She works on issues related to personalizing medicine, the role of genes in phenotypes, and philosophy of race, broadly construed. Phila Mfundo Msimang is a lecturer of philosophy at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. He is a founding member and the Secretary of the Azanian Philosophical Society. He is presently engaged in projects looking at the use of race in the sciences and the problem of race in society more generally. His research interests are in the philosophy of race and in minimal cognition. His focus is on the metaphysics of race in the philosophy of race and studying the degrees of intelligence in simple organisms in minimal cognition research. Michiru Nagatsu is an associate professor at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, and Practical Philosophy, the University of Helsinki. He runs the Economics and Philosophy Lab and the HELSUS Methodology Lab. He uses a range of empirical approaches in his research—​including experimental philosophy, collaborations with scientists, interviews, integrated history, and the philosophy of science—​to study conceptual and methodological questions in both fundamental and applied sciences. L. Uchenna Ogbonnaya is a postdoc at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He holds a PhD from the University of Calabar supervised by J. O.

xvi  List of contributors

Chimakonam. His areas of specialization and research interest include African philosophy, logic, metaphysics, and applied philosophy. He has published some articles and chapters in international journals and edited collections, and has presented papers at some international conferences. He is an editorial assistant for Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions. He is a member and secretary of the Conversational Society of Philosophy (CSP) and serves as the coordinator of their Monthly Seminar Gathering (MSG). He is currently working on a research project titled ‘Decoloniality through Conversational Thinking’ for his postdoc. Marcos Barbosa de Oliveira is an associate professor (professor colaborador) in the philosophy graduate programme of the Department of Philosophy at Universidade de São Paulo (USP). He has a BSc in Physics at USP (1970), and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at University College London (1981). He is a member of the research group Filosofia, História e Sociologia da Ciência e da Tecnologia at the Instituto de Estudos Avançados da USP, and a member of Associação Filosófica Scientiae Studia. In the last two decades, the main theme of his work has been the commodification of science. Luana Poliseli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI), Austria. Her work approaches general philosophical questions through empirical knowledge of particular sciences, including themes of visualization and imagination in scientific understanding; mechanistic explanation; model-​building; and knowledge production for sustainability sciences. Luis Reyes-​Galindo is an independent researcher and an associate editor for the journal Tapuya. His research includes the sociology of science and technology, scientific communication and open access publishing, and the role of experts in policy making. Mark Risjord is a professor of Philosophy at Emory University, USA, and Affiliated Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic. His research is in the philosophy of science, with special interest in issues arising from anthropology and nursing. His current projects investigate inferentialist approaches to scientific representation and minimalist approaches to joint action. Kristina Rolin is University Lecturer in Research Ethics at Tampere University. She is the principal investigator of the research project “Social and Cognitive Diversity in Science: An Epistemic Assessment” (2018–​2022). Her areas of research are philosophy of science and social science, social epistemology, and feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. She

List of contributors  xvii

is interested in diversity in science, the role of trust and values in science, collective knowledge, and objectivity. Smita Sirker is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has previously taught at the Centre for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata; has been associated in different capacities with the Centre for Cognitive Science, Jadavpur University; and also served as a Joint Director of School of Cognitive Science. Her research interests include moral reasoning, patterns of reasoning in unschooled persons, and philosophy of cognitive science. She is currently working on the conceptions of proof in Indian logic and mathematics. She has publications in the areas of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophy of moral reasoning and philosophy of mathematics. Stephen Stich is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize, the first recipient of the Gittler Award for Outstanding Scholarly Contribution in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, and a winner of the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement and Contribution, awarded by the Phi Beta Kappa Society in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association. In the Spring of 2020, he was Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at the Princeton University Center for Human Values. He is co-​PI for the Geography of Philosophy Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Koji Tanaka is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University. His main research areas are logic, philosophy and history of logic, philosophy of language and Buddhist philosophy. His current project aims to advance a theory about the nature of logic and modality which draws on Buddhist philosophical material and challenge the conceptions of logic and modality that are widely entrenched but unexamined in contemporary literature. Henrik Thorén is a researcher in theoretical philosophy at the department of philosophy at Lund University and the principal investigator of the project Risk, Values and Decision-​making in the Economics of Climate Change (RIVET). His research interests mostly concern philosophical questions that arise out of scientifically studying sustainability including for example interdisciplinarity and integrative models, values in science and the role of science in public policy, as well as examining specific and important concepts in sustainability research such as resilience and ecosystem services.

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xviii  List of contributors

Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He works in the philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, and has interests in epistemology and political philosophy, cartography and GIS, cognitive science, and science in general. Recent publications include “A Beginner’s Guide to the New Population Genomics of Homo sapiens: Origins, Race, and Medicine” in The Harvard Review of Philosophy; “Mapping the Deep Blue Oceans” in The Philosophy of GIS (Springer); When Maps Become the World (University of Chicago Press, 2020); Our Genes: A Philosophical Introduction to Human Evolutionary Genetics (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Chun-​Ping Yen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia Sinica. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She mainly works in philosophy of language, especially its interface with metaphysics and with philosophy of mind.

Introduction Reimagining epistemology and philosophy of science from a global perspective David Ludwig

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, public health, and sustainable energy require critical reflection on knowledge production and knowledge diversity. This book aims to contribute to the negotiation of these global challenges along two lines. On the one hand, we want to showcase the potential of epistemology and philosophy of science in addressing knowledge diversity on a global scale and its entanglement with scientific, technological, and political practices. On the other hand, we also want to challenge academic philosophy to become more engaged with questions of global knowledge production that often remain in the periphery of mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. This book is therefore an invitation to reimagine epistemology and philosophy of science as globally engaged fields that integrate tools from academic philosophy with critical reflection about heterogeneous forms of knowledge production and their interactions with local livelihoods, practices, and policies. In addressing social and environmental crises on local and global scales, modern science and technology are often contested as part of the solution as well as part of the problem. Policy responses to issues such as environmental destruction or the COVID-​19 pandemic require scientific expertise that appears increasingly fragile and threatened by the global rise of anti-​ science populism. At the same time, current social and environmental crises do not only require scientific expertise, but are also the product of technological and scientific modernity. Modern agricultural science and technology, for example, may be indispensable in meeting the global challenge of “feeding the world” but is simultaneously a driving force in the loss of biodiversity through monocropping and pesticide application, in deforestation through expansive industrial farms, in food insecurity through displacement of smallholder farmers and land grabbing, in soil erosion through industrialization and intensification, and so on (Macnaghten and Carro-​Ripalda 2015). On the one hand, epistemology and philosophy of science could contribute to navigating this complexity by fostering critical reflexivity beyond simple narratives about science as the sole solution or the root cause of a world in perpetual socio-​environmental crisis. On the other hand, academic philosophy

2  David Ludwig

often seems woefully ill-​equipped to fill this role in both public and academic controversies about responses to global challenges. While “global challenges” have become ubiquitous in science and innovation policy (Kaldewey 2018), there remains little interaction with mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science (see, however, Efstathiou 2016). Critical perspectives on modernization and the colonial legacies of science are also largely produced outside of academic philosophy, as illustrated by Harding’s Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (2011) that is edited by a philosopher but mostly showcases scholarship from other fields such as anthropology, history, and sociology. Rather than giving up on academic philosophy as a source for critical scholarship, this book explores the potential of epistemology and philosophy of science to contribute to negotiating knowledge, science, and technology on local and global scales. There are many reasons to be optimistic about the potential of these fields. Epistemology has grown into a dynamic and interdisciplinarily engaged field that provides much more than textbook debates about the definition of “knowledge” as “justified true belief ”. For example, the field has come a long way in considering cross-​cultural variability of epistemological core terms including “knowledge” (Kiper et al., Chapter 5) and addressing the normative dimensions of negotiations of knowledge through notions such as “epistemic injustice” (Koskinen and Rolin, Chapter 9). Philosophy of science has also moved beyond general debates about “the structure of science” (Nagel 1961) towards pluralist models that consider science in its heterogeneous disciplinary, geographic, and historical shapes (Kellert et al. 2006; Ruphy 2016). One important implication of this development is that philosophers of science have become increasingly attentive about the interactions between scientific knowledge production and social values (Lacey, Chapter 13; Douglas 2009; Elliott 2017) as well as more general debates about the role of science in democratic societies (Kurtulmuş, Chapter 12; Kitcher 2011; van Bouwel 2015). While all of these developments indicate the potential of philosophical reflexivity in addressing global knowledge production, intercultural contexts also provide an important challenge to the mainstream of both epistemology and philosophy of science. While philosophers have become increasingly attentive to questions of knowledge diversity and their normative implications, much of this debate remains focused on Europe and North America with little attention for the Global South. Furthermore, the question is not just what but also who is being represented in epistemology and philosophy of science. Turning attention to global dimensions of science runs the risk of reproducing epistemic injustices if it remains dominated by scholars from the Global North who are simply talking about (rather than with) the Global South. This book therefore constitutes an attempt to reimagine epistemology and philosophy of science through an intercultural and interdisciplinary conversation about global knowledge production.

Introduction 3

Social contestations of science Addressing science from a global perspective requires engagement with its contested status from decolonial critique (Harding, Chapter 3) to anti-​ science populism (Reyes-​Galindo, Chapter 16). From the vantage point of the Global North, anti-​science populism and anti-​intellectualism provide powerful reminders of the need for policy that is informed by the scientific expertise (Collins, Chapter 26). For many people in the Global South, however, encounters with scientific expertise have been encounters with colonial instruments of control. Writing from a Māori perspective, Smith’s (2013, 1) Decolonizing Methodologies summarizes this sentiment by writing that “research” is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. […] The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still off ends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our “faculties” by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are. Even after the political fall of colonial empires and their academic instruments such as “race science” (Msimang, Chapter 21), the role of science often remains contested among scholars in the Global South. Institutionalized science remains deeply entangled with radical transformations of an allegedly underdeveloped “Third World” through market-​driven agendas of technological modernization and economic growth (Ludwig and Macnaghten 2020). Resistance against these agendas by both social movements and scholars in the Global South reflects the wide range of cultural, environmental, and social damage of such modernist visions of development (e.g. Shiva 1991; Esteva 2011). Locating the role of science in this critique of modernist and growth-​oriented development, Escobar (2018, 89) argues that in third-​world contexts … science has become the most central political technology of authoritarianism, irrationality, and oppression of peoples and nature. As a reason of state, science operates as the most effective idiom of violent development and even standardizes the formats of dissent. … Organized science thus becomes ineffective as an ally against authoritarianism and increasingly dependent on market-​based vested interests. This motivates the powerful and perhaps startling indictment. Escobar’s framing of science as an instrument of a brutal modernist vision of development echoes with some contributions of this volume such

4  David Ludwig

as Harding’s discussion of anti-​colonial feminism (Harding, Chapter 3) and especially Harris’ (Chapter 8) discussion of the fallist movement in South Africa that challenged the marginalization of African perspectives with the slogan Science Must Fall. The chapters of this book, however, tell heterogeneous stories that do not add up to one straightforward narrative of science as colonial and modernist domination. Reyes-​Galindo’s (Chapter 16) discussion of “post-​truth” and “fake news”, for example, addresses vilification of Brazilian research through an administration that sees science as an obstacle for an agenda that pushes economic development at the price of environmental and public health concerns. While Reyes-​Galindo’s chapter addresses the COVID-​19 pandemic as the “apex of a ‘war’ declared by Bolsonaro on the country’s scientific and educational institutions since entering office”, Oliveira (Chapter 15) discusses “innovationism” in Brazil as the meeting ground of scientific and political elites in formulating neoliberal agendas of growth that exacerbate social-​environmental crises. Even within a single national context such as Brazil, science therefore takes too many forms and roles to fit a simple narrative of being a hero or a villain. Rather than thinking of science as performing one essential societal function—​ from “colonial domination” to “rational reasoning”—​ the contributions of this book add to a multi-​layered picture that can be aptly described with Collins’ (Chapter 26) metaphor of “science as craftwork”. As Collins argues, “sciences that confront the citizen in the political sphere aren’t exact and aren’t open to being presented as magic or religion”. Instead, they are crafts and skillful practices of asking questions, collecting evidence, and drawing conclusions. This book presents a kaleidoscope of these historically and culturally shaped craftworks from physics in Japan (Ito, Chapter 23) to medicine in South Africa (Mncube, Chapter 20) to logic (Tanaka, Chapter 24) and mathematics (Sirker, Chapter 25) in India. The different cultural and disciplinary shapes of scientific practices do not lead to a universal characterization of science and its function in a global arena. Instead, they lead to a pluralist picture of heterogeneous crafts with equally heterogeneous epistemic and social functions. While the chapters of this book complement each other in composing such a pluralist picture, this does not mean that the authors agree in all of their characterizations of science. Collins’ take on “science as craftwork” is decisively optimistic by presenting science as a “craftwork with integrity” and emphasizing: “Science has to be respected, not because it is always right, like magic or religion are said to be; it isn’t always right but is still the best way to generate conclusions which feed into politics. Science is craftwork with integrity and that is the best we can hope for” (Chapter 26). Other contributions of this volume—​ e.g. Pinto (Chapter 14), Harding (Chapter 3), Harris (Chapter 8), Koskinen and Rolin (Chapter 9)—​focus on contexts in which the integrity of science becomes questionable both by being dominated through

Introduction 5

particular interests and by dominating other forms of knowledge production that are not institutionalized as science.

Scientific pluralisms and knowledge diversity Knowledge about the world is produced by diverse epistemic communities (Santos 2015; Harding 2015). Some of this plurality is internal to science and the contributions of this book span a wide range of fields such as ecology (Poliseli and Leite, Chapter 6), logic (Tanaka, Chapter 24), geography (Winther, Chapter 22), genetics (Msimang, Chapter 21) mathematics (Sirker, Chapter 25), medicine (Mncube, Chapter 20), physics (Ito, Chapter 23), psychology (Liu and King, Chapter 19), and so on. However, the idea of knowledge production as a “craftwork” also provides an opportunity to think of epistemological matters beyond institutionalized science (Janich 2015), and globally oriented philosophy of science requires engagement with the many varieties of Indigenous, traditional, and local expertise that commonly remain marginalized in scientific practices (Liu and King, Chapter 19, Mika, Chapter 10, Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya, Chapter 17). Addressing this epistemic diversity is particularly urgent in the context of global challenges of intertwined social and environmental issues that cannot be addressed through restricted disciplinary perspectives (Scholz and Steiner 2015). Nagatsu and Thorén (Chapter 7) introduce sustainability science as an interdisciplinary field that requires to move “beyond the natural-​social divide” and its associated disciplinary methods. Using the case studies of fisheries management and climate science, Nagatsu and Thorén argue for a systems perspective that can integrate various variables and trade-​offs in concerns about resource allocation and conservation. As Poliseli and Leite (Chapter 6) point out, however, interdisciplinary knowledge integration is not always a smooth process as it involves different methodological approaches and ways of positioning science towards “wicked problems” such as environmental and public health challenges. Given the heterogeneous forms of expertise that are involved in engaging with these wicked problems, Poliseli and Leite focus on the “interplay between trust and disagreement” in developing epistemically productive tensions between research programs. Questions of knowledge integration and disagreement do not only arise in the context of interdisciplinary engagement between natural and social sciences but become even more urgent in transdisciplinary contexts that involve both academic and non-​academic actors. On the one hand, transdisciplinary knowledge integration constitutes a core demand for globally engaged epistemology and philosophy of science. Rather than assuming the epistemic priority of Western science, transdisciplinary approaches can contribute to acknowledgement of diverse forms of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988) and especially of “Epistemologies of the South” (Santos and Meneses 2009;

6  David Ludwig

Santos 2015) that remain often marginalized in academia through the dominance of English (Yen, Chapter 2) and the European tradition of academic knowledge production more generally. Recognition of diverse academic and non-​ academic epistemic communities is therefore a crucial component in challenging epistemic injustices (Koskinen and Rolin, Chapter 9) and incorporating the insights of diverse epistemic standpoints into scientific practices (Wylie 2013; Harding 2015; Koskinen and Rolin 2019). On the other hand, epistemic diversity also constitutes a pressing challenge for academic philosophers who develop their models on the basis of often idealized case studies of institutionalized science, and examples drawn from its history, and thus lack resources for navigating methodological and political tensions of negotiating knowledge in transdisciplinary trading zones (Galison 1997; Robles-​Piñeros et al. 2020).

Linking epistemologies with ontologies and values Epistemic diversity is an important starting point for addressing knowledge production and scientific practices from a global perspective (Ludwig and Koskinen, Chapter 1). At the same time, emphasis on diversity alone is not sufficient but can contribute to a misleading picture of harmonious knowledge integration which fails to address tensions between heterogeneous epistemic communities and their practices. Knowledge systems are not sets of propositions that can be simply added up into a larger set that provides a more comprehensive knowledge base and leads to better solutions. Instead, different knowledge systems and epistemologies are often entangled with conflicting ontologies and values that lead to very different epistemic practices (Ludwig and El-​Hani 2020). In the African context, the contributions of Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya (Chapter 17) as well as Mncube (Chapter 20) provide case studies of this complexity in the environmental and medical domains. Focusing on the Igbo concept “nmandu”, Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya highlight a biocentric conception of the world along the Igbo saying “everything there is, is part of the web of life”. Contrasting this perspective with anthropocentric thinking, the authors highlight biocentricism as a core feature of African philosophies that comes with distinct epistemological but also ontological and ethical assumptions. Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya’s case study complements wider debates about Indigenous and traditional knowledge that stress its importance for developing sustainable relations with environments, but also highlight that this knowledge is entangled with holistic and relational ways of being in the world (Cajete 2000; Wilson 2008). Mncube’s discussion of African traditional medicine (Chapter 20) develops a related case through practices of South African izangoma (diviners) while also warning that the decolonization of medicine needs to avoid a wholesale relativism in medicine.

Introduction 7

Writing from a Māori perspective, Mika’s (Chapter 10) discussion of the relation between Indigenous worldviews and research methods reinforces some of the core lessons from the African context that are stressed by Chimakonam, Uchenna Ogbonnaya, and Mncube. Emphasizing the holistic character of Māori ontologies, Mika points out that “it is difficult to imagine that the research methods we employ today align with traditional indigenous approaches” and that “we have to deal with the possibility that research methods, as they are currently employed, do not correspond with indigenous first principles of existence”. Rather than simply assuming smooth integration of Indigenous knowledge and methods into academic research, serious engagement with Indigenous perspectives requires engagement with unresolved tensions. Different ways of producing knowledge reflect different ways of being in the world and global negotiations of epistemologies therefore require simultaneous negotiations of ontologies and values. Emphasis on the ontological dimension of knowledge diversity converges with a wider debate about the “ontological turn” (Holbraad and Pederson 2017) that has its origin in cultural anthropology (De la Cadena 2007; Viveiros de Castro 2009) but has also been increasingly adopted in debates about science and technology (Pickering 2017). As Risjord (Chapter 11) spells out, the ontological turn in anthropology emerges from a critique of theorizing cultural diversity as a representational diversity of beliefs about the world. Moving debates from diversity of representations about the world towards ontological diversity of ways of being in the world raises important questions about addressing epistemologies and science from a global perspective. While cross-​cultural studies of epistemic diversity often mobilize representationalist frameworks of different beliefs about the world, Risjord proposes an ecological model of “cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended” and thereby emphasizes the need to address the situatedness of knowledge systems and their entanglement with different practices on a global scale.

Political philosophy of science Negotiating knowledge production on a global scale is a deeply political matter: whose concerns and questions matter? Whose concepts and ontologies? Whose methods and practices? Different answers to these questions lead to heterogeneous and often conflicting perspectives on scientific practices and their politics. As Guo and Ludwig (Chapter 4) point out, the relation between politics and philosophy of science is complex and historically unstable. In the Anglophone literature, the historical narrative commonly moves from a politicized environment of European philosophy of science in the early 20th century to a post-​war depoliticization in the United States to a more recent surge of normative concerns in areas such as feminist philosophy of science (Risch 2005; Howard 2009). Using the case study of Chinese philosophy of

8  David Ludwig

science, Guo and Ludwig argue that this periodization does not fit countries such as China that have been shaped by different dynamics of philosophers trying to create independence from and to prove usefulness to the interests of the Communist Party. Even if the dynamics of politicization and depoliticization differ between philosophical communities, the emergence of “political philosophy of science” (Rouse 1987; López Beltrán and Gómez 2013) provides important resources for addressing knowledge production on a global scale. The relation between science and values has been one focal point of recent philosophy of science as outlined by Lacey (Chapter 13). By expanding these debates towards the role of values in traditional and Indigenous knowledge, Lacey shows how values mediate between knowledge systems and the ways of life of the communities who employ them. Questions of democratization provide another important entry point for political philosophy of science. Kurtulmus (Chapter 12) traces the development of governance debates from earlier arguments that science needs to be free from societal biases to more recent cases for demanding democratic legitimacy of scientific research (Wilholt 2012). While political philosophy of science provides important entry points for a globally oriented debate about knowledge production, this book also provides challenges to further expand and rethink debates about political philosophy of science. As Fraser (2009) points out, the global state of socio-​environmental challenges requires novel approaches of thinking about questions of social justice as transcending national framings. Fraser’s account of global justice therefore shifts attention towards the politics of representation and misrepresentation: who gets a voice in negotiating economic questions of distribution and cultural questions of recognition? Misrepresentation can take the form of marginalization of stakeholders through the legacy of colonial structures of domination (Harding, Chapter 3) and other forms of epistemic injustice (Koskinen and Rolin, Chapter 9). However, misrepresentation can also take the form of overrepresentation of actors with institutional power to shape research agendas. Pinto’s (Chapter 14) discussion of industry funding in Latin America provides a lively illustration of this type of misrepresentation through commodification and privatization of science. As Pinto highlights, industry funding of science does not have homogeneous effects around the world as research and development (R&D) may be outsourced to the Global South without reflecting local concerns or needs. In Pinto’s case study of pharmaceutical research, this misrepresentation leads to misdistribution of treatments which are developed in the Global South, but “do not contribute to the well-​being of the local populations, as they do not target the relevant diseases, are not available, or are unaffordable”. The aim of this volume, however, is not only to provide critical perspectives on misrepresentation but also to contribute to a positive vision of inclusive knowledge production that represents the wide range of actors and their epistemic traditions. First, this is a matter of broadening the scope of academic

Introduction 9

research that moves beyond the dichotomy between a Western centre and a global periphery of knowledge production (Ito, Chapter 23) and instead recognizes the wide variety of traditions of academic knowledge production in fields such as psychology (Liu and King, Chapter 19), logic (Tanaka, Chapter 24), or geography (Winther, Chapter 22). At the same time, a positive model of just representation also needs to include Indigenous and other local communities outside of institutionalized academia that are highlighted in diverse chapters of this book from Aotearoa/​ New Zealand (Mika, Chapter 10) to Brazil (Oliveria, Chapter 15; Reyes-​Galindo, Chapter 16) to China (Guo and Ludwig, Chapter 4; Liu and King, Chapter 19) to Nigeria (Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya, Chapter 17) to South Africa (Harris, Chapter 8; Mncube, Chapter 20; Msimang, Chapter 21). Both critical cases of misrepresentation and positive cases of inclusive knowledge production suggest opportunities for expanding political philosophy of science beyond established debates about values and democratization towards questions of global justice.

Rethinking science, reimagining philosophy of science The ambition of this book is twofold. On the one hand, we aim to show the relevance of epistemology and philosophy of science for addressing global knowledge production and scientific practices. While history (Chambers and Gillespie 2000; Schiebinger 2005) and social studies (Harding 2011; Reyes-​ Galindo 2017) of science have become increasingly concerned with global configurations of research, academic philosophy often marginalizes global perspectives as niche fields such as “development ethics” or “intercultural philosophy” without much interaction with the mainstream of the discipline. However, these configurations interact with core questions about epistemology, ontology, and scientific practice. This book showcases how philosophy can make innovative contributions to addressing these questions both through more general debates about issues such as “epistemic injustice” (Koskinen and Rolin, Chapter 9), “transdisciplinary methods” (Poliseli and Leite, Chapter 6), “evolutionary models” (Chellappoo, Chapter 18), “science and values” (Lacy, Chapter 13), “democratization of science” (Kurtulmuş, Chapter 12), and by situating them in concrete case studies of different disciplines and geographic contexts. At the same time, this book showcases globally engaged research by a global community of philosophers that is far from representative of the mainstream of epistemology and philosophy of science as reflected in major journals or conferences. Indeed, there is increasing awareness in some subcommunities such as experimental philosophy (Kiper et al., Chapter 5; Stich et al. 2018) and emerging debates about linguistic diversity in philosophy and science (Yen, Chapter 2; Gobbo and Russo 2020). At the same time, the mainstream of both academic epistemology and philosophy of science has a

10  David Ludwig

long way to go in developing more inclusive research agendas that reflect the standpoints of heterogeneous actors beyond Western academia and the requirements of addressing knowledge production in the light of pressing social-​environmental problems from climate change to food security to global health. In this sense, this book does not only make a case for the relevance of philosophical reflexivity but is also an invitation to reimage epistemology and philosophy of science as inclusive disciplines that engage with the most urgent societal concerns about knowledge production and scientific practice on a global scale.

References Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Clear Light Pub. Chambers, D. W. & Gillespie, R. (2000). Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge. Osiris 15, 221–​240. de la Cadena, M. (2007). La producción de otros conocimientos y sus tensiones: ¿De la antropología Andinista a la interculturalidad? In Degregori, C. I. & Sandoval, P., eds. Saberes Periféricos. Ensayos Sobre La Antropología en América Latina. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 107–​152. Douglas, H. (2009). Science, Policy, and the Value-​ Free Ideal. University of Pittsburgh Press. Efstathiou, S. (2016). Is it Possible to Give Scientific Solutions to Grand Challenges? On the Idea of Grand Challenges for Life Science Research. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56, 48–​61. Elliott, K. C. (2017). A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science. Oxford University Press. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. Duke University Press. Esteva, G. (2011). Más allá del desarrollo: la buena vida. Aportes Andinos 28 (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar), 1–​6. Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. Columbia University Press. Galison, P. (1997). Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. University of Chicago Press. Gobbo, F. & Russo, F. (2020). Epistemic Diversity and the Question of Lingua Franca in Science and Philosophy. Foundations of Science 25 (1), 185–​207. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), 575–​599. Harding, S. (2011). The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader. Duke University Press. Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research. University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The Ontological Turn. Cambridge University Press. Howard, D. (2009). Better Red than Dead—​Putting an End to the Social Irrelevance of Postwar Philosophy of Science. Science and Education 18 (2), 199–​220.

Introduction 11 Janich, P. (2015). Handwerk und Mundwerk: Über das Herstellen von Wissen. C. H. Beck. Kaldewey, D. (2018). The Grand Challenges Discourse: Transforming Identity Work in Science and Science Policy. Minerva 56 (2): 161–​182. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​ s11024-​017-​9332-​2. Kellert, S. H., Longino, H. & Waters, C. K. (2006). Scientific Pluralism 19. University of Minnesota Press. Kitcher, P. (2011). Science in a Democratic Society. Prometheus Books. Koskinen, I. and Rolin, K. (2019). Scientific/​ Intellectual Movements Remedying Epistemic Injustice. Philosophy of Science, 1–​18. https://​doi.org/​10.1086/​705522 López Beltrán, C. & Velasco Gómez, A. (2013). Aproximaciones a la filosofía política de la ciencia. UNAM. Ludwig, D. & El-​Hani, C. N. (2020). Philosophy of Ethnobiology: Understanding Knowledge Integration and its Limitations. Journal of Ethnobiology 40 (1), 3–​20. https://​doi.org/​10.2993/​0278-​0771-​40.1.3. Ludwig, D. & Macnaghten, P. (2020). Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Innovation Governance: A Framework for Responsible and Just Innovation. Journal of Responsible Innovation 7 (1), 26–​44. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​23299460.2019.1676686. Macnaghten, P. & Carro-​Ripalda, S. (2015). Governing Agricultural Sustainability: Global Lessons from GM Crops. Routledge. Nagel, E. (1961). The Structure of Science. Harcourt, Brace & World. Pickering, A. (2017). The Ontological Turn: Taking Different Worlds Seriously. Social Analysis 61 (2), 134–​150. Reisch, G. A. (2005). How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge University Press. Reyes-​Galindo, L. & Duarte, T. R. (2017). Intercultural Communication and Science and Technology Studies. Palgrave. Robles-​Piñeros, J. Ludwig, D., Baptista, G. & Molina, A. (2020). Intercultural Science Education as a Trading Zone between Traditional and Academic Knowledge. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84, 101337. Rouse, J. (1987). Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science. Cornell University Press. Ruphy, S. (2016). Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered. Pittsburgh University Press. Santos, B. S. (2015). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge. Santos, B. S. & Meneses, M. P. (2009). Epistemologias do Sul. Almedina. Schiebinger, L. (2005). Forum Introduction: The European Colonial Science Complex. Isis 96 (1), 52–​55. Scholz, R. W. & Steiner, G. (2015). Transdisciplinarity at the Crossroads. Sustainability Science 10 (4), 521–​526. Shiva, V. (1991). The Violence of Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. Zed Books. Smith, L. T. (2013). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. Stich, S., Mizumoto, M. & McCready, E. (2018). Epistemology for the Rest of the World. Oxford University Press.

12  David Ludwig Van Bouwel, J. (2015). Towards Democratic Models of Science: Exploring the Case of Scientific Pluralism. Perspectives on Science, 23 (2), 149–​172. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2009). Métaphysiques cannibales. Presses Universitaires de France. Wilholt, T. (2012). Die Freiheit der Forschung: Begründungen und Begrenzungen. Originalausgabe. Suhrkamp Verlag. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Pub. Wylie, A. (2013). Why Standpoint Matters. In Figueroa, R. & Harding, S., eds. Science and Other Cultures. Routledge, 34–​56.

Part I

Rethinking philosophical practices

Chapter 1

Philosophy or philosophies? Epistemology or epistemologies? Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig

What do we mean when we talk about philosophies or epistemologies in the plural? Are “epistemology” and “philosophy” as coherent projects—​in the singular—​threatened if we recognize the global diversity of “epistemologies” and “philosophies”? Are the meanings of the terms blurred, or do they lose normative force? Then again, what do we gain by using the plural forms? Is it easier to accept “philosophies” in plural than “epistemologies” in plural? While editing this book, we realized that the answers are not clear and that we disagree: so we decided to write a dialogue. DAVID: 

Hi Inkeri, thank you so much for suggesting this dialogue. The global heterogeneity of knowledge systems raises complex meta-​philosophical questions. Do “epistemology” and “philosophy” as coherent projects—​in the singular—​disappear when recognizing the global diversity of “epistemologies” and “philosophies”—​in plural? Does it remain important to reflect on the nature of epistemology and philosophy in more general terms? Does aiming for generality entail a projection of contingent Western standards onto “the rest of the world”? It looks like we disagree on how to answer these questions. I’m happy to emphasize plural forms, and it seems to me that the singular creates a risk of policing the boundaries of “epistemology” and “philosophy” that is both theoretically shallow and politically problematic. INKERI:  Hi David, thank you for agreeing to this dialogue. Our topic is something that has been worrying me for some time, and I’m glad to be able to discuss it here. Indeed, I think that the move from singular to plural forms creates at least as many problems as it solves. Talk about “epistemologies” and “philosophies”—​in the plural—​has become increasingly popular. I fear this risks broadening or diluting the terms so far that they will hardly have any meaning left—​especially “epistemology”—​or that they will be reduced to gestures. There are understandable motivations for deconstructing both of these concepts, but there is also the risk that we are left without a clear understanding of what exactly we are claiming when we talk about philosophies and particularly epistemologies.

16  Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig DAVID:  Before

we turn to our disagreements, let’s try to clarify our common starting point. I think we both agree that knowledge and expertise are widely distributed across the globe. Sure, professors in Oxford are experts in their domain of inquiry. But the same is true for university lecturers in Kinshasa, Indigenous elders in the Amazon, or union workers in Mumbai. Furthermore, there are issues on diversity that surpass differences in propositional knowledge about the world. Different forms of expertise come with different methodological standards and material practices of producing and validating knowledge: they are also embedded in different ontologies and metaphysical assumptions about how the world works. In this sense, there are many epistemologies and philosophies. Hence the title of our book—​Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science. INKERI: You are right, expertise does indeed take many forms and can be found all around the globe, and the different forms of expertise come with different epistemic strategies, ontological views, and metaphysical assumptions—​we would hardly be collaborating if we disagreed on this. However, I’m not convinced that it follows that we should talk about “philosophies” or “epistemologies” in the plural. As I said, the plural form that I’m really apprehensive about is “epistemologies”. The singular form “epistemology” does not disappear when we use the plural one. What is it of which we have many? Do we in fact have many of them? I worry that by using the plural form in today’s very popular, undefined way, we are evading these questions. DAVID:  To be honest, I’ve been quite happy to evade these questions. It seems to me that the concepts of “epistemology” and “philosophy” are a bit like the concept of “game”. Sure, there are family resemblances between different “games”, but they have no hidden essence to be discovered by philosophers (Wittgenstein 1953). There is a lot to understand about “games” in the plural, but a philosophical debate about the nature of “game” in the singular would be at best boring and at worst deeply confusing. So, why should we be concerned? Why not learn from the fascinating plurality of epistemologies and philosophies without worrying about their nature in singular? INKERI:  I see, here our views differ somewhat. With regards to philosophy, I have no strong need to argue for the singular form. It is clear that Taoist philosophy is something quite different from philosophical logic (but for Buddhist logic, see Tanaka, Chapter 24), yet both can be called philosophies—​like Go and tag are both games. That is why I’m not so worried about “philosophies” in the plural; though I do not see a particular need for the plural form, as we can easily say that Taoist philosophy and philosophical logic are both “philosophy”. But I’m not sure that the same applies to “epistemology”. DAVID:  I’ve been more worried about the singular in “philosophy” than in “epistemology”. So maybe our dialogue will lead to the conclusion that

Philosophy/ies? Epistemology/ies?  17

the situation is different. In the case of “philosophy”, I think there is clear evidence that the singular has led not only to theoretically shallow but also politically deeply problematic boundary disputes. The recent history of African philosophy is a striking example, as African philosophers have been under constant pressure to prove that their intellectual traditions count as “proper philosophy”. While a volume on French or German philosophy can immediately start with substantive philosophical issues, volumes on African philosophy have often been started with lengthy discussions on the very existence of African philosophy: from the status of African Indigenous knowledge systems to the legitimacy of calling an African sage a philosopher (see Mosima 2016 for an excellent overview). There is a clear hierarchy built into this setup. While the status of European thought as philosophy is taken for granted, the status of African thought as philosophy has to be proven. Second, this often results in shallow boundary disputes about definitions of the term “philosophy”. Emphasizing philosophies in the plural helps to shift attention to the many relevant contributions of African philosophers on a wide range of topics such as environmental philosophy (Chimakonam 2017; Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya Chapter 17) or political theory (Ramose 1999). But even if all of this is true in the case of “philosophy”, you suggest that the situation may be different in the case of “epistemology”? INKERI:  Yes, I think so. I’m not sure whether the plural form really helps in the boundary disputes about philosophy, as it can easily become just another bone of contention in them, but at least it’s not harmful. In the case of epistemology, I get the uncomfortable feeling that we are turning a useful philosophical notion into an “elevator word”. Hacking (1999, 22–​23) describes elevator words as words we use to move the discussion to a “higher” level when discussing our thoughts about the world, and notes that their meanings are “remarkably free-​floating”. I fear the plural form, or the way in which it is currently used, is turning “epistemology” into a word that mainly indicates the importance of something. Sometimes it seems to be used almost as an honorary title; which I find unfortunate. DAVID:  Maybe we can tease out this worry a bit more? I have been using the notion of epistemology quite broadly to refer to reflective epistemic practices. People around the world produce knowledge and reflect on the ways they produce knowledge. In this sense, epistemologies in plural seems a rather innocent strategy for acknowledging there is not a singular essence of epistemology, but many different intellectual endeavors that are connected through family resemblances. INKERI:  We clearly see this differently. I’m certainly not looking for the hidden essence of epistemology, but for me “epistemology” is a word that, though used in different philosophical traditions, tends to have a fairly clear meaning—​something along the lines of “theory of knowledge”, or more often “theorizing about knowledge”. It is a much younger term

18  Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig

than “philosophy”, coined as recently as in the 19th century; though it was immediately applied to describe other, much earlier, theorizing (Woleński 2004). The plural form has rarely been used; and when used, it has been synonymous with “theories of knowledge” or “epistemological theories”: that is, different and often competing stances in debates about knowledge, belief, epistemic justification, and other related notions. Meanwhile, using it in the undefined way we are talking about here, the one that embraces the plural form, is quite new. And now, “epistemologies” does not appear to simply mean “epistemological theories”. I fear that if we have, first, an established way to use the term where the plural form is quite unnecessary; and secondly, discussions about epistemologies in the plural, without clarity about what exactly is meant, this creates confusion. I think very often much ambiguity could be avoided by talking about “knowledge systems”, instead of epistemologies. But it’s quite clear that many would argue against such a clarificatory move. DAVID:  You’re right that “epistemology” has been historically used mostly in singular. However, talk about “epistemologies” in the plural still seems like an attractive option for challenging some of the more problematic aspects of this history. Mainstream epistemology has been—​and often continues to be—​rather limited by a universalism (implicit or explicit) that remains ignorant towards the global diversity of epistemic practices; this is expressed through the singular notion of epistemology. Moving from singular to plural seems like a useful rhetorical move in addressing these shortcomings of mainstream epistemology as it has become institutionalized in Europe and North America. INKERI:  I see what you mean, but I’m not convinced that the move is useful. You see, I also had some discussions in mind when suggesting this dialogue: ones with students who want to embrace, for instance, the idea of Indigenous epistemologies, and who end up believing this entails accepting some fairly strong form of epistemic relativism. Unfortunately, they remain unable to defend such a view in a way that would be compatible with their critical, political, and epistemic, aspirations. I think we are doing a disservice to those students if we do not try to clarify the notion, or notions, of epistemology we use. And currently, we rarely do. For instance, compare the current Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Epistemology” (Setup and Neta 2020) with the article on “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science” (Anderson 2020). Unsurprisingly, the plural form is not used in the first one—​not even when discussing feminist epistemology. And it is used in the second one—​without really clarifying what is meant by it. Could the latter article be written without using the plural form? Epistemologists are certainly capable of writing a whole book about epistemic pluralism without ever using the plural form “epistemologies” (Coliva and Pedersen 2017). Do pluralist epistemologists who argue that there are several ways of

Philosophy/ies? Epistemology/ies?  19

being epistemically justified, or rational, have different “epistemologies” than the epistemologists who defend monist views? If yes, why do they not claim that they do, or why do they not use the plural form? And if they do not have different epistemologies—​if one wants to argue that these epistemologists are all academic philosophers trained in a way that ensures that their theories are all “Western epistemology”—​then what precisely is the qualitative aspect about the differences here? The epistemological views defended by academic epistemologists differ from each other; and the epistemological views held in some Indigenous knowledge system differ from the views of many academic epistemologists. Why would the Indigenous views constitute a separate epistemology—​thus necessitating the use of the plural form—​if the different epistemologists’ views do not? I’m not asking these questions only because of some potential misunderstandings between feminist or postcolonial thinkers and more traditional epistemologists. Rather, I suspect that there might be several notions of epistemology in use here. DAVID:  I don’t doubt that one can write a wonderful and even pluralist book about knowledge without ever using the plural form. I’m also pretty sure that one could write an equally wonderful book with the plural forms. It is certainly possible to use different framings that come with different opportunities and risks. In the case of the plural form, I can certainly get on board with the need to clarify talk about epistemologies and I agree that the term is often used as a fashionable buzzword without a clear meaning, especially in critical theory and postcolonial humanities. That being said, I see strong reasons to preserve the plural form, as it reflects a core insight from debates about decolonization (Smith 1999; Harding, Chapter 3). While it is trivial to say that people around the world have first-​order knowledge about the world, concepts such as “epistemology” (or “philosophy”, “methodology”, “research”, “science”, etc.) have often been used as if only Western actors are capable of higher-​order reflexivity. Prioritizing epistemologies in the plural is a useful rhetorical move to remind ourselves of the many existing forms of reflexive reasoning. This does not mean that “epistemologies” has to become a meaningless term that becomes indistinguishable from “knowledge systems”. On the contrary, it seems to me that the decolonial challenge actually requires a distinction between a first-​order plurality of knowledge about the world (which is trivial) and a higher-​order plurality of reflexive reasoning-​ about-​knowledge and knowledge-​production (which is often denied to actors in the Global South). Talk about epistemologies in plural can actually build on this distinction and thereby emphasize what Santos (2015) has influentially named “Epistemologies of the South”, which remain widely marginalized in philosophical and scientific debates. INKERI:  But do we really need to talk about epistemologies in the plural to do that? Would it not be sufficient to say that there are many different

20  Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig

epistemological stances or views, often critical of each other? And that globally some forms of reflexive reasoning on epistemological issues have wrongly been disregarded? DAVID:  You’re right, we probably don’t need the plural form to make this argument. But we probably don’t need the singular form, either. Whether we foreground “epistemology” or “epistemologies” seems to be a strategic choice of emphasis. Furthermore, the marginalization of epistemological stances in the Global South seems to provide a strong strategic reason to put emphasis on plurality in order to overcome deeply entrenched epistemic injustices (Rolin and Koskinen, Chapter 9). I’m still not sure that I understand the reasons for emphasizing the singular instead. INKERI:  In my view, the plural form quite unnecessarily calls into question the normative aspect of the notion of epistemology—​particularly if the notion is not clearly defined. Let me give some examples to clarify why I think so. You mentioned Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He does not really define “epistemology”, but he describes epistemologies of the South as “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (Santos 2015, x). Now, “ways of knowing” could be interpreted in many ways, but Santos clearly renounces any strongly relativistic interpretations precisely to keep these “epistemologies” normative: “If all the different kinds of knowledge are equally valid as knowledge, every project of social transformation is equally valid or, likewise, equally invalid” (Santos 2015, 190). Would he need to emphasize this if he did not use the plural form? DAVID:  Hm, maybe you’re right that talk about epistemologies requires some additional effort in clarifying that pluralism is not the same as “anything goes” relativism (Mncube, Chapter 20). But this seems like a relatively small price to pay compared to the risk of epistemic marginalization through the rejection of plural forms and exclusive talk about epistemology, in the singular. INKERI:  I think the problem with “epistemologies” reaches further than the need to distinguish pluralism and relativism. Let me give you another example. Harding (1987, 2), who uses the plural form, has suggested a distinction between method, methodology, and epistemology. She defines methodology as “a theory and analysis of how research should proceed”, and differentiates it from epistemology, which deals with “an adequate theory of knowledge or justificatory strategy”. In other words, the task of epistemology is to justify the chosen methodology. But this can be understood in two ways. It is obvious that in different situations people use different justificatory strategies—​if this is all that is meant by “epistemologies”, the meaning of the plural form is quite trivial. Harding (1987, 3) even refers to a sociological, explicitly non-​normative notion

Philosophy/ies? Epistemology/ies?  21

of “epistemologies” as “strategies of justifying beliefs.” But this interpretation seems to miss something quite important: epistemology aims at developing an adequate theory of knowledge. In other words, episte­ mology is a clearly normative notion. With this interpretation, the meaning of the plural form becomes less clear. We can obviously use one theory of knowledge to justify different methodologies in different contexts. And we can have and do have different epistemological views, resulting in debates about methodological choices. But what does it mean to say that we have different epistemologies? If we do, and if all existing strategies for justifying beliefs constitute epistemologies, how precisely is it possible for us to use one in order to meaningfully criticize another? Often when reading a text about “epistemologies” that uses an unspecified notion of epistemology, I cannot figure out how I should interpret it. So, I find it more than understandable that students end up with strong views they are unable to defend. DAVID:  Let me see whether I correctly understand this triad of method, methodology, and epistemology. Consider an Indigenous community collaborating with academic ecologists on the conservation of an endangered species. Clearly, there will be a plurality of methods and methodologies. The ecologists may assess the size of the endangered population through a method of semi-​random and stratified sampling that balances methodological concerns about representativeness of the sample, and feasibility of field methods. The Indigenous community may assess the size of the population through sightings during hunting that is methodologically justified through experiential expertise about the environment and intergenerational stories about the local habitat of the species. Why would this plurality stop at the epistemological level? For example, the Indigenous community may justify its methodological standards through its personal bond and spiritual connections with the endangered species that will look very different from an epistemological justification of sampling methodologies in academic population surveys. Why grant plurality at the level of method and methodology, but not epistemology? INKERI:  Perhaps plurality can be granted also at the level of epistemology, but if one wants to do so, I would really like to understand what is meant, as it is by no means a clear claim. Are we just describing different justificatory strategies? Or are the different epistemologies different, possibly competing epistemological theories, that is, theories of knowledge? Or are we making a much stronger claim and saying that here we have an example of different theorizings about knowledge? Are we claiming that one epistemology can and should be used to criticize other episte­ mologies? Or that they are in some sense incommensurable? It would in fact be interesting to see some sophisticated form of epistemic relativism defended here, particularly one that would allow for criticism across the lines of the different epistemologies (Risjord 1998; Kusch 2021). But this

22  Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig

must not be done by leaving “epistemology” undefined; or by defining it in a way that conflates a sociological, or even anthropological, non-​ normative notion with a normative one, and then just claiming that there are many epistemologies. As I mentioned earlier, I believe that in most academic philosophical traditions “epistemology” has a fairly clear meaning: theory of knowledge, or rather, theorizing about knowledge. Roughly put, epistemology is the area of philosophical thought where we study knowledge from a normative viewpoint. This makes epistemology at the core a normative project. And it is clear that most people who today use the plural form wish to retain this normativity, as the different “epistemologies” are typically used for criticism. I find it unsatisfactory that the tension between a sociological, non-​normative notion and the philosophical, normative notion is so often left unexamined. DAVID: Indeed, I prefer to start with a more sociological perspective on different epistemologies rather than epistemology as the “study of knowledge from a normative viewpoint”. I think there is a risk of positioning philosophers as “final authorities” who evaluate the perspectives of others through their normative frameworks, while neglecting the contingency of their own perspective. The sociological starting point can help to create a more equal dialogue between different epistemologies rather than approaching epistemology as a normative project of evaluating and validating epistemological perspectives around the world. I don’t think that normativity disappears in such a dialogue. Instead, talk about epistemologies in the plural helps to recognize that normative authority is also globally distributed. INKERI:  I see. And to me the unspecified plural form seems slippery in a way that doesn’t easily allow for effective critical debate. I think we might be engaged in somewhat different discussions here. I work mostly with philosophy of the humanities and the social sciences, and with fields like Indigenous studies, gender studies, and other forms of activist research, where plurality is taken for granted, sometimes in an unreflective way. Perhaps your viewpoint regarding these issues is simply quite different? DAVID: You are right, our disagreements probably reflect that we’re approaching the topic through different examples and contexts. I can understand your concerns about normativity and relativism in a context where plurality is widely taken for granted but remains vague and elusive. However, most communities in the Global South face very different realities in which plurality is clearly not taken for granted. From perspectives of the Global South, I don’t think that a loss of normativity or epistemological relativism are the core issues compared to the continuing marginalization of local epistemic traditions. When it comes to addressing socio-​environmental issues such as biodiversity conservation, food security, poverty reduction or public health, epistemic inequity continues to be rampant between stakeholders. Recognizing heterogeneous

Philosophy/ies? Epistemology/ies?  23

epistemological traditions is crucial in these contexts and I don’t think that it leads to a loss of normativity. INKERI:  I can see that, where you work, the marginalization of local epistemic traditions is a much more pressing problem than the kind of philosophical nit-​picking I’m engaged in. But since one of the central questions we started from when planning this book was how to decolonize phi­ losophy of science without breaking epistemology apart, I feel I must insist on the nit-​picking. After all, we could, as you just did, talk about “epistemological traditions” instead of “epistemologies”. If I understand you correctly, you feel that using the plural “epistemologies” is a strategically efficient move: in a way it turns the tables. Instead of trying to justify the plural, you demand a justification for the use of the singular. And obviously you are in a better position than I am to estimate whether that is a good strategy. However, such strategic moves can backfire. For instance, Spivak who suggested interpreting identity categories “strategically” in an essentialist manner, later noted that the results were not what she had hoped for: her notion “just simply became the union ticket for essentialism. As to what is meant by strategy, no one wondered about that” (Danius and Jonsson 1993, 35). Do you not see a risk of something similar happening with “epistemologies” in the plural? Is the strategic gain really so significant that it justifies turning the notion into a vacuous elevator word? DAVID:  Yes, it is a strategic choice, but it does not reduce to strategy. I also very much think that there are substantive ways of talking about epistemologies in the plural that highlight heterogeneous ways of reasoning about methods and methodologies on a global scale. There would be a difference with anti-​essentialists who adopt a “strategic essentialism” merely for political goals. The choice to highlight the plural form is strategic, but I’d say that the choice to highlight something else through the singular form is also strategic. If I understand you correctly, your main reason for highlighting the singular form is the desire “not to break epistemology apart” and to avoid slippery slopes towards epistemological relativism. Maybe we are at a point where we can agree that there is a trade-​off between these concerns but still disagree on the weight of these different considerations. Indeed, I often feel that “breaking epistemology apart” can be liberating and I’m just not that worried about epistemic relativism. But I guess a full evaluation of the background concerns may be beyond what we can achieve in this dialogue? INKERI:  Well, I would welcome careful, reflective analysis of any substantive ways of talking about epistemologies in the plural. That would lessen my worries, as my main concern doesn’t have so much to do with any well-​defined, explicit form of relativism. Rather, I dislike the ambiguity with regard to normativity, as in my view it is rendering a fine philosophical notion toothless and useless. When I say that I don’t want to break

24  Inkeri Koskinen and David Ludwig

epistemology apart, I mean that I would like to at least defend the idea that we have a field—​one that I would like to call “epistemology”—​where we can meaningfully criticize each other and disagree. Of course, it is possible to criticize this idea too, and I’m fairly sure that not every author in this volume agrees with this want of mine. DAVID: I think we’re reaching a point where we need to acknowledge that there is no innocent terminology. When it comes to very general and abstract terms such as “epistemology” and “philosophy” there will always be plenty of room for misunderstanding and misuse. Attempts to apply these terms in heterogeneous global contexts further amplifies these risks. Shifting to plural forms can mitigate some concerns about hierarchical applications of “epistemology” and “philosophy”, but also creates space for novel misunderstandings. There are probably no elegant solutions and I don’t think we’ll reach complete agreement. However, our conversation has helped me to understand the issues at stake in making these terminological decisions. INKERI:  With regards to “philosophies” our views do not seem to differ that much. Our disagreement there quickly shrunk to me being slightly more skeptical about the usefulness of the plural form; but we clearly do weigh the risks and benefits differently when talking about “epistemologies”. However, I do not really expect to convince terribly many readers of the importance of the worries I have expressed. Most likely those who tended to agree with you when starting to read this dialogue still do so, and vice versa. Hopefully, however, this might inspire someone to clarify more carefully what they mean when they talk about epistemologies in the plural. I know that I have gained from our conversation a better understanding of several ways in which this could be done.

Acknowledgment David Ludwig’s contribution has been supported by an ERC Starting Grant (851004 Local Knowledge) and a NWO Vidi Grant (V1.Vidi.195.026 Ethnoontologies).

References Anderson, E. (2020). Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. In Zalta, E. N., ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). https://​plato. stanford.edu/​archives/​spr2020/​entries/​feminism-​epistemology/​. Chimakonam, J. O., ed. (2017). African Philosophy and Environmental Conservation. Routledge. Coliva, A. & Pedersen, N. J. L. L., eds. (2017). Epistemic Pluralism. Palgrave Macmillan. Danius, S. & Jonsson, S. (1993). An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Boundary, 2 (20), 24–​50.

Philosophy/ies? Epistemology/ies?  25 Hacking, I. (1999). The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press. Harding, S. (1987). Introduction: Is there a feminist method? In S. Harding, ed. Feminism and Methodology. Indiana University Press, 1–​14. Kusch, M. (2021). Relativism in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge University Press. Mosima, P. M. (2016). Philosophic Sagacity and Intercultural Philosophy: Beyond Henry Odera Oruka. African Studies Centre. Ramose, M. B. (1999). African Philosophy through Ubuntu. Mond Books. Risjord, M. (1998). Relativism and the Possibility of Criticism. Cogito, 12 (2), 155–​160. Santos, B. de Sousa (2015). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. Steup, M. & Neta, R. (2020). Epistemology. In Zalta, E. N., ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). https://​plato.stanford.edu/​ archives/​spr2020/​entries/​epistemology/​. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Macmillan. Woleński, J. (2004). The History of Epistemology. In Sintonen, M., Woleński, J. & Niiniluoto, I., eds. Handbook of Epistemology. Kluwer Academic, 3–​54.

Chapter 2

Linguistic diversity in philosophy Chun-​P ing Yen

In recent years, increased attention has been devoted to the problem of the lack of diversity in academic philosophy (Ayala 2015; Conklin et al. 2019; Contesi and Terrone 2018; Contessa 2014a, 2014b; Ferrer 2012; Paxton et al. 2012; Schwitzgebel 2019; Weihelm et al. 2018; Wolters 2015). Indeed, the profession does not represent the diversity of our current population. This is what Alcoff (2013) calls the “demographic challenge,” a challenge regarding representation and marginalization in the discipline. Among the cases of diversity within the profession, the issue of linguistic diversity seems the most controversial one. While it is clearly unjust to judge academic performance based on gender, race, or ethnicity, to assess work based on language proficiency and capacity plays a crucial role in efficient and productive scholarly exchange.1 The question is: in which language? And to what extent?

The global status of English English is now widely accepted as the dominant global medium of scholarly exchange.2 Its rise in the global academic landscape ran roughly parallel to its rise more widely after World War II, parallel to the economic power of the United States (Lillis and Curry 2010). Another vital factor was the increasing influence of academic evaluation systems, such as the citation indices published by the USA-​based Institute of Scientific Information (ISI), which exclude most journals that do not publish in English (Lillis and Curry 2010). English is often described as a lingua franca or an “academic lingua franca” because of its global academic communication status. Such a description is controversial, mostly when the term lingua franca is thought to imply a neutral perspective, free from any authority of its native speakers (Lillis et al. 2010; Wolter 2015).3 The hegemony of English allows scholars in the global academic collective to communicate with colleagues from different linguistic backgrounds without learning their languages, thus allowing more scholarly dialogue and collaboration opportunities. These benefits, however, are not without a cost. The need for English proficiency has put non-​native

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  27

English-​speaking scholars working and living in contexts where English is not the official or dominant means of communication at a disadvantage in publishing and sharing research across borders (Lillis and Curry 2010).4 Proficiency in English costs non-​native English-​speaking scholars time and money, as do opportunities to engage in global conversations in their specific disciplines. Scholars who lack the required proficiency may be isolated from the mainstream professional community and its resources, affecting the quality and the quantity of their research (Canagarajah 2002; Ferguson 2007; Flowerdew 2013; Hyland 2016). In addition to the pressure to publish research findings in English-​language journals, scholars working outside of non-​Anglophone contexts5 may also be expected to write for the local community in their local, national or regional languages since there is a need to disseminate their research findings within these academic communities as well.6 They often have to make difficult decisions about which topic to write, and in which language (Flowerdew 2013, 2019; Kuteeva and Mauranen 2014; Lillis and Curry 2010, ch. 2; Salager-​ Meyer 2014). The situation creates tension between knowledge building and its evaluation in a global context (Lillis et al. 2010). On the one hand, writing in English is crucial to disseminate one’s research to a global readership. On the other, engaging in local research activities and reaching locally targeted readerships, which generally do not read English-​language papers, can also be important. The tension is more urgent when it comes to determining whether or not to cite non-​English research in English-​language papers. A 2010 study of the impact of English’s global status on citation practices indicates that the pressure to publish in English brings with it the pressure to cite English-​ language sources (Lillis et al. 2010).7 After analyzing 240 articles in English-​ language national and international psychology journals (in Slovakia, Hungary, Spain, and Portugal), the authors reported that references to English-​ language sources are preferred in English-​ language international journals. As scholars publish more in English, work not published in English may be increasingly undervalued or ignored (Lillis et al. 2010; Flowerdew 2001, 2013; Wolters 2015). Given English’s status within global evaluation systems, Lillis et al. (2010, 131) concluded that English is “shaping what gets counted as knowledge” and “cannot be viewed as a transparent medium, simply ‘translating’ knowledge from one language to another.”

The insularity of the mainstream philosophical community The situation in English-​language international philosophy journals is similar to Lillis et al.’s (2010) findings in psychology. In a sample of 93 articles from prestigious English-​language philosophy journals, Schwitzgebel et al. (2018) found that only 3% of the citations were works not originally written in

28  Chun-Ping Yen

English. The only source languages other than English of the cited works were ancient Greek, Latin, German, French and Italian. When broken down by the original year of publication of the cited sources, there was only one among 2,166 citations from the year 2000 to the year 2016 written in languages other than English. Schwitzgebel et al. (2018) concluded that the author-​pool of the sampled articles is highly insular, mostly citing and interacting with other scholars writing in English.8 In other words, mainstream English-​language philosophy is highly insular. The study also showed that more than 90% of the editorial board members of the sampled English-​language journals had as their primary academic affiliation an institution in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada or New Zealand. Schwitzgebel et al. (2018) suggest that philosophers who are located in an Anglophone country and serving on the editorial board of a prestigious English-​language journal are more likely to be interacting primarily with and be influenced by colleagues in their local communities. As a result, the editorial board member group in the sampled English-​language journals also proved highly insular. Moreover, given that publication in these prestigious journals is professionally valuable for career advancement in the global market, philosophers around the globe strive to write to impress this highly insular group, including strategies that mimic native English. Editorial board members of these journals therefore have an asymmetrical influence on the work of philosophers outside this group. Schwitzgebel et al. (2018) also examined the citation-​ sources of philosophy articles in prestigious Chinese-​language journals alongside a sample of European-​language journals. None of these cases shared the pattern of insularity found in English-​language journals. As reported, foreign-​language sources constitute a substantial portion of citations in all three non-​English-​ language cases. The survey also suggested that English is dominant in foreign-​ language citations by philosophers writing in languages other than English. Cited sources in English were about double those in all other languages, in all three cases. Further examination also confirmed the asymmetric influence of English-​language articles on articles written in other languages. The same study argued that, while philosophers writing in languages other than English frequently cite recent English-​language articles, works written in languages other than English are rarely mentioned by articles published in prestigious English journals. From the above discussion, we can see that English does not simply play a crucial role in efficient and productive scholarly exchange; given its status within global academic evaluation systems, English has an asymmetric influence on scholarly output in other languages in philosophy as the discipline’s dominant language. From the insularity of the mainstream philosophical community, it follows that linguistic diversity is minimal in the field.

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  29

Why does linguistic diversity matter to philosophy? The lack of linguistic diversity in mainstream philosophy raises both ethical and epistemological concerns, suggesting it is detrimental to the philosophical enterprise in general. Firstly, the lack of linguistic diversity leaves non-​ native English-​speaking philosophers in an underprivileged position (Ayala 2015; Contesi and Terrone 2018; Schwitzgebel 2019; Yen and Hung 2019; Wolters 2015). When not disseminating their work in English, non-​native-​ English-​speaking philosophers bear a disproportionate burden to publish. When disseminating their work in other languages, it turns out to be rarely cited by articles published in mainstream English-​language journals. For example, part of the job of the editorial board of a journal is to help to identify peer reviewers and to provide additional opinions on papers that need it. Given the insularity of the board of mainstream English-​language journals, it can be challenging for the board to do its job when the submitted manuscripts cite works in other languages. Under these circumstances, to have their manuscripts reviewed, authors may need to drop the cited works which are not in English. For example, Yen and Hung (2019) reported that in an earlier version of their manuscript, they used Chen’s (2013, 2014) account of structural causation to establish the causal explanation of how multiple factors jointly bring about the distribution of authorship in academic publication. While the authors thought Chen’s theory was the pertinent one for their purpose, Chen’s papers were in Mandarin. The only English version of Chen’s account at the time was the interpretation approved by Chen in Yen and Hung’s first manuscript. After the submission of their first manuscript, they were asked to include a link to an English translation of Chen’s papers, which did not exist.9 Secondly, increasing the linguistic diversity brings in fundamentally different thoughts and novel perspectives to mainstream philosophy (Ayala 2015; Contesi and Terrone 2018; Schwitzgebel 2019; Yen and Hung 2019; Wolters 2015). Philosophical concepts, while often assumed to be transhistorical and universal, have a history in language. Philosophers have noted examples of concepts that have no straightforward translation into English. Schwitzgebel (2019) mentioned the Chinese concept de as such an example. Roughly, de signifies an inner moral power through which a person may positively influence others. While the Chinese character de is often translated as “virtue” or “power,” there is no precise English word for the concept. The German concept Dasein is another paradigmatic example. The word Dasein can be used to refer to a person, or consciousness, or self-​consciousness, but its meaning goes beyond this. If mainstream philosophy is insular and English is dominant, there will be no room for these untranslatable concepts of other languages and traditions—a significant loss for the discipline. Words like the above are referred to as “untranslatables” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin et al. 2014). The term refers

30  Chun-Ping Yen

to words significant in philosophy whose “translation, into one language or another, creates a problem” (Cassin et al. 2014, xvii). There are thus philosophical concepts that are “untranslatable,” and demand knowledge of various languages to grasp their understanding (Ayala 2015; Cassin et al. 2014).

Cross-​l inguistic variations Recent empirical research also suggests cross-​linguistic variations in many aspects of our thinking about the world (Boroditsky 2006; Boroditsky et al. 2011; Boroditsky and Gaby 2010; Boroditsky et al. 2003; Bowerman and Choi 2000; Everett 2005; Fausey and Boroditsky 2011; Lucy and Gaskains 2001; McDonough et al. 2003; Wolff and Holmes 2011). Three examples are presented in this section: cross-​linguistic variations regarding spatial relations, ideas of inanimate objects, and reference to proper names. Space Languages differ considerably in how they describe spatial relations. For example, speakers of English and Korean talk about “joining objects” differently. English distinguishes between putting things into containers and putting things onto surfaces. Korean distinguishes between tight and loose fit or attachment (Choi and Bowerman 1991; Bowerman and Choi 2000; McDonough et al. 2003). Placing an apple in a bowl, for example, requires a different relational term from placing a letter in an envelope in Korean because the former is an example of loose containment and the latter an example of a tight fit. On the other hand, placing a letter in an envelope requires the same relational term as putting a magnet on the refrigerator in Korean because both involve a close fit (Boroditsky 2006). That people talk differently does not imply that they think differently. To test whether these cross-​linguistic differences are reflected in the ways English and Korean speakers represent spatial relations, McDonough et al. (2003) showed scenes involving the tight and loose fit to both Korean-​speaking adults and English-​speaking adults. The study demonstrated a contrast between the two groups of subjects in distinguishing between the tight and loose fit scenes. Korean-​speaking adults appeared to recognize the two spatial relations, but English-​speaking adults didn’t. McDonough et al. (2003) also found that, unlike adult English speakers, preverbal infants, raised in English-​speaking and Korean-​speaking households, appeared to distinguish between the tight and loose fit. McDonough et al. (2003) noted that this suggested that preverbal infants’ categorization of the tight-​and loose-​fit containment may be universal. Once they begin learning a language, those who learn English will group the tight-​and loose-​fit containment into a single category by the term “in.” On the other hand, infants who grow up learning Korean will continue to distinguish between the

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  31

tight-​and loose-​fit containment categories, exemplifying the influence of learned languages (Boroditsky 2006). Objects Many languages have grammatical gender systems which assign a gender to each noun. Grammatically, words belonging to different genders will get treated differently, and words belonging to the same grammatical gender will get treated the same. In a series of studies, Boroditsky et al. (2003) tested whether talking about inanimate objects with gender markers leads people to relate these objects to gender features. They asked a group of native German speakers and native Spanish speakers to write down the first three adjectives in English that came to mind to describe inanimate objects having opposite gender assignment in German and Spanish. It turns out that the descriptions the subjects gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, the word for “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. While the German speakers were more likely to choose words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful” to describe a key, the Spanish speakers were more likely to use “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny” to do that. The word for “bridge,” on the other hand, is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. When asked to describe a bridge, the German speakers were more likely to respond with words like “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender.” In contrast, for the same task, the Spanish speakers were more likely to come up with “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” In another study conducted without labels and verbalization in any language, Boroditsky et al. (2003) asked a group of native German speakers and native Spanish ones to rate the similarity of pairs of unlabeled pictures depicting objects and people. Again, all the objects were chosen to have opposite grammatical genders in German and Spanish. The picture of each object was compared to pictures of several biological males and females. Both German and Spanish subjects rated grammatically feminine objects to be more similar to females and grammatically masculine objects more similar to males. Treating objects as masculine or feminine in the grammar makes people think of these objects as being more like men or women, respectively. Similar experiments were conducted with native English speakers to test whether learning new grammatical categories can shape the way people think about inanimate objects. In a study similar to the previous one, a group of native English speakers was taught about the soupative/​oosative distinction in the fictional Gumbuzi language. The soupative/​oosative distinction was designed to correspond to biological gender, which also extended to inanimate objects. After mastering the soupative/​oosative distinction, the English subjects were asked to rate the similarity of pairs of pictures depicting people

32  Chun-Ping Yen

and objects that were either in the same grammatical category or in different grammatical ones in Gumbuzi. These subjects, like in the German and Spanish examples, rated pairs of items that were in the same grammatical category as more similar than items that came from different grammatical categories. Boroditsky et al. (2003) thus suggested that a grammatical distinction in language can affect people’s thinking about objects. Reference In a series of studies, Machery and colleagues suggested that speakers of different languages apprehend the semantic reference of proper names differently (Machery et al. 2004, 2015). Machery et al. (2015, 65) presented the following “clarified Gödel case” to native English-​speaking and native Chinese-​speaking subjects: Suppose that John has learned in college that Gödel is the man who proved an important mathematical theorem, called the incompleteness of arithmetic. John is quite good at mathematics and he can give an accurate statement of the incompleteness theorem, which he attributes to Gödel as the discoverer. But this is the only thing that he has heard about Gödel. Now suppose that Gödel was not the author of this theorem. A man called “Schmidt,” whose body was found in Vienna under mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did the work in question. His friend Gödel somehow got hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work, which was thereafter attributed to Gödel. Thus he has been known as the man who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic. Most people who have heard the name “Gödel” are like John; the claim that Gödel discovered the incompleteness theorem is the only thing they have ever heard about Gödel. The subjects were then asked to answer the following question (Machery et al. 2015, 66): When John uses the name “Gödel,” regardless of whom he might intend to be talking about, he is actually talking about: (A) the person who really discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic; (B) the person who got hold of the manuscript and claimed credit for the work. It turned out that 61.2% of the native Chinese-​speaking subjects picked the answer A, and 59.5 % of the native English-​speaking subjects picked the answer B.

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  33

In a follow-​up study, they presented the Chinese version of this case to another group of native Chinese-​speaking subjects, and 81.5% of them chose the answer A. The result suggests that speakers of different languages have different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names.

Closing remarks Scholars have long debated the question of to what extent speakers of different languages think differently about the world.10 While recent empirical research supports the idea that languages affect the ways people think about many aspects of the world, it would be premature to definitively answer this long-​debated question just yet. It is enough, for now, to point to evidence that speakers of different languages attend to significant aspects of the world differently. Given the dominant status of English in academic philosophy, if speakers of different languages see and think of significant aspects of the world in different ways, then philosophers, as Schwitzgebel cautions, “risk being excessively predisposed to concepts and patterns of thought that are comfortable in English” (Schwitzgebel 2019). It will be at a significant loss to philosophy’s society, intellectually, if that continues to be the case. Yet as we can see from this work, having a common language for scholarly exchange does not necessarily lead to a highly dominant language, nor to a highly insular circle of community. It is up to philosophers to make philosophy a more inclusive and diverse discipline. A certain language proficiency is surely crucial for academic performance in philosophy in that research output must be presented in a way that the targeted community expects. Nonetheless, as discussed at the start of this chapter, English’s global status in scholarly research and publication is partly due to its status within global academic evaluation systems, which are heavily biased toward English-​language journals. We should be mindful of not turning judgments on research quality into comparisons between native and non-​native English proficiency (Lillis and Curry 2013; Lillis et al. 2010; Yen and Hung 2019). Furthermore, in order to “decentre” (to borrow a term from Curry and Lillis 2010) current practices in academic knowledge production, circulation and evaluation, we should create a more inclusive environment for scholars with different linguistic backgrounds by having more international participation and multilingual collaboration in journals and conferences (Ferguson 2007). This includes: encouraging local and regional collaboration networks (Wolters 2015), including and acknowledging non-​English mediating-​ work in academic evaluation systems,11 and urging English-​ language journals to recruit more bilingual or multilingual scholars to editorial boards.

34  Chun-Ping Yen

Notes 1 This seems a current standard requirement for journal article submission nowadays. Take an example I borrowed from Contesi and Terrone (2018). In the section of “English Language Editing” in their “Instructions for Authors,” Erkenntnis asks the authors “to ensure the English language [of their manuscripts is] of sufficient quality to be understood.” 2 For example, according to Lillis and Curry (2010, 9), 67% out of the 66,166 academic journals in Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory (2009) use at least some English. A 2012 study from the scientific-​research publication Research Trends also reports that about 80% of all journals indexed in Scopus, the world’s largest database for peer-​reviewed journals, are published in English (van Weijen 2012). 3 For a more detailed discussion on the meaning of “lingua franca,” see Gobbo and Russo (2020). 4 Various surveys highlight the burden of having to write in a second language in sciences (Bortolus 2012; Clavero 2011; Corcoran 2015; Di Bitetti and Ferreras 2017; Ferguson 2007; Guariguata et al. 2011; Mori et al. 2015) and in humanities (De Schutter and Robichaud 2015; Hyland 2016; Langum and Sullivan 2017; Radder 2015; Wolters 2015). 5 The meaning of “Anglophone” can be ambiguous sometimes. For example, while Oxford English Dictionary defines it as an English-​speaking person, Cambridge English Dictionary and Merriam-​Webster Dictionary define it as a person who speaks English, especially in countries where other languages are also spoken. Here the term is used to refer to linguistic communities whose members speak English as their native or first language regardless of the location of these communities. Given the status of English in academic knowledge production, circulation, and evaluation globally, researchers often, following Canagarajah (1996), differentiate between the Anglophone scholars and the non-​Anglophone scholars as at the center and at the periphery of the global academic community respectively. 6 See Curry and Lillis (2010) for case studies of Slovak, Hungarian, Spanish, and Portuguese scholars; Flowerdew and Li (2009) for a case study of Chinese scholars; Buckingham (2008) for a case study of Turkish scholars. Research continues to be published in many languages other than English for many reasons, yet is severely underrepresented in citation indices generated by ISI. 7 Citation practices here include in-​text citations, bibliographic references, and the writer’s measurement of the cited sources for evaluative purposes. 8 The study also demonstrates a similar result in the case of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Only one (Jürgen Habermas) of the 100 most-​cited recent authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy worked the majority of his career in a non-​Anglophone country and was primarily writing in a language other than English. 9 Lillis et al. (2010) also reported a “telling case” where citations in languages other than English were not valued. A Hungarian psychologist wrote a manuscript submitted to an English-​language international journal. There were 40 references, and among which, only one was not English-​language. It was a Hungarian-​language unpublished Ph.D. thesis with an English translation of the thesis title provided. Somehow it caused a problem. An excerpt of one of the reviewer comments reads as follows (Lillis et al. 2010, 118–​119):

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  35 As a general comment the style needs to be polished. In any instance sentences follow each other without logical connections and the authors often refer to other publications that may not be available to the ordinary unilingual or even bilingual North American reader. By themselves these two points make it difficult to evaluate the results or the comments passed. See also Breeze (2015). 10 See Boroditsky (2006), Reines and Prinz (2009), and Wolff and Holmes (2011) for literature reviews on the subject. 11 Pérez (2018) suggests that journals accept contributions in multiple languages; when a non-​English paper is accepted for publication, the journal should publish it along with an English translation. She also suggests that conferences held in non-​ English-​speaking countries should encourage presentations in multiple languages. Other possibilities include encouraging English-​speaking scholars to acquire proficiency in other languages and engaging with scholarship in non-​English-​language networks.

References Alcoff, L. M. (2013). Philosophy’s Civil Wars. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 87, 16–​43. Ayala, S. (2015). Philosophy and the Non-​ Native Speaker Condition. American Philosophical Association Newsletter in Feminism and Philosophy 14 (2), 2–​9. Boroditsky, L. (2006). Linguistic Relativity. In Nadel, L., ed. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publication Group, 917–​921. Boroditsky, L. & Gaby, A. (2010). Remembrance of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community. Psychological Science 21 (11), 1635–​1639. Boroditsky, L., Fuhrman, O. & McCormick, K. (2011). Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think about Time Differently? Cognition 118 (1), 123–​129. Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A. & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner, D. & Goldin-​Meadow, S., eds. Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. MIT Press, 61–​79. Bortolus, A. (2012). Running Like Alice and Losing Good Ideas: On the Quasi-​ Compulsive Use of English by Non-​Native English Speaking Scientists. Ambio 41 (7), 769–​772. Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2000). Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. C., eds. Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, Cambridge University Press, 475–​511. Breeze, R. (2015). Citing outside the Community? An Investigation of the Language of Bibliography in Top Journals. In Alustrué, R. P. & Pérez-​Llantada, C., eds. English as a Scientific and Research Language: Debates and Discourses: English in Europe, vol. 2. De Gruyter, 37–​58. Buckingham, L. (2008). Development of English Academic Writing Competence by Turkish Scholars. International Journal of Doctoral Studies 3, 1–​18. Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). Non-​Discursive Requirements in Academic Publishing, Material Resources of Periphery Scholars, and the Politics of Knowledge Production. Written Communication 13 (4), 435–​472.

36  Chun-Ping Yen Canagarajah, A. S. (2002). A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. University of Pittsburgh Press. Cassin, B., Apter, E., Lezra, J. & Wood, M., eds. (2014). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton University Press. Chen, R.-​ L. (2013). Constructing a Causal Reasoning for the RCA Event: An Approach Based on Structural Causation and Abduction. SOCIETAS: A Journal for Philosophical Study of Public Affairs 46, 81–​130 (in Mandarin). Chen, R.-​L. (2014). Flying out from the Cage: Reflections on Causation in Taiwan’s Public Health Cases. Academia Sinica Law Journal 15, 283–​329 (in Mandarin). Choi, S. & Bowerman, M. (1991). Learning to Express Motion Events in English and Korean: The Influence of Language-​Specific Lexicalization Patterns. Cognition 41, 83–​121. Clavero, M. (2011). Language Bias in Ecological Journals. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 9 (2), 93–​94. Conklin, S. L., Artamonova, I. & Hassoun, N. (2019). The State of the Discipline: New Data on Women Faculty in Philosophy. Ergo 6 (30), 541–​868. Contesi, F. & Terrone, E. (2018). Introduction. Philosophical Papers 47 (1), 1–​20. Contessa, G. (2014a). Analytic Philosophy and the English Language: Some Data and Some Preliminary Thoughts. Blog post at Yet another philosopher’s blog. http://​yetanotherphilosophersblog.blogspot.com/​2014/​09/​analytic-​philosophy-​and-​ english.html. Accessed Jan. 2020. Contessa, G. (2014b). More Data on the Underrepresentation of EFL Philosophers. Blog post at Yet another philosopher’s blog. http://​yetanotherphilosophersblog. blogspot.com/​2014/​10/​more-​data-​on-​underrepresentation-​of-​efl.html. Accessed Jan. 2020. Corcoran, J. N. (2015). English as the International Language of Science: A Case Study of Mexican Scientists’ Writing for Publication. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto. Curry, M. J. & Lillis, T. M. (2010). Academic Research Networks: Accessing Resources for English-​Language Publishing. English for Specific Purposes 29, 281–​295. De Schutter, H. & Robichaud, D. (2015). Van Parijsian Linguistic Justice: Context, Analysis, and Critiques. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18 (2), 87–​112. Di Bitetti, M. S. & Ferreras, J. A. (2017). Publish (in English) or Perish: The Effect on Citation Rate of Using Languages Other than English in Scientific Publications. Ambio 46 (1), 121–​127. Everett, D. (2005). Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language. Current Anthropology 46 (4), 621–​646. Fausey, C. M. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Who Dunnit? Cross-​Linguistic Differences in Eye-​Witness Memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 18 (1), 150–​157. Ferguson, G. (2007). The Global Spread of English, Scientific Communication and ESP: Questions of Equity, Access and Domain Loss. Ibérica 13, 7–​38. Ferrer, A. (2012). What can we Do about Diversity? Blog post at Leiter reports. https://​ leiterreports.typepad.com/​blog/​2012/​12/​what-​can-​we-​do-​about-​diversity.html, Accessed Jan. 2020. Flowerdew, J. (2001). Attitudes of Journal Editors to Non-​ Native Speaker Contributions. TESOL Quarterly 35, 121–​150.

Linguistic diversity in philosophy  37 Flowerdew, J. (2013). English for Research Publication Purposes. In Paltridge, B. & Starfield, S., eds. The Handbook of English for Specific Purposes, John Wiley & Sons, 301–​321. Flowerdew, J. (2019). The Linguistic Disadvantage of Scholars Who Write in English as an Additional Language: Myth or Reality. Language Teaching 52, 249–​260. Flowerdew, J., & Li, Y. (2009). English or Chinese? The Trade-​off between Local and International Publication among Chinese Academics in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Journal of Second Language Writing 18, 1–​16. Gobbo, F. & Russo, F. (2020). Epistemic Diversity and the Question of Lingua Franca in Science and Philosophy. Foundations of Science 25, 185–​207. Guariguata, M. R., Sheil, D. & Murdiyarso, D. (2011). “Linguistic Injustice” is Not Black and White. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 26 (2), 58–​59. Hyland, K. (2016). Academic Publishing and the Myth of Linguistic Injustice. Journal of Second Language Writing 31, 58–​69. Kuteeva, M. & Mauranen, A. (2014). Writing for Publication in Multilingual Contexts: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 13, 1–​4. Langum, V. & Sullivan, K. P. (2017). Writing Academic English as a Doctoral Student in Sweden: Narrative Perspectives. Journal of Second Language Writing 35, 20–​25. Lillis, T. M. & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. Routledge. Lillis, T. M. & Curry, M. J. (2013). English, Scientific Publishing and Participation in the Global Knowledge Economy. In Erling, E. J. & Seargeant, P., eds. English and Development: Policy, Pedagogy and Globalization. Multilingual Matters, 220–​242. Lillis, T., Hewings, A., Vladimirou, D. & Curry, M. J. (2010). The Geolinguistics of English as an Academic Lingua Franca: Citation Practices across English-​Language National and English-​Language International Journals. International journal of Applied Linguistics 20 (1), 111–​135. Lucy, J. & Gaskains, S. (2001). Grammatical Categories and the Development of Classification Preferences: A Comparative Approach. In Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S., eds. Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge University Press, 257–​283. Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S. & Stich, S. P. (2004). Semantics, Cross-​Cultural Style. Cognition 92, B1–​B12. Machery, E., Sytsma, J., & Deutsch, M. (2015). Speaker’s Reference and Cross-​Cultural Semantics. In Bianchi, A., ed. On Reference. Oxford University Press, 62–​74. McDonough, L., Choi, S. & Mandler, J. M. (2003). Understanding Spatial Relations: Flexible Infants, Lexical Adults. Cognitive Psychology 46, 229–​259. Mori, A. S., Qian, S. & Tatsumi, S. (2015). Academic Inequality through the Lens of Community Ecology: A Meta-​Analysis. PeerJ 3, e1457. Paxton, M., Figdor, C. & Tiberius, V. (2012). Quantifying the Gender Gap: An Empirical Study of the Under-​Representation of Women in Philosophy. Hypatia 27 (4), 949–​957. Pérez, D. I. (2018). Languages for the Analytic Tradition. Philosophical Papers 47 (1), 49–​69. Radder, H. (2015). How Inclusive is European Philosophy of Science? International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (2), 149–​165.

38  Chun-Ping Yen Reines, M. F. & Prinz, J. (2009). Reviving Whorf: The Return of Linguistic Relativity. Philosophy Compass 4 (6), 1022–​1032. Salager-​Meyer, F. (2014). Writing and Publishing in Peripheral Scholarly Journals: How to Enhance the Global Influence of Multilingual Scholars? Journal of English academic Purposes 13, 78–​82. Schwitzgebel, E. (2019). Disadvantages of a Lingua Franca in Philosophy. Blog post at The splintered mind. http://​schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/​2019/​07/​disadvantages-​ of-​lingua-​franca-​in.html. Accessed Jan. 2020. Schwitzgebel, E., Huang, L. Ta-​Lun, Higgins, A. & Gonzalez-​Cabrera, I. (2018). The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses. Philosophical Papers 47 (1), 21–​48. van Weijen, D. (2012). The Language of (Future) Scientific Communication. Research Trends 31. www.researchtrends.com/​issue-​31-​november-​2012/​the-​language-​of-​ future-​scientific-​communication/​. Accessed July 2020. Weihelm, I., Conklin, S. L. & Hassoun, N. (2018). New Data on the Representation of Women in Philosophy Journals: 2004–​2015. Philosophical Studies 175, 1441–​1464. Wolff, P. & Holmes, K. J. (2011). Linguistic Relativity. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 2 (3), 253–​265. Wolters, G. (2015). Globalized Parochialism: Consequences of English as Lingua Franca in Philosophy of Science. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29, 189–​200. Yen, C.-​P. & Hung, T.-​W. (2019). New Data on the Linguistic Diversity of Authorship in Philosophy Journals. Erkenntnis 84 (4), 953–​974.

Chapter 3

Anti-​c olonial feminisms and their philosophies of science Latin American issues Sandra Harding

Introduction Feminisms have identified the centrality of the control of women’s sexuality and labor in a colonized culture in the success of any attempted colonialism.1 They point out how strategies that colonialisms invent to achieve this goal in turn shape gender relations in the colonizers’ home cultures. Moreover, these practices affect the colonizers’ entire colonial enterprise, including approaches to the production of knowledge, here referred to as the colonizers’ sciences and technologies. These feminisms also identify the locally distinctive residues and reinventions of such colonial projects, including gender relations, long after the end of formal colonial rule. Here the focus will be on several aspects of the particular ways in which this occurred in Latin America. Examining this location of colonialism is especially valuable because modernity was co-​created through the Spanish and Portuguese colonial encounters in the Americas. The central concerns of today’s mainstream modern sciences and technologies and their philosophies, adjusted to the institutional contexts of today, were invented in Europe’s encounter with the Americas beginning in 1492. Thus, Latin America’s history and present anti-​colonial projects are arguably of central importance for understanding today’s continuing global colonialities and the diverse resistances to them. The next section identifies issues about the history of modernity and coloniality. The following one reviews just three of the particular focuses of feminist concern with ontological, epistemological, and philosophy of science consequences in the context of Latin American persisting coloniality: the control of women’s sexuality and labor, the invisibility of men’s distinctive gender concerns (“men’s studies”), and the focus on local geographical, historical, and cultural spaces, instead of only on the supposedly universal. The section after this identifies some productive tensions in this work.

40  Sandra Harding

Modernity was created in Spanish and Portuguese encounters with the Americas Here the focus is mostly on one of today’s leading theoretical analyses: the Modernity/​ Coloniality/​ Decoloniality (MCD) arguments. These critiques of colonialism are in one sense recent. They began to flourish in the 1990s, though they often draw on analyses from the 1960s and 1970s. (See Dussel 1975; Grosfoguel et al. 2005; Mignolo 2000, 2011; Mignolo and Escobar 2010; Moraña et al. 2008; Quijano 2000; and also Nieto Olarte 2016 and Santos 2007, 2014.) In English they appeared after the postcolonial theories, which focused on the Middle East and Far East, and in the USA became institutionalized in literature and culture departments beginning in the 1970s (Said 1972). Yet there is an important sense in which they are five centuries old. By 1538 and 1551 colonial universities had been created in Santo Domingo, Lima, and Mexico City. These intellectual centers became sites of heated debates over Eurocentric epistemology and historiography. In these debates, criollo elites, mestizo, and indigenous intellectuals sought to demonstrate that European knowledge was unable to recognize, much less comprehend, the cultural differences and forms of governance of, amongst others, the vanquished Inca (Mendoza 2015). As Lewis Hanke points out, in the Americas it was only in Spanish colonialism that such debates occurred (Hanke 2002). Five themes in these writings are especially relevant for the discussion here. One is that modernity and coloniality are two sides of a coin: they have been deeply entangled since 1492, and modern sciences remain marked by central assumptions and practices of that long entanglement. As Enrique Dussel (1995) put the point: I argue that while modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence, it also originates in a dialectical relation with non-​Europe. Modernity appears when Europe organizes the initial world-​system and places itself at the center of world history over against a periphery equally constitutive of modernity … When one conceives modernity as part of a center-​ periphery system instead of an independent European phenomenon, the meanings of modernity, its origin, development, present crisis, and its postmodern antithesis change. (9–​10, 11; my emphasis) Moreover, colonialism was a significant generator of capitalism. The rise of capitalism depended on the extractions of silver and gold, and of labor, in the Americas (Quijano 2000). Thus MCD theory reconceptualizes the ways we think about modernity, colonialism, capitalism, democracy, and their accompanying knowledge system. Second, the distinctive focus on that history in the work of Dussel and others is not an attempt to enter a correction into standard histories of

Anti-colonial feminisms and philosophies  41

modernity and its sciences, thereby extending forward a linear Eurocentric intellectual history. Rather, the MCD program should be seen as another way of thinking that runs counter to the great modernist narratives (Christianity, liberalism, and Marxism); it locates its own inquiry at the very borders of systems of thought and reaches towards the possibility of non-​Eurocentric modes of thinking (Escobar 2010, 34). Third, MCD thought should be “rear guard theory,” in contrast to the typical “avant garde” stance of modern theorizing “from above.” It is to produce knowledges, or sciences, “from below” rather than from the interests and desires of elites. The social justice movements that began in the 1960s, such as the US civil rights movement, poor people’s movements, and feminisms, adopted this model of research. In feminism it appeared as “standpoint theory,” a transformation of “the standpoint of the proletariat” to serve feminist purposes (Harding 2004). In Latin America, social justice movements have been very active; from the coalition that the World Social Forum consistently creates, to the Zapatistas, the Andean highlands indigenous movements, such as Buen Vivir (de la Cadena 2010; Gudynas 2011; Santos 2004; Walsh 2010), and to Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Freire 1997). Fourth, MCD envisions a pluriverse: a world of only partially overlapping and partially conflicting worlds, rather than a single unified, coherent world, as in the standard modern Western model (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018; Escobar 2018; Reiter 2018) This concept is clarified below. Finally, innovative and well-​ developed projects for understanding the hideous effects of Iberian colonialism on gender and sexuality relations in the Americas as well as in Europe, and their entanglements with racial hierarchies, are visible in this work, though not consistently so (Lugones 2008, 2010; Mendoza 2015; Walsh 2016).2 This is the topic of the next section.

Race, gender, sexuality and colonialism: entanglements The Spanish miscegenation policies introduced in the Americas more hierarchical and rigid gender and sexuality relations than had already existed. They did so in ways that, to this day, deeply entangle race, gender, and sexuality hierarchies. They achieved this effect by installing pre-​Darwinian biological sciences of gender, sexuality, and racial hierarchies in service to social inequality (Lugones 2008; Schiwy 2010; Walsh 2016). There are at least four distinct literatures that have identified important gender/​ sexuality and race issues in the case of Spanish and Portuguese coloniality in the Americas. One is the extensive historical literature that has described sexuality, gender, and family forms both before and after colonization.3 Here is identified the more fluid and transient sexualities characteristic of some of the Amerindian cultures. A person’s sexuality could change over the course of one’s life, and it was not constrained by the gender binaries that attempt to contain modern Western sexual practices (Walsh 2016).

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These histories also focus on how the control of colonized women’s bodies—​ their sexuality and their labor—​ has always been crucial to the success of colonial projects. Maria Lugones (2008), Catherine Walsh (2016), Freya Schiwy (2010), and others have explored the especially rigid, hierarchical and entangled gender, sexuality, and racial hierarchies that the Iberians introduced to the Americas. Gaining control of the family relations of the colonized has always been a crucial and difficult task for colonizers. Also, medical and health histories often focus on issues about women, gender, and race. For example, Nancy Leys Stepan has produced extensive studies of the race and gender assumptions that directed eugenics in Latin America between the two World Wars.4 A second literature looks at the gendered, sexualized, and racialized assumptions of modernization theory and also its post-​World War II Third World development theory, policies, and practices (Escobar 1995; Visvanathan et al. 2011). Modernity itself has always meant leaving behind the household and whatever is associated with it, such as support for reproduction and women’s work. Decolonial men’s studies provide another perspective on these entanglements of gender, sexuality, and race (Vigoya et al. 2003). For example, Steven Harris (2005) points out that the Jesuits tended to reproduce their familiar European gendered domestic relations in the missions they established in the Americas. There they produced the highly profitable apothecaries that they sold around the globe. Yet it was the Amerindian male servants who in fact collected and analyzed the data about the indigenous plants, as part of the women’s work—​cooking, cleaning, etc.—​that they were assigned in the missions. The priests were the official authors of such apothecaries, but the actual scientists were Amerindian men servants. As noted earlier, gender relations exist between men (and between women), not only between men and women. An especially innovative literature rethinks political economy in the context of centering women’s everyday activities. Perhaps the most radical such an approach has been taken by Wendy Harcourt and Arturo Escobar (2005) in Women and the Politics of Place. Here they propose a political economy that starts off its projects from subaltern women’s needs in the particular places in which they carry out their activities. In a place-​based analysis of globalization, women are often the leading change agents—​a point obscured in conventional development and globalization studies. This is a new form of politics, they argue, and it produces new kinds of political subjects. Finally, there is the constant concern in these writings for an appropriate research methodology that can produce “science from below,” or “rear guard theory” in Santos’s phrase—​that is, sciences that can produce the kinds of knowledge that exploited groups need and want. Feminist standpoint methodology exemplifies a particular focus of the participatory action research (PAR) that emerged in the USA. and around the globe after World War II

Anti-colonial feminisms and philosophies  43

(Harding 2004; Park et al. 1993). PAR requires researchers to take up for their own projects the tasks of producing the kinds of knowledge/​information needed by already existing social movements that want to change public policy. Their research must participate in the projects of activists. Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) “borderlands” strategy is another example of such a standpoint methodology. “I think where I stand,” as Mignolo (2011) put the point, in borrowing Anzaldua’s argument. (This issue is pursued below.) These analyses raise the possibility that such kinds of entangled “rear guard” theory identified above can defeat the tendency of sciences to claim “innocence” with respect to the consequences of their research methodologies and the uses of the facts that they produce. These projects intend to take responsibility for their social and political consequences. Is the way that they intend to do so sufficient to escape the “imperial eyes” (Pratt 2008) with which scientific research has all too consistently mapped the world on behalf of the modern West?

Productive tensions By “productive” I mean that the theories identified above reveal tensions that do not appear immediately resolvable in any obviously fair and democratic way. Rather, they mark controversies that we have to negotiate while recognizing that the familiar intellectual frameworks and political strategies are probably not the most useful for moving forward in today’s world. “I think where I stand:” borderlands projects Walter Mignolo (2000) borrowed Anzaldua’s (1987) articulation of borderlands thinking to characterize the overall MCD agenda.5 Anzaldua’s argument was that for Chicanas living on the Texas side of the Texas–​Mexico border, and in particular, lesbian feminist Chicanas such as herself, a distinctive kind of creative thinking and politics could emerge from what was otherwise a contradictory, confusing, and often painful location. She identified many ways in which borderlands residents felt loyalties to conflicting aspects of their lives. For example, they felt loyalties to forcing their thinking that initially was in Spanish into English, where often in Mexico it could not fully be understood. They felt loyalties to their often sexist and heterosexist Mexican families and to their Mexican nation and its culture, yet also to their proud identities as women, as lesbians, and as US citizens. Yet it was precisely learning to think out of the space between the two sides of those borderlands that was generating new and valuable conversations, politics, and knowledge production. This stance of refusing to assimilate completely to one culture or the other, and also refusing to go away, opens into a number of ongoing political and intellectual debates. How knowledge can and should be produced is an issue in each of them.

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For example, what is the role of experience in the production of knowledge? Social justice movements often have insisted that minoritized groups’ reports of their experiences should take priority over the perceptions of dominant groups that have benefitted from the discriminatory and exploitative assumptions, policies, and practices that created such minoritized experiences for others. Yet the particular claims of minoritized individuals or groups are never automatically incorrigible. We frequently change our minds about just how to characterize our past experiences. After all, marital rape, date rape, sexual harassment, and caring labor are concepts that came into existence only relatively recently through vigorous political and intellectual struggles. Nor should it mean that members of dominant groups cannot make valuable contributions to knowledge that is for members of subjugated groups. John Stuart Mill made important contributions to the feminist thinking of his day, as, obviously, did Marx and Engels to critiques of the class system that was oppressing the poor of their day (and ours). But how is it that members of dominant groups can manage to produce such valuable contributions to knowledge for subjugated groups? Borderlands knowledge production opens into a continuum of epistemological, ontological, and methodological projects that are all intended to create “knowledge from below.” These projects have affinities with participatory action research projects developed initially to give voice to poor people in 1950s anti-​poverty projects (Park et al. 1993). Subsequently, the civil rights movement’s anti-​racist research, feminist standpoint theories (Harding 2004), African American women’s intersectionality projects (Cho et al. 2013), “citizen science” or “civic science” projects in the natural sciences (Bäckstrand 2003; Hess 2007), and the collaborative research projects worked out between indigenous groups and modern Western scientists (Fortmann 2008; Wylie 2015) are significant parts of this continuum. Thus these projects refuse to start off their thinking from the concerns of militaries, corporations, and states, as does 90% or so of natural science research and much social science research in the USA. Research is always socially located. Can and should indigenous ways of thinking and living be resurrected and preserved? A second site of tensions is the frequent attempt to revalue indigenous thought and living practices. Resurgent indigenous movements in Latin America have had a relatively high presence in politics (Aparicio and Blaser 2008; Blaser 2013; Santos 2004). In the Andes highlands, Buen Vivir got its agendas into the new constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador when left political parties came to power in 2006 and 2007. (de la Cadena 2010; Gudynas 2011; Walsh 2010). The indigenous Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia. Such situations create a number of productive tensions (not to mention occasional violent reactions). For example, attempts to preserve traditional ways of life

Anti-colonial feminisms and philosophies  45

can conflict with indigenous peoples’ desires to access better health and education, and other resources to deal with destruction of their environments by extraction of raw materials, plantation industries, and climate change. They want selectively to preserve their own cultures amidst modernity’s powerful effects. Thus, additionally, there no longer exist any purely indigenous ways of thinking and living, untouched by modern Western cultures, for indigenous groups have been interacting with European cultures from 1492 through to the present day. Relatedly, there is the emergence of “inappropriate Others.” Joanne Rappaport (2003) points out that a new class of indigenous intellectuals has emerged in Colombia. They are not subordinated, but rather have a distinctive political agenda. Born to rural indigenes, they have benefitted from the improved educational and economic infrastructures initiated in the last few decades. Thus they are now cosmopolitan, sometimes hold doctorates, speak at the United Nations and the World Bank, and have been elected by non-​indigenous urban voters to positions in the national Colombian House of Representatives (Rappaport 2003, 338). They constantly relocate Western science to within indigenous research projects. For example, they have advocated for particular kinds of scientific information in order to protect the work and world of their mountain gods or river spirits. Materialism: Is it enough? And, on the other hand, do we have enough of it? A distinguishing mark of modern Western knowledge systems is that they are secular. From Galileo to the present day, modern Western sciences have insisted on a disenchanted world, to be described and explained in purely secular terms. Yet many non-​Western cultures refuse to give up embedding their knowledge systems in their ethical commitments, including to religious and spiritual assumptions and practices. It is ironic that the secularist stance adopted in the West to advance progressive politics and knowledge production now has become associated with Western imperialism and unethical relations to other cultures. In Latin America, too, indigenous groups insist that the secularism of Western sciences distorts fundamental commitments of indigenous cultures. It reduces understandings of indigenous knowledge to projects unrecognizable from indigenous perspectives (Isasi-​ Diaz and Mendieta 2012; Perez 2005). Recently reconsiderations of the secularist stance have appeared in the North. As part of resistance to the anti-​ Islam discourses that emerged after 9/​11, one theme in them is to begin to reimagine how to live in democratic social relations in a constantly shrinking multicultural world. Liberal democracy’s insistence on the separation of church and state seems to lack the space for inclusive social relations with cultures that are significantly constituted by religious and spiritual commitments. To them, to give up such

46  Sandra Harding

commitments is to give up their culture (Levey and Modood 2009; Mendieta and VanAntwerpen 2011). A related theme in the North insists that secularisms are multiple and culturally specific; that is, they never lack specific cultural traits. Every religion produces its own distinctive form of secularism when it specifies what are its central commitments and ways of observing them. Thus Catholic, Jewish, Lutheran, and Islamic secularisms are distinctively different from each other. Moreover, this analysis supports earlier insights by historians that modern Western sciences in fact are distinctively Christian, and even specifically Protestant (Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008). No wonder that they are experienced as alien impositions by other cultures. Finally, the recent New Materialist movement has argued that a preoccupation with only the epistemology of science leaves such criticisms still contained within false and damaging modern ontologies. The nature/​culture divide remains intact until nature is understood as having active agency in human projects. This position coincides with some Latin American projects. These arguments are well worth pursuing further (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010).

Conclusion In conclusion, Latin American innovations in the production of knowledge have opened up the possibility of developing egalitarian ontological and epistemological pluriverses. These would be “worlds of worlds,” in which multiple knowledge systems around the globe partially overlap with each other, and none can claim unique universal legitimacy. In order for that vision to become a reality, however, tremendous efforts must be made to transform economic and political power relations both between and inside rich and poor cultures and societies around the globe. Actual, material inequalities and their hideous consequences are the major source of oppressive research methodologies, epistemologies, ontologies, and philosophies of science, both locally and around the globe. Yet we live today in a moment in which new spaces for engaging with such projects appear every month, as the urgency to do so increases. Knowing and living are intimately connected: only if we learn to live in more democratic ways can we come to know ourselves and others in the kinds of satisfactory ways that are not blocked by inequalities.

Notes 1 This essay draws on Harding (2016, 2017, 2018) and Harding and Mendoza (forthcoming). I am using here a number of rich literatures. However, my point is not to engage with these fascinating literatures, but rather, to give readers a sense of the larger conceptual frameworks within which the later addressed issues are located.

Anti-colonial feminisms and philosophies  47 2 Mendoza’s essay provides a comprehensive and rich review of feminist themes in these literatures, an account of the significant differences between postcolonial and Decolonial analyses, plus an analysis of the relation of this Latin American feminist Decolonial thinking to several related schools of thought in the USA. See also Guy (2011) and Lavrin (2011) for literature reviews of the histories of gender and sexuality relations in Latin America. (From here on I will capitalize Decolonial to distinguish the MCD analysis used here from many other decolonial practices.) 3 This literature is too vast and complex to review here. However an excellent brief overview of it can be found in Kevin Terraciano and Lisa Sousa’s (2011) “Historiography of New Spain.” 4 See Stepan (1982, 1996). Rodriguez (2001) introduces a special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review focused on her work, with a response by Stepan. 5 See Mendoza 2015 for an analysis of the problems with this kind of borrowing, or appropriation, of feminist analysis for non-​feminist projects.

References Alaimo, S. & Hekman, S., eds. (2008). Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press. Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/​La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books. Aparicio, J. R. & Blaser, M. (2008). The “Lettered City” and the Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Latin America. Anthropological Quarterly 81 (1), 59–​94. Bäckstrand, K. (2003). Civic Science for Sustainability: Reframing the Role of Experts, Policy-​Makers and Citizens in Environmental Governance. Global Environmental Politics 3 (4), 24–​41. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. Blaser, M. (2013). Ontological Conflicts and the Stories of Peoples in Spite of Europe. Current Anthropology 54 (5), 547–​568. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. & McCall, L. (2013). Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4), 785–​810. Coole, D. & Frost, S., eds. (2010). New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press. de la Cadena, M. (2010). Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes. Cultural Anthropology 25 (2), 334–​370. de la Cadena, M. & Blaser, M., eds. (2018). A World of Many Worlds. Duke University Press. Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation. Tr. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky. Orbis Books. Enrique, D. (1995). The Invention of the Americas. Tr. Michael D. Barber. Continuum. Escobar, A. (1995). Encountering Development. Princeton University Press. Escobar, A. (2010). Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/​Coloniality Research Program. In Mignolo, W. D. & Escobar, A., eds. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Routledge, 179–​210. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. Duke University Press. Fortmann, L., ed. (2008). Participatory Research in Conservation and Rural Livelihoods. Wiley-​Blackwell.

48  Sandra Harding Freire, P. (1997) [1968]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Tr. M. B. Ramos. Continuum. Grosfoguel, R., Maldonado-​Torres, N. & Saldivar, J. D. eds. (2005). Latin@os in the World System: Decolonization Struggles in the 21st Century U.S. Empire. Paradigm Publishers. Gudynas, E. (2011). Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow. Development 54 (4), 441–​447. Guy, D. J. (2011). Gender and Sexuality in Latin America. In Moya, J. C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, Oxford University Press, 1–​ 16. www.oxfordhandbooks.com/​view/​10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780195166217.001.0001/​ oxfordhb-​9780195166217-​e-​13?print=pdf Hanke, L. (2002). The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. 2nd ed. Southern Methodist University Press. Harcourt, W. & Escobar, A., eds. (2005). Women and the Politics of Place. Kumarian Press. Harding, S., ed. (2004). The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Routledge. Harding, S. (2016). Latin American Decolonial Social Studies of Scientific Knowledge: Alliances and Tensions. Science, Technology and Human Values 41 (6), 1063–​1087. Harding, S. (2017). Latin American Decolonial Studies: Feminist Issues. Feminist Studies 43 (3), 624–​636. Harding, S. (2018). State of the Field: Latin American Decolonial Philosophy of Science. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​ j.shpsa.218.10.001. Harding, S. & Mendoza, B. (forthcoming). Latin American Decolonial Feminist Philosophy of Knowledge Production. In Crasnow, S. and Intemann, K., eds. Routledge Handbook of Feminist Philosophy of Science. Routledge, 104–​116. Harris, S. J. (2005). Jesuit Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–​1773. Isis 96, 71–​79. Hess, D. J. (2007). Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry: Activism, Innovation, and the Environment in an Era of Globalizaztion. MIT Press. Isasi-​Diaz, A. M. & Mendieta, E., eds. (2012). Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/​o Theology and Philosophy. Fordham University Press. Jakobsen, J. R. & Pellegrini, A., eds. (2008). Secularisms. Duke University Press. Lavrin, A. (2011). Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America. In Moya, J. C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. Oxford University Press, 153–​180. Levey, G. B. and Modood, T. (2009). Secularism, Religion, and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge University Press. Lugones, M. (2008). Coloniality and Gender. Tabula Rasa 9, 73–​102. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia 25 (4), 742–​759. Mendieta, E. & VanAntwerpen, J., eds. (2011). The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. Columbia University Press. Mendoza, B. (2015). Coloniality of Gender and Power: From Postcoloniality to Decoloniality. In Disch, L. & Hawkesworth, M., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Oxford University Press, 100–​121. Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local Histories/​ Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press.

Anti-colonial feminisms and philosophies  49 Mignolo, W. D. & Escobar, A., eds. (2010). Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Routledge. Moraña, M., Dussel, E. & Jauregui, C. A., eds. (2008). Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Duke University Press. Nieto Olarte, M. (2016). The European Comprehension of the World: Early Modern Science and Eurocentrism. In Vessuri, H. & Kuhn, M., eds. The Global Social Science World: Under “Western” Universalism. Ibidem-​Verlag. Park, P. et al., eds. 1993. Voices of Change: Participatory Research in the United States and Canada. Bergin & Garvey. Perez, L. E. (2005). Decolonizing Spiritualities: Spiritualities that are Decolonizing and the Work of Decolonizing our Understanding of These. In Grosfoguel, R., Maldonado-​ Torres, N. & Saldivar, J. D., eds. Latin@s in the World-​ System. Paradigm Publishers. Pratt, M. L. (2008). Imperial Eyes, 2nd ed. Routledge. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla 1 (3), 533–​580. Rappaport, J. (2003). Redrawing the Nation: Indigenous Intellectuals and Ethnic Pluralism in Contemporary Colombia. In Thurner, M. & Guerrero, A., eds. After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas. Duke University Press, 310–​346. Reiter, B., ed. (2018). Constructing the Pluriverse. Duke University Press. Rodriguez, I., ed. (2001). The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Duke University Press. Said, E. (1972). Orientalism. Pantheon. Santos, B. de S. (2004). The World Social Forum. Viveka. Santos, B. de S., ed. (2007). Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. Verso. Santos, B. de S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers. Schiwy, F. (2010). Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity: Gender, Race, and Binary Thinking. In Mignolo, W. D. & Escobar, A., eds. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Routledge, 125–​148. Stacey, A. & Hekman, S. J., eds. (2008). Material Feminisms. Indiana University Press. Stepan, N. (1982). The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–​1960. Macmillan. Stepan, N. (1996). The Hour of Eugenics. Cornell University Press. Sumi, C., Crenshaw, K. & McCall, L. (2013). Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (4), 785–​810. Terraciano, K. & Sousa, L. (2011). Historiography of New Spain. In Moya, J. C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. Oxford University Press, 25–​64. Vigoya, M.V., Fonseca, C. L. W., Latapi, A.E. & Fernandiz, F. (2003). Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. Duke University Press. Visvanathan, N., et al., eds. (2011). The Women, Gender, and Development Reader, 2nd ed. New York: Zed Books. Walsh, C. (2010). Development as Buen Vivir. Development 53 (1), 15–​21.

50  Sandra Harding Walsh, C. (2016). On Gender and its Otherwise. In Harcourt, W., ed. The Palgrave Handbook on Gender and Development. Palgrave, 34–​47. Wylie, A. (2015). A Plurality of Pluralisms: Collaborative Practice in Archaeology. In Padovani, F., Richardson, A. & Tsou, J. Y., eds. Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives from Science and Technology Studies. Springer, 189–​210.

Chapter 4

Philosophy of science in China Politicized, depoliticized, and repoliticized Yuanlin Guo and David Ludwig

Introduction Philosophy of science has become increasingly reflective about its historically changing political ambitions. The most common historical narrative moves from Austria to the United States by emphasizing the political activism of the Vienna Circle (Uebel 2010; Richardson 2009), the depoliticization of the field in the cold war period (Reisch 2005; Vaesen and Katzav 2019), and more recent trends towards re-​politicization in areas such as feminist philosophy of science (Howard 2009; Longino 2006). This chapter expands the narrow geographic focus of this history of philosophy of science by focusing on the developments in China that followed a very different historical path. Academia in China has been a handmaid of politics since the Qin Dynasty (221–​206 bc). Prominent historian Zehua Liu (1935–​2018) has argued that ancient Chinese society was centered around the political power of the king. The king’s power dominated all aspects of the society, including the social resources, materials, and wealth. It also dominated agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, education, science, and technology, and the fate of every member of society. In a society ruled by the king’s power, all people and materials were to some extent at the disposal of political power. All theoretical or actual care for the people was only a means to political ends. (Liu 2015, 22) In contemporary China, academia remains in the service of the central political power as every academic field has to be approved and given an identity through the government. Without such political approval, a field has no opportunities of enrolling students, setting up journals, receiving research funding, and so on. The emergence and development of philosophy of science in China is therefore closely entangled with its political position in relation to the government. This chapter focuses on these dynamics of politicization, depoliticization, and repoliticization that have characterized the field.

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Few Chinese scholars studied philosophy of science before the second half of the 20th century. After 1949, the field became established as a part of Marxist philosophy with the goal of creating an intellectual bridge between dialectical materialism and the natural sciences. In this first phase from 1949 until 1978, Engels’s work on Dialectics of Nature constituted the main point of reference and remained almost entirely disconnected from non-​Marxist debates in philosophy of science. Instead, Dialectics of Nature was widely employed and taught with the goal of bringing the natural sciences into the service of dialectical materialism and communist society. From 1978 until 2012, philosophy of science became increasingly independent from the Dialectics of Nature. The so-​called “Opening-​up” meant that China would also incorporate intellectual traditions from the West. Under these circumstances, a lot of Western philosophy of science was introduced into China. For example, the work of Schlick (1882–​ 1936), Carnap (1891–​1970), Popper (1902–​1994), Kuhn (1922–​1996), Feyerabend (1924–​1994), Lakatos (1922–​1974), Putnam (1926–​2016) and van Fraassen (1941–​) had a significant impact on Chinese philosophers of science during this period. However, Western philosophy of science did not easily integrate with Dialectics of Nature, which had also been thoroughly reworked for the purposes of Marxism in China. As a consequence, Dialectics of Nature was renamed Philosophy of Science and Technology in 1987. At this stage, philosophy of science in China was increasingly conceptualized as a depoliticized project of understanding the nature of scientific inquiry that contrasted with the overtly political ambitions of Dialectics of Nature. Depoliticization was embraced by Chinese philosophers of science as a strategy of creating autonomy from direct political demands. However, the Chinese Communist Party again put greater emphasis on the political function of the field since 2012 when Jinping Xi (1953–​) became the General Secretary of the Central Committee. At present, the Communist Party insists that Chinese philosophy of science should be a Marxist branch of philosophy, not a Western (non-​Marxist) branch of philosophy.1 The current and future development of Chinese philosophy of science is therefore highly dependent on the wider political developments within China.

Politicized philosophy of science in China (1949–​1 978) Philosophy of science in China emerged from Dialectics of Nature, which aimed to bridge dialectical materialism and natural science for the purposes of communist society. All research in communist China is supposed to obey dialectical materialism. However, dialectical materialism is abstract and sciences are concrete. For this reason, it is necessary to create two bridges between dialectical materialism and sciences: one is Dialectics of Nature, which links natural science and technology with dialectical materialism;

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another is historical materialism, which links social science and humanities with dialectical materialism. Dialectics of Nature is based on the unfinished manuscript with the same title (Dialektik der Natur) and Anti-​Dühring by Friedrich Engels (1820–​1895), Materialism and Empirical Criticism by Vladimir Lenin (1870–​1924), and the Mathematical Manuscript by Karl Marx (1818–​1883). During this period, Dialectics of Nature was further developed and refined in communist China. According to “the long-​term plan for the development of science during the 12-​year period from 1956 until 1967,” which the Chinese government published in 1956, Dialectics of Nature ought to deal with the following nine topics: 1. basic concepts in mathematics and natural science, and dialectical materialist categories; 2.  methodology of science; 3.  kinds of motion and change in nature, and how to classify science; 4.  historical development of ideas of mathematics and natural science; 5.  criticising idealism in mathematics and natural science; 6.  philosophical problems in mathematics; 7. philosophical problems in physics, chemistry, astronomy, and earth science; 8.  philosophical problems in biology and psychology; 9.  natural science as social phenomena. (Gong 1996, 21) The nine topics were mainly concerned with the methodology of science and so-​called view of science. Methodology of science aimed at providing scientists with guidance about scientific research methods. The view of science aimed to distinguish sciences of the proletariat from those of the bourgeoisie, to praise the former, to attack the latter, and to argue against idealism in science and for materialism in science. In this early phase, genetics, theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics were attacked as sciences of the bourgeoisie. Although research in Dialectics of Nature was largely interrupted because universities and institutes were closed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–​1976), attacks on supposedly bourgeois sciences continued and led to proposals such as the replacement of modern Western medicine as well as traditional Chinese medicine through a medicine of the proletariat. Founding figures of modern philosophy of science like Tscha Hung (1909–​ 1992) and Tianji Jiang (1915–​2006) did not belong to the Dialectics of Nature circle but to the section of “foreign philosophy.” Hung, the only member of Vienna Circle from the East, received a doctoral degree under Moritz Schlick’s supervision. His works on logical empiricism have had a greater influence on Chinese philosophers since 1949. Jiang obtained a master’s degree in

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philosophy in North America. His book Contemporary Western Philosophy of Science, published in 1984 and republished later, has been a founding document of philosophy of science in China.

Depoliticized philosophy of science in China (1978–​2 012) After the death of Zedong Mao (1893–​1976), the Chinese government, led by Xiaoping Deng (1904–​1997), implemented the “reform and opening-​up” policy in 1978. The so-​called “opening-​up” meant that Chinese academia also became increasingly engaged with international scientific debates. Under these circumstances, Dialectics of Nature began to introduce and incorporate contemporary Western debates and ideas. The dramatic changes in this phase can be illustrated by contrasting three textbooks on Dialectics of Nature, compiled under supervision of the Chinese government. The first textbook (The Compilation Group 1979) consists of View of Nature, View of Science, and Methodology of Science (i.e. philosophy of nature and philosophy of science). View of Technology and Methodology of Technology (i.e. philosophy of technology) were added to the second one (State Education Commission 1991). The third one (Ministry of Education 2004) further absorbed Science and Technology Studies (STS). Dialectics of Nature greatly expanded and developed, and assimilated philosophy of technology, sociology of science, history of science and technology, “science, technology and society,” science and technology studies, and philosophy of science.2 With respect to Western philosophy of science, works by Schlick, Carnap, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Laktos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others were translated into Chinese and researched. Popper’s falsificationism, Kuhn’s paradigm shifts, and Feyerabend’s methodological anarchism were popular in Chinese universities in the 1980s and 1990s. Dialectics of Nature became increasingly broader and deeper during the period, going beyond Marxism. Consequently, Dialectics of Nature as a branch of philosophy was renamed Philosophy of Science and Technology (Dialectics of Nature) by the Chinese government to connect with international academic research. Initially, they were both regarded as one and the same branch, although Dialectics of Nature was deleted in 1997. In fact, Philosophy of Science and Technology was not an accurate name because it included philosophy, as well as branches of historical and sociological studies of science. Furthermore, Chinese researchers often prefer application-​oriented research to fundamental research because of an intellectual and political prioritization of the societal impact of science. For this reason, philosophical research on science and technology was less emphasized than research on policy, strategy, and management of science and technology in the field of Philosophy of Science and Technology (Chen and Xu 2005).

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Dialectics of Nature and Chinese philosophy of science gradually began to blend with international philosophy of science and wider science studies. In 1987, the Chinese Society of Dialectics of Nature joined the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, which belongs to the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science. An international conference on philosophy of science, devoted to the topic “Realism and Anti-​ Realism in the Philosophy of Science,” took place in Beijing in 1992. The collection of articles from the conference, as part of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science book series (BSPS, volume 169), was published in English (Cohen et al. 1996). An anthology of excellent Chinese articles about history and philosophy of science and technology was translated into English and published in 1996 (Fan and Cohen 1996). In 2007, Tsinghua University (in Beijing) held the Thirteenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. During this period, Western general philosophy of science, philosophy of quantum mechanics, philosophy of system sciences, philosophy of life sciences, ethics of science, philosophy of cognitive sciences, philosophy of information, scientific realism and anti-​realism, scientism and humanism, postmodernist philosophy of science, science and values, philosophy of social sciences, and epistemology of science were among the important research fields in philosophy of science in China. Furthermore, Wang (2004) compiled an outstanding textbook Studies in Philosophy of Science on the basis of this research. To characterize the second phase in terms of “depoliticization” is not to say that Chinese philosophy of science was free of normative motivations or implications. Indeed, many of the imported philosophers of science from Carnap to Popper to Feyerabend had well-​known political agendas of their own. Instead, depoliticization was employed as a strategic frame that produced greater intellectual independence from Dialectics of Nature and thereby opened up connections with international philosophy of science. It is precisely this greater intellectual distance from Dialectics of Nature and from the political program of the Chinese Communist Party that has more recently led to a collapse of the second phase in an era of repoliticized philosophy of science under increasing government control.

Repoliticized philosophy of science in China (2012–​t he present) According to the Chinese Communist Party, socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era since 2012. In this new era, the Communist Party exercised leadership over all areas of academia and the party also began to exercise tighter control and guidance over Dialectics of Nature and philosophy of science. In contrast to earlier appeals for depoliticization, Chinese

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philosophy of science responded by increasingly emphasizing its political function. In 2012 the Chinese government reduced “Introduction to Dialectics of Nature,” a course for all master’s degree students in fields of natural science and technology since 1981, from three credit-​hours (54 class-​hours) to one credit-​hour (18 class-​hours). This decision challenged Chinese philosophy of science and Dialectics of Nature because the course provided most teaching jobs for scholars in the field. For example, in 2018, Tsinghua University dissolved its Institute for Science, Technology, and Society because of the adjustment in this course. The Teaching and Research Section in Dialectics of Nature, founded in 1978, and the Research Section in Science, Technology, and Society, established in 1985, were incorporated into this institute in 1993. It was one of the most important research and teaching institutions in fields of Dialectics of Nature and philosophy of science from 1978 until 2018. Under political and ideological pressure, Dialectics of Nature has been at pains to emphasize its political function. A Syllabus for Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, compiled and published under supervision of the Chinese government in 2012, insists that Dialectics of Nature is not a branch of philosophy, but a branch of Marxist Theory—​ different from Philosophy of Science and Technology (The Compilation Group 2012, 1).3 In contrast to the previous Dialectics of Nature textbooks, it made three major changes. First, the titles of chapters were transformed from View of Nature, View of Science and Technology, Methodology of Science and Technology, etc., into Marxist View of Nature, Marxist View of Science and Technology, Marxist Methodology of Science and Technology, and so on. Second, for the Marxist View of Science and Technology in China, the views of Zedong Mao, Xiaoping Deng, Zemin Jiang (1926–​), and Jintao Hu (1942–​) were added. In particular, Xi’s view of science and technology was further elaborated and became the most important part of Marxist View of Science and Technology in China in the 2018 version (The Compilation Group 2018). Thirdly, it enlarged the quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin (1879–​1953). In sum, Dialectics of Nature claimed a repoliticized identity to prove its relevance in the new area of socialism with Chinese characteristics. In this political and ideological situation, Chinese philosophy of science has been restructured under a novel political agenda. First, it returned to dialectical materialism and in particular the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Accordingly, the Chinese government insists that Chinese philosophy of science must be clearly distinguished and critical of non-​Marxist and Western traditions of philosophy of science. This requirement is enforced through tight control and censorship of publications. In the undergraduate and graduate teaching of philosophy of science, for example, professors must use the textbooks that have been compiled and published under supervision of the Chinese government.

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Second, Chinese philosophy of science must conform to Marxism and additionally reflect its Chinese characteristics. In 2016, President Xi pointed out that China should have confidence in its culture, in addition to confidence in its path, guiding theories, and political system. The so-​called “confidence in China’s culture” means that China should attach more importance to Chinese culture, especially Chinese traditional culture, so the country embraces its distinctness from other—​and particularly—​Western nations. Under these cultural circumstances, some scholars emphasize that more importance should be given to Chinese philosophers of science. Other scholars focus on practical philosophy of science, which includes traditional Chinese medicine, and other indigenous knowledge from China. Finally, this push towards a distinctly Chinese and explicitly politicized philosophy of science also creates tensions with other dynamics in Chinese academia. For example, top-​ranking Chinese universities have increasingly hired Western academics, including philosophers of science, as part of their wider “Recruitment Program of Global Experts” (Kim 2017). While Chinese philosophy of science has looked inwards to prove its political value to the Chinese Community Party, Chinese academia also looks outwards to establish international leadership and attract foreign expertise. Indicating another possible step in the circle of politicization and depoliticization, philosophy of science and technology are often better suited to fit into such international recruitment programs than other areas of Western philosophy (e.g. ethics, political philosophy, history of philosophy) that are more explicitly tied non-​ Marxist political traditions. To sum up, Chinese philosophy of science has returned to the Dialectics of Nature derived from Marx, Engels, and Lenin as well as put increased emphasis on the Chinese characteristics of scientific practices. Both developments reflect another shift in the political positioning of philosophy of science. While depoliticization was widely embraced in the second phase (1978–​2012) to position the field in greater independence from political control, repoliticization has become the dominant framework to prove relevance and usefulness of philosophy of science in the new era of socialism-​with-​ Chinese-​characteristics. At the same time, this trend has created currently unresolved tensions with simultaneous attempts to establish international leadership and to recruit foreign expertise in Chinese academia.

Conclusion We have drawn a historiographic and a systematic conclusion from our engagement with philosophy of science in China. Historiographically, processes of depoliticization cannot be subsumed under one global narrative of the history of philosophy of science. In the same time period in which philosophy of science in the USA became increasingly depoliticized, it took its most overtly political form as Dialectics of Nature in China. By the time that

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feminist and other political projects challenged the depoliticized character of North American philosophy of science, Chinese philosophers insisted on depoliticization as a strategy of creating independence from the political control and opening-​up debates towards international scholarship. More recent developments of repoliticization are driven by the strategic concerns of the Chinese Communist Party and are largely independent of simultaneous debates about “science and society” in Europe and North America. Our study shows that a simple distinction between politicization and depoliticization is of insufficient analytic granularity to engage with societal concerns in philosophy of science. In China, questions about depoliticization are closely connected with the role of the Chinese Communist Party in shaping the agendas of philosophical research. While related concerns have a long tradition in Western philosophy through the idea of “freedom of science” (Kant 1798; Wilholt 2012), current debates about “science and society” as well as “science and values” in the English-​speaking literature often embrace politicization as a strategy for diversifying societal influence on scientific practice (Howard 2009; Fehr and Plaisance 2010). Understanding these diverging developments requires a more careful engagement with different kinds of politicization that are at stake in current debates about the politics of philosophy of science. Finally, the politicization, depoliticization, and repoliticization of philosophy of science in China is not an independent development of this branch. Politics has dominated academia and daily life since the Qin Dynasty to the current focus on the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party. The current imperative of repoliticization limits both the intellectual originality and international visibility of Chinese philosophy of science. Given that this development creates tensions with the ambition to establish international leadership of Chinese academia, the future development of Chinese philosophy of science remains closely entangled with the wider and uncertain political dynamics.

Acknowledgments David Ludwig’s contribution has been supported by an ERC Starting Grant (851004 Local Knowledge) and a NWO Vidi Grant (V1.Vidi.195.026 Ethnoontologies).

Notes 1 In China, Western philosophy is used to refer to non-​Marxist philosophy in the West although Marxist philosophy originated from the West and partly belongs to Western philosophy. 2 For more details, see Guo (2014). 3 Nowadays in China, philosophy consists of eight branches: Western philosophy, philosophy of science and technology (philosophy of science included), Marxist

Philosophy of science in China  59 philosophy, ethics, studies in religion, logic, traditional Chinese philosophy, and aesthetics. In 2005, the Chinese government created a new subject “Marxist theory,” which consists of six branches: basic Marxist principles, foreign Marxism, history of Marxism, Marxism in China, ideological and political education, and studies in basic problems of modern Chinese history. Although “Introduction to Dialectics of Nature” is still an ideological course for master’s degree students, Dialectics of Nature is neither a branch of philosophy, nor a branch of Marxist theory due to its depoliticization.

References Chen, R. & Xu, W. (2005). Statistical Analysis of Dissertations for Academic Degrees in Philosophy of Science and Technology in China. Studies in Dialectics of Nature 21 (7), 94–​99. Cohen, R., Hilpinen, R. & Qiu, R. (1996). Realism and Anti-​Realism in the Philosophy of Science: Beijing International Conference, 1992. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fan, D. & Cohen, R., ed. (1996). Chinese Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Tr. Kathleen Dugan and Mingshan Jiang. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fehr, C. & Plaisance, K. S. (2010). Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science: An Introduction. Synthese 177 (3), 301–​316. Gong, Y. (1996). Dialectics of Nature in China. Beijing University Press. Guo, Y. (2014). The Philosophy of Science and Technology in China: Political and Ideological Influences. Science and Education 23 (9), 1835–​1844. Howard, D. (2009). Better Red than Dead—​Putting an End to the Social Irrelevance of Postwar Philosophy of Science. Science and Education 18 (2), 199–​220. Jiang, T. (1984). Contemporary Western Philosophy of Science. Chinese Social Science Press. Kant, I. (1798). Der Streit der Fakultäten. Nicolovius. Kim, H. (2017). The Higher Education Policy of Global Experts Recruitment Program: Focused on China. Bulgarian Comparative Education Society. https://​eric. ed.gov/​?id=ED574216 Liu, Z. (2015). The King’s Power Dominating Society—​ A Re-​ examination of Ancient Chinese Society. Tr. Jingqiong Wang and Josh Mason. Journal of Chinese Humanities (1), 4–​24. Longino, H. E. (2006). Philosophy of Science After the Social Turn. In Galavotti, M. C., ed. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook [2004], vol. 12. Springer, 167–​177. Ministry of Education (2004). Conspectus of Dialectics of Nature. Higher Education Press. Reisch, G. A. (2005). How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic. Cambridge University Press. Richardson, S. S. (2009). The Left Vienna Circle, Part 1. Carnap, Neurath, and the Left Vienna Circle Thesis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (1), 14–​24. The Compilation Group (1979). A Textbook of Dialectics of Nature. People’s Education Press. The Compilation Group (2012). A Syllabus for Dialectics of Nature. Higher Education Press.

60  Yuanlin Guo and David Ludwig The Compilation Group (2018). A Syllabus for Dialectics of Nature (Revision). Higher Education Press. The State Education Commission (1991). Conspectus of Dialectics of Nature. Revised ed. Higher Education Press. Uebel, T. (2010). What’s Right about Carnap, Neurath and the Left Vienna Circle Thesis: A Refutation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (2), 214–​221. Vaesen, K. & Katzav, J. (2019). The National Science Foundation and Philosophy of Science’s Withdrawal from Social Concerns. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78, 73–​82. Wang, W. (2004). Studies in Philosophy of Science. Tsinghua University Press. Wilholt, T. (2012). Die Freiheit der Forschung: Begründungen und Begrenzungen. Suhrkamp Verlag.

Chapter 5

Experimental philosophy Jordan Kiper, Stephen Stich, H. Clark Barrett and Edouard Machery

Introduction For centuries, thinkers have urged that fundamental philosophical concepts, such as the concepts of knowledge, or right and wrong, are universal or at least shared by all rational people (e.g., Plato 1892/​375 bce; Kant 1996/​1781; Foot 2003). Yet many social scientists, in particular cultural anthropologists (e.g., Boas 1940), but also continental philosophers such as Foucault (1969) have remained skeptical of these claims. For example, Andriessen and Boom (2007, 645) describe “the Confucian concept of knowledge” as follows: Basic in the Confucian concept of knowledge is the unity of knowledge and action. Knowledge exists in action. Knowledge is not a formal structure of ideas on the level of rational thinking or representation: knowledge unfolds itself in (moral) action. They quote Eliade (1992) in support of their claim: “Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge” (quoted in Andriessen and Boom 2007, 645). Much is at stake not only philosophically, but also scientifically, if crucial philosophical concepts are indeed cross-​ culturally universal (Stich 1990, 2018; Stich and Tobia 2016; Machery 2017a, 2017b). Until recently, compelling empirical evidence about their universality has remained scant. It was not until the early 21st century that anthropologists, philosophers, historians, and linguists began to accumulate data suggesting that what it means to know, and how we as humans come to possess knowledge, may not be the same for all historical periods, cultures, and demographic groups (Weinberg et al. 2001; Bromhead 2009; Cohen 2010; Rheinberger 2010). To what extent do people around the world share philosophical concepts? This is an empirical question that cannot be answered by consulting existing ethnographies, surveys, or historical accounts. Most cultural studies prior to the onset of massive cross-​cultural studies in the 2010s, which we discuss below, were centered on occasional descriptions of philosophical concepts, rather than focused investigations of those concepts. Partly as a response to this gap in the literature, experimental philosophy—​a new

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line of research led primarily by philosophers, but also involving cultural psychologists and anthropologists—​was initiated in the early 21st century. Experimental philosophy uses methods from anthropology, cross-​cultural psychology, and linguistics to examine philosophical concepts, and thereby to address traditional philosophical questions and investigate how people ordinarily think. In what follows, we highlight some of the results of these empirical studies, which suggest that the question of philosophical universals is far from settled, and that far more cross-​cultural research is necessary. To illustrate what is at stake, we will focus in detail on the concept of knowledge, and use it as a case study throughout this chapter. Our discussion proceeds as follows. We begin by questioning the assumption that philosophical concepts are universal. We then explain why assessing this assumption is so important. After considering this, it will become clearer why experimental philosophy is increasingly focusing on cross-​ cultural projects, as illustrated by experimental philosophy research on the concept of knowledge. Finally, we outline an ambitious project, the Geography of Philosophy Project, which empirically investigates the concepts of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom across cultures, languages, religions, and socioeconomic groups.

Are there universal philosophical concepts? Some leading figures in Western philosophy have held that one or another important philosophical concept is universal. According to Kant’s discussion of human nature in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a concept of justice is part of the “animal nature” that is shared by all human beings (Kant 1996, 176): “It appears as if a certain concept of justice (which applies to external freedom) evolves together with the animal nature; consequently, it is not something that is gradually learned.” Similar views can be found among more recent philosophers. A good example is a forthcoming article by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists which argues that the concept of knowledge is a basic representation, shared by monkeys, apes, and human beings on a par with universal representational capacities such as the capacity to represent magnitudes (Phillips et al. in press): “a capacity for knowledge representation [that has] ended up being one that is cognitively basic.” Well-​known social scientists have likewise maintained that important philosophical concepts are held by people in all cultures (Wierzbicka 1992, 1996; Mikhail 2011). To illustrate, in his study of magical thinking, Mauss held that the concept of mana was universal, despite being rarely lexicalized, as Leacock (1954, 62) explains: For example, in Mauss’ study of magic, which will be discussed later, magical practices were studied in a number of societies and were found in a number of cases to be associated with the concept of mana. It was

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therefore assumed that the concept of mana was universal, and that all magical practices were ultimately based on this concept. Mauss (1938) similarly believed that the concept of a self, while actively denied by Buddhists and other philosophical traditions, is nevertheless an innate mental category, and thus a universal. More recently, Clyde Kluckhohn (1955, 672) has defended the universality of some moral concepts: Every culture has a concept of murder, distinguishing this from execution, killing in war, and other “justifiable homicides.” The notions of incest and other regulations upon sexual behavior, the prohibitions upon untruth under defined circumstances, of restitution and reciprocity, of mutual obligations between parents and children—​these and many other moral concepts are altogether universal. Skepticism over these claims has nonetheless persisted among ethnographers, historians, and linguists whose work focuses on the analysis of specific cultures (Boas 1940; Geertz 1993), and among ethnographers there is great skepticism about the existence of many sorts of universals. Emotions, for instance, are claimed to be so complex when expressed in a particular culture that only a detailed narrative could do justice to their relative meaning (Beatty 2013); a fortiori concepts of emotions are bound to be culturally local (Lutz 1982, 1988). Likewise, the historical genealogies of Foucault (1997) suggest to many scholars that what we might have taken to be universal concepts are in fact socially constructed and importantly different in particular historical contexts. For example, contrary to Mauss, Foucault claims that the concept of self is constructed by various self-​oriented practices that vary across periods and cultures (Foucault 1969). Numerous linguistic anthropologists have similarly claimed that subtle cultural and linguistic differences in the meanings of words challenges the universality of many supposedly universal concepts (Everett 2005). If these skeptics are right, concepts of interest to Western philosophers are very unlikely to be identical across all, or even most, cultures. An alternative middle ground to these views is that there may be a universal core to many philosophical concepts that is elaborated in different ways in distinct cultures (e.g., Atran 1998, on folk biological concepts; Lillard 1998, on folk-​ psychological concepts). Machery et al. (2017a) have, for instance, speculated that the culture-​specific concepts of knowledge, expressed by the words usually taken to translate “to know that,” may well share a common core, while varying in other respects (see also Hannon 2015; for discussion, see Wierzbicka 2018).

What is at stake? Much is at stake in whether philosophical concepts are universal. For one thing, discovering the universality of some concepts will tell us much about the mind and just how malleable our minds are (Machery and Faucher 2020).

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The issue is also central for determining which philosophical projects are worth pursuing. Additionally, the relativity of certain concepts is of practical importance for cross-​cultural communication and cooperation in science, politics, and law. Cross-​c ultural communication Cross-​cultural communication is an important practical issue affected by the debate about the universality of philosophical concepts. Deep differences in philosophical concepts across cultures would surely pose a challenge to communication across cultural divides (e.g. Andriessen and Boom 2007, on the concept of knowledge). The challenge will be even greater if many of these conceptual differences are covert—​that is, hidden by what appears to be a shared vocabulary or misleading traditional translations. On the other hand, central philosophical concepts that are shared across cultures, would be important foundations on which to build cross-​cultural understanding. Malleability of mind The existence of universal, philosophically important concepts would demand an explanation, raising a host of questions. Is their universality a product of some constraints imposed by our cognitive architecture? If so, are these concepts adaptations or rather spandrels? In the former case, are they still adaptive? Alternatively, these philosophical concepts may be either so obvious or useful that they have been invented and reinvented all over the world and transmitted by cultural transmission. What philosophical projects are worthwhile? Variation in philosophical concepts across cultures or other demographics would matter philosophically because it would raise questions about the significance of a century-​long research tradition in Western philosophy. The details of this argument are intricate (Stich 1990; Machery 2017, 126–​148), but the gist of the argument is simple. Epistemology, for instance, would simply be an exercise in understanding the way Westerners talk about “knowledge,” and it is entirely unclear why we should value this inquiry.1 Focusing on epistemic concepts such as the concepts of knowledge and justification, Stich put the point as follows (1990, 20): The analytic epistemologist proposes to evaluate these differing cognitive processes by explicating our intuitive notions of cognitive evaluation [e.g., the concept of knowledge], and then exploring which inferential processes fall most comfortably within the extension of those notions. But these intuitive notions of cognitive evaluation are themselves local

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cultural products, and there is no reason to think that they won’t exhibit just as much intercultural and interpersonal variation as the cognitive processes that they evaluate. In light of this, it is hard to see why most people would care very much whether a system of cognitive processes falls within the extension of some ordinary notion of epistemic evaluation—​why, for example, they would care whether their reasoning falls within the boundaries of the intuitive notion of rationality—​unless of course there is some reason to think that falling within the extension of one of these concepts correlates with something else we do care about.

Experimental philosophy Whether philosophical concepts are universal or vary across cultures, as well as the extent and manner to which they vary, are empirical questions that cannot be answered from the armchair. To answer them, a new philosophical tradition emerged at the beginning of the 21st century known as experimental philosophy. Experimental philosophy examines, among other things, whether and how philosophical concepts vary across groups, including cultures. It relies on the methods of empirical sciences, primarily psychology, but also anthropology and, increasingly, linguistics and neuroscience (Knobe and Nichols 2008, 2014; Machery and O’Neill 2014; Sytsma and Livengood 2015; Sytsma and Buckwalter 2016; Fischer and Curtis 2019). It often borrows methods from the social sciences such as free listing tasks, questionnaires, and responses to vignettes (often modeling vignettes on famous philosophical thought experiments). Frequently, participants are presented with a vignette describing an imaginary situation. For instance, in Machery et al.’s (2017a) study on the concept of knowledge, participants in Brazil, the USA, India, and Japan were presented with the following vignette: Paul Jones was worried because it was 10 pm and his wife Mary was not home from work yet. Usually she is home by 6 pm. He tried her cell phone but just kept getting her voicemail. Starting to worry that something might have happened to her, he decided to call some local hospitals to ask whether any patient by the name of “Mary Jones” had been admitted that evening. At the University Hospital, the person who answered his call confirmed that someone by that name had been admitted with major but not life-​threatening injuries following a car crash. Paul grabbed his coat and rushed out to drive to University hospital. As it turned out, the patient at University Hospital was not Paul’s wife, but another woman with the same name. In fact, Paul’s wife had a heart attack as she was leaving work, and was at that moment receiving treatment in Metropolitan Hospital, a few miles away. Did Paul know that his wife was in a hospital?

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In addition to this target question, participants were asked additional comprehension questions, and a pair of questions designed to determine whether they thought Paul’s belief was justified and whether they thought Paul thought he knew, but didn’t. Responses were analyzed statistically to look for patterns. Using vignettes such as this, and varying the information in the vignette, allows experimental philosophers to identify the cues that influence or fail to influence the application of concepts such as the concept of knowledge (Machery et al. 2017a). A handful of philosophers began examining the universality of philosophical concepts in recent decades, providing evidence suggesting that variation may exist among and across populations. In particular, variation was reported between Western and East Asian students (Weinberg et al. 2001; Machery et al. 2004), genders (e.g., Buckwalter and Stich 2014), and personality characteristics such as introversion and extroversion (Feltz and Cokely 2009). These initial findings provided tentative evidence that long-​standing assumptions in philosophy about the universality of concepts may not be warranted, and they have led to intense, but fruitful empirical and philosophical debates (Machery et al. 2017a, 2017b; Adleberg et al. 2015; Nagel 2012; Stich 2013). Since the onset of these studies, the literature on the universality of philosophical concepts has grown increasingly sophisticated and rich, and we have no space here to review it in any detail (for an overview, see Stich and Machery n.d.). For sake of brevity, we will continue to focus on the concept of knowledge (see also Mizumoto et al. 2018, 2020a, 2020b). An important aspect of the concept of knowledge, according to many philosophers, is the idea that some forms of luck are incompatible with knowing something. One does not know that p when one acquires a belief that p by luck even if that belief is true. In his famous paper, Gettier (1963) proposed a pair of cases in which, Gettier maintained, the protagonist did not have knowledge despite having a belief that was not only true, but also justified, although acquired by luck. The vignette presented above illustrates the basic structure of a Gettier case: Paul Jones has a true, justified belief that his wife is in a hospital. Most philosophers shared Gettier’s verdict about these cases, and a large literature offering additional “Gettier cases” grew out of Gettier’s paper in order to characterize the concept of knowledge (Hetherington and Hetherington 2018). Just about all of this work was done by English-​speaking philosophers whose cultural background is European. In one of the earliest experimental-​philosophy studies, Weinberg et al. (2001) reported evidence that most East Asians and South Asians did not share Gettier’s verdict; unlike most Westerners, and the overwhelming majority of philosophers, they judge that protagonists in Gettier cases did have knowledge. Yet, this study was relatively limited in terms of participants, and was in need of replication. Follow-​up studies have failed to find any cultural variation in people’ judgment about the Gettier case (Seyedsayamdost 2015; Kim

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and Yuan 2015), but they too are limited, examining few participants and a small number of cultures. Machery et al. (2017a, 2017b) conducted the first large cross-​cultural studies about lay people’s reaction to Gettier cases: they found that, across cultures, most people are like philosophers in being sensitive to the incompatibility of knowing something and luck. In this case, philosophers’ judgment about knowledge is in line with those of lay people across cultures (but see Starmans and Friedman 2020), although the sample of cultures examined remains limited. Many philosophers have argued that knowledge ascription is sensitive to what is at stake—​to how costly it would be for the agent to have a false belief (Stanley 2005): the higher the stakes, the more stringent the criteria for the ascription of knowledge. Here, too, Rose et al. (2019) found that people ascribe knowledge similarly across cultures and languages: across 19 sites, 16 countries, and 14 languages, stakes barely matter for knowledge ascription. It is noteworthy that in this case philosophers’ judgment about knowledge turned out to be widely different from that of laypeople since many epistemologists have asserted that stakes influence lay ascription of knowledge. Other studies compare participants in two or three countries. Some philosophers have argued that asserting something is only permissible when one knows it. Turri and Park (2018) have shown that, like American participants, Korean participants judge that one should not assert something that is false because one lacks knowledge in this case. Yuan and Kim (in press) have presented evidence that, just like American participants, Korean and Chinese participants are less likely to ascribe knowledge when the evidence is based on textual information about the probability of error than when it is perceptual (holding the risk of error constant), are influenced by moral factors when they ascribe knowledge, and are willing to ascribe knowledge to someone while denying her the relevant belief. In the previous examples, little variation was found across cultures and languages, but other cases show that cultures and languages influence how people ascribe knowledge and other epistemic concepts (see in this volume Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya; Ito; Liu and King; Winther; Yen). Philosophers often begin their discussion of knowing something by contrasting it to merely believing it or to believing it with justification. This starting point surely reflects the fact that “knowing that” and “believing that” are two distinct expressions in English, as in other languages commonly spoken by philosophers. While common, this linguistic distinction is not universal, and some languages such as Cofán, a language spoken in northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia, do not distinguish lexically knowing and believing something (Chartrand et al. n.d.).2 Speakers of these languages may of course still distinguish the concepts expressed in English by “knowing that” and “believing that,” but it may also be the case that they don’t. Be that as it may, it is dubious that philosophers would start their discussion of knowing by contrasting knowing and believing that if they spoke one of these

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languages. Based on the semantics of “knowing how” in English, Stanley and Williamson (2001) have argued that all knowledge-​how reduces to propositional knowledge, but critics have been quick to note that other languages such as French lexicalize know-​how and propositional knowledge quite differently (Rumfitt 2003). Cross-​cultural experimental studies have also begun identifying variation in knowledge ascription. Philosophers have claimed that people refrain from ascribing knowledge to someone who has a true belief when the possibility that the person’s belief could be false is salient, a phenomenon philosophers call “skeptical pressure.” One of the most influential ideas in epistemology, the context-​sensitivity of knowledge, is meant to address the impact of skeptical pressure on knowledge ascription (Lewis 1996). In two experiments Waterman et al. (2018) have recently shown that participants in India, China, and the USA were all sensitive to skeptical pressures, but Chinese and Americans were much more sensitive to the presence or absence of a possibility of error than Indians. Perhaps, then, it was a mistake to make so much of the context-​sensitivity of knowledge ascription in English when building a theory of knowledge. Mizumoto (2018) also notes that “to know” corresponds to two distinct verbs in Japanese, and provides evidence that they are used differently, raising questions about the generalizability of observations about the use of “know” in English (see also Mizumoto et al. 2020b on the expression of “to know how” in Japanese). In any case, most of the studies we have mentioned have serious limitations. Most studies involve only two or three cultural groups, and even the largest studies included very few small-​scale societies (Machery et al. 2017b; Rose et al. 2019). Further, participants are often undergraduates, who may share a common cultural background and many shared assumptions from being raised in the same educational system. Much remains to be known, then, about whether, how, and why epistemic concepts vary across languages and cultures, and while some important notions in epistemology—​particularly, the incompatibility of knowledge and some form of luck—​have been found across cultures, others may reflect the peculiarities of epistemic languages in English and a few other languages.

The Geography of Philosophy Project Though the work that has been done so far provides a promising beginning, much more cross-​ cultural experimental research in philosophy is necessary (as is the case in the cognitive sciences more broadly; see Barrett 2020). Philosophers and anthropologists are increasingly using both large and small cross-​cultural studies that employ experimental methods to focus on the universality or variability of particular phenomena. These have included studies of communication styles based on individualism and collectivism (Hofstede 2011), perspectives on cooperation and sociality (Henrich

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and Ensminger 2014), and aspects of cognition such as judgments about intentions (Barrett et al. 2016). Inspired by such projects, Machery, Stich, and Barrett assembled an international team of philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists working on five continents, to collect data about three important philosophical concepts: the concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding (see also Hall et al., in prep. on the concept of knowledge). The resulting project, the Geography of Philosophy (www. geographyofphilosophy.com), plans to compare students and non-​students across cultures, religions, and socioeconomic groups. Small-​scale societies are included among the cultures we are surveying. The Geography of Philosophy Project examines some of the topics discussed earlier—​whether luck prevents the ascription of knowledge, the influence of stakes on knowledge ascription, whether knowledge is a norm of assertion—​and others (e.g., how do people judged to be wise ask for advice or what dimensions distinguish people judged to be wise from those judged to be unwise). An important feature of the project is its interdisciplinarity. In addition to philosophers and psychologists the project includes linguists, anthropologists, economists, and scholars in cultural studies. People in all of these fields can play a crucial role in identifying existing scholarship and in formulating and testing novel hypotheses about similarities and differences in the concepts of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Interpreting the variation of philosophical concepts across languages and cultures requires linguistic expertise. As an illustration, in Machery et al. (2017a), a puzzling pattern emerged in the responses of Bengali-​speaking participants in Kolkata (Calcutta). Bengali speakers were outliers compared to others, insofar as they appeared to ascribe knowledge even when a true belief was acquired by luck, at least for some formulations of the questions participants were asked. However, when Bengali-​ speaking scholars were consulted, the explanation became evident. The words commonly used to translate “to know” in Bengali (jáná) and in Sanskrit (jñá), the verbal root of the Bengali word, are used somewhat differently from “to know” in English. In particular, the distinction between “to believe” and “to know” is not always retained when jáná or jñá are used. Thus, jáná may in fact express two rather different concepts in Bengali, one of which is closer to the concept expressed in English by “know” and the other closer to the concept expressed in English by “believe.” Inspired by this experience, the Geography of Philosophy Project involves a detailed study of the epistemic vocabulary used in the languages of the project. Finally, cultural anthropologists traditionally immerse themselves within a culture, using distinctive methods to understand other people’s lifeways. By incorporating those techniques, and working with cultural anthropologists, experimental philosophers can grasp unexpected understandings of philosophical concepts. An interesting example is reported by cultural anthropologists exploring the concept of knowledge related to shamanism in

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the western Amazon, where “knowledge” has a bodily component that can be passed from shaman to shaman (Homan 2019; Kiper 2019). The Geography of Philosophy Project includes qualitative methods, including interviews and focus groups, to complement the usual experimental and quantitative methods commonly used in experimental philosophy.

Conclusion Experimental philosophy has yielded remarkable data that have opened new avenues of research and demonstrated the likelihood that philosophical concepts vary cross-​culturally in at least some important respects. As we attempted to show in this chapter, empirical data challenge traditional assumptions about widely shared concepts. Accordingly, taking variation seriously entails more cross-​cultural studies and greater interdisciplinarity in the field.

Notes 1 “Westerners” here refers to the people born and raised in Western Europe, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. 2 https://​clics.clld.org/​edges/​1410-​1890.

Acknowledgments This project/​publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Experimental philosophy  71 Beatty, A. B. (2013). Current Emotion Research in Anthropology: Reporting the Field. Emotion Review 5 (4), 414–​422. Boas, F. (1940). Race, Language, and Culture. University of Chicago Press. Bromhead, H. (2009). The Reign of Truth and Faith: Epistemic Expressions in 16th and 17th Century English. Mouton de Gruyter. Buckwalter, W. & Stich, S. (2014). Gender and Philosophical Intuition. In Knobe, J. & Nichols, S., eds. Experimental Philosophy, vol. 2. Oxford University Press, 307–​346. Chartrand L., Barr, K., Vindrola, F., Allen, C. and Machery, E. (n.d.). Unboxing Universality and Variation: The Distribution of Epistemic Concepts across Culture. Manuscript. Cohen, E. (2010). Anthropology of Knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, S193–​S192. Eliade, M. (1992). Neo-​Confucianism. In Eliade, M., ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. vol. 4, Macmillan Reference Books. Everett, D. (2005). Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology 46 (4), 621–​646. Feltz, A. & Cokely, E.T. (2009). Do Judgments about Freedom and Responsibility Depend on Who you are? Personality Differences in Intuitions about Compatibilism and Incompatibilism. Consciousness and Cognition 18 (1), 342–​350. Fischer, E. & Curtis, M., eds. (2019). Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy. Bloomsbury Publishing. Foot, P. (2003). Natural Goodness. Clarendon Press. Foucault, M. (1969). The Archaeology of Knowledge. Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1997). Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–​1984, vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. P. Rabinow. Penguin. Geertz, C. (1993). Local Knowledge. Fontana. Gettier, E. L. (1963). Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis 23 (6), 121–​123. Hall, B. F., et al. (in prep.). Registered Replication Report: Turri, Buckwalter, and Blouw (2015). https://​psyarxiv.com/​zeux9/​. Hannon, M. (2015). The Universal Core of Knowledge. Synthese 192 (3), 769–​786. Henrich, J. & Ensminger, J. (2014). Experimenting with Social Norms. Russell Sage Foundation Press. Hetherington, S. & Hetherington, S. C., eds. (2018). The Gettier Problem. Cambridge University Press. Hofstede, G. (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model in Context. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture 2 (1), 3–​26. Homan, J. (2019). Routes to Knowledge in the Upper Amazon. Go Philosophy: Official blog for the Geography of Philosophy Project, October 3. https://​go-​philosophy. com/​routes-​to-​knowledge/​ Kant, I. (1996). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Tr. V. L. Dowdell. Southern Illinois University Press. Kim, M. & Yuan, Y. (2015). No Cross-​Cultural Differences in the Gettier Car Case Intuition: A Replication Study of Weinberg et al. 2001. Episteme 12 (3), 355–​361. Kiper, J. (2019). An Anthropological Perspective, Part 1. Go Philosophy: Official blog for the Geography of Philosophy Project, 3 July. https://​go-​philosophy.com/​ ?s=Kiper. Kluckhohn, C. (1955). Ethical Relativity: Sic et Non. Journal of Philosophy 52 (23), 663–​677.

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Experimental philosophy  73 Rose, D., Machery, E., Stich, S., Alai, M., Angelucci, A., Berniūnas, R., Buchtel, E. E., Chatterjee, A., Cheon, H., Cho, I. R. & Cohnitz, D. (2019). Nothing at Stake in Knowledge. Noûs 53 (1), 224–​247. Rumfitt, I. (2003). Savoir Faire. Journal of Philosophy 100, 158–​166. Seyedsayamdost, H. (2015). On Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions: Failures of Replication. Episteme 12 (1), 95–​116. Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and Practical Interests. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75, 168–​172. Stanley, J. & Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing How. Journal of Philosophy 98, 411–​444. Starmans, C. & Friedman, O. (2020). Expert or Esoteric? Philosophers Attribute Knowledge Differently than All Other Academics. Cognitive Science 44 (7), e12850. Stich, S. P. (1990). The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation. MIT Press. Stich, S. P. (2013). Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1), 151–​178. Stich, S. P. (2018). Knowledge, Intuition and Culture. In Proust, J. & Fortier, M., eds. Metacognitive Diversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Oxford University Press, 381–​394. Stich, S. P. & Machery, E. (n.d.). Demographic Differences in Philosophical Intuition: A Reply to Joshua Knobe. Manuscript. Stich, S. P. & Tobia, K. (2016). Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition. In Sytsma, J. & Buckwalter W., eds. A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. John Wiley & Sons, 5–​21. Sytsma, J. & Buckwalter, W., eds. (2016). A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. John Wiley & Sons. Sytsma, J. & Livengood, J. (2015). The Theory and Practice of Experimental Philosophy. Broadview Press. Turri, J. & Park, Y. (2018). Knowledge and Assertion in Korean. Cognitive Science 42 (6), 2060–​2080. Waterman, J., Gonnerman, C., Yan, K. & Alexander, J. (2018). Knowledge, Certainty, and Skepticism. In Mizumoto, M., Stich, S. P. & McCready, E., eds. Epistemology for the Rest of the World. Oxford University Press, 187–​214. Weinberg, J. M., Nichols, S. P. & Stich, S. (2001). Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29, 429–​460. Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-​Specific Configurations. Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2018). I Know. In Mizumoto, M., Stich, S. P. & McCready, E., eds. Epistemology for the Rest of the World. Oxford University Press, 216–​249. Yuan, Y. & Kim, M. (In press). Cross-​Cultural Convergence of Knowledge Attribution in East Asia and the US. Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

Part II

Reconfiguring scientific methods

Chapter 6

Developing transdisciplinary practices An interplay between disagreement and trust Luana Poliseli and Clarissa Machado Pinto Leite Introduction Collaborative research teams have become a necessary tool for addressing societal challenges, e.g., biodiversity loss, poverty, etc. (Pohl et al. 2017). Supposing a state of epistemic imperfection—​in which our knowledge is limited and our responses to incomplete evidence are faulty (Christensen 2007)—​in order to confront societal problems, multi-​, inter-​and transdisciplinary research teams are needed, which by definition encompass experts from distinct domains. On the one hand, these collaborations arise as a necessary condition to mitigate the state of epistemic imperfection. On the other hand, they create epistemic dependence featuring an asymmetry between researchers, in terms of discipline and theoretical knowledge, that might lead to academic tensions (Hackett 2005) and contribute to epistemic disagreements. According to Straber et al. (2013), we lack an account of epistemically appropriate responses to academic peer disagreement. For instance, in the philosophical literature on epistemology of disagreement, normative accounts of how one should respond when facing an epistemic disagreement are usually elaborated on hypothetical case scenarios and do not necessarily reflect how disagreements take place in scientific/​academic scenarios (De Cruz and De Smedt 2013). In contrast, a significant part of the sociology of science and Science and Technology Studies (STS) deals with academic controversies in scientific settings. These discussions, however, mostly lack normative conclusions (Collins 1983). With that in mind, we argue that before a normative account to guide responses is developed, we first need to address how academic disagreement happens in real interdisciplinary scientific practice. That is, adequate normative perspectives need to be based on detailed empirical understanding of collaborative dynamics. While much of the philosophical literature jumps right into normative analysis and suggestions, this chapter aims to show how a descriptive empirical starting point can lead to better normative analysis. In this chapter we address a case of academic disagreement in an interdisciplinary research team in Brazil during their elaboration of a framework

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for transdisciplinary practice. Data were collected with ethnographic methods (e.g., participant observation, recorded meetings, and interviews) and the analytic perspective of this investigation is grounded in recent debates around social epistemology of research groups and epistemology of disagreement. We will show, through an empirical case study, that an interplay between trust and disagreement is required for dealing with inter-​and transdisciplinary praxis. We hold that shedding light onto disagreements and communications between collaborators may improve the epistemic performance of collaborative research teams by refining interdisciplinary dynamics. This chapter is ordered as follows. First, we introduce a general and brief account of epistemic disagreement. Then the notions of epistemic trust and epistemic dependence as proposed by Wagenknecht (2015) are presented. Next a case study of an academic disagreement in interdisciplinary research is introduced. Finally we discuss lessons from the case study presented. We note that restricted disagreement can lead to knowledge production; however, conciliatory behavior is required in a collaborative research team. Such behavior is only possible when epistemic peers possess a minimum amount of epistemic trust among each other, which is gained by solving disagreements. Thus, we assume that fruitful collaborative practices, in this case interdisciplinary practices, emerge from an interplay of academic disagreement and trust.

Disagreement between experts in a nutshell How should one react to a situation of epistemic disagreement? In the epistemology of disagreement, two attitudes are usually adopted when encountering disagreement: the conciliatory (or conformists) and the steadfast (or non-​conformist) view (Christiansen 2007, 2009; Elga 2007; Lackey 2008). The steadfast view demands confidence in the face of disagreement, while the conciliatory position mandates extensive revision of opinions on controversial matters. The basic theoretical distinction between these two positions depends on their attitude toward assessing the epistemic credentials of opinions voiced by people with whom one disagrees (Christensen 2011). For example, if A disagrees with B on a subject matter p where B is expert, the epistemology of disagreement suggests that A should adopt a conciliatory position because B is a superior peer in subject matter p. In a contrasting scenario, if A and B disagree about subject matter p, where A is an expert, then A should adopt a steadfast position. However, if A and B possess the same credentials regarding subject matter p then both should suspend judgments about p. Despite this apparent simplicity, for a disagreement to be considered an actual peer disagreement, three considerations are important. First, both peers must possess the same amount and type of knowledge concerning subject p. Second, in most of the epistemology of disagreement debates,

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“disagreement has largely focused on our immediate normative response to prima facie instances of disagreement” (Gelfert 2011), in other words, according to epistemology, disagreements are about beliefs and not actions (Bistagnino 2011). And third, disagreements focus on simplified two-​person cases and avoid complicated real-​world considerations (Bistagnino 2011). Given these three conditions, peer disagreements are extremely rare to find in real-​life academic scenarios, as rightly pointed out by De Cruz and De Smedt (2013). It is important to highlight that, if one considers the STS account of experimental practices, it is often the case that scientists will agree on their core beliefs but disagree on how certain actions were carried out (Collins 1975; Pinch 1986; Knorr Cetina 2009). This is one of the reasons why we address the disagreement in this case study as “academic disagreement.” We will call “academic disagreements” those disagreements that take place between researchers, in real-​life scientific practice, that do not necessarily fit the above three conditions, but are, nonetheless, disagreements. However, we do wish to challenge such debates by asking how and to what extent epistemology of disagreement can empirically inform an academic disagreement in an asymmetrical peerage, i.e., between experts from distinct fields. We agree with Bistagnino (2011) that the literature on artificial, simple interaction cases can help to provide insights into more difficult and complicated cases of disagreement. Yet despite our alignment with Bistagnino, how should one proceed if A and B are both expert peers regarding different topics, thus exemplifying an asymmetry that is natural of collaborative investigations? How is one to decide which position to adopt, or which direction to adjust, in an interdisciplinary impasse? We will tackle this question later in this chapter by presenting an empirical case study of an academic disagreement between interdisciplinary researchers, in a collaborative research group, focusing on their scientific practices.

Epistemic dependence, epistemic trust, and epistemic vigilance Collaborations arise as a necessary condition to mitigate disciplinary limitations to address real-​world problems such as poverty or biodiversity conservation. As scientists usually come from distinct fields (with different materials, intellectual resources, practices, and values), this type of research requires a division of labor between forms of data gathering, assessment of evidential arguments, interpretation, and so on (Andersen and Wagenknecht 2013). Such heterogeneity of expertise inevitably creates epistemic dependence between scientists regarding their judgments and testimonies concerning their academic domains (Wagenknecht 2016). In general terms, “epistemic dependence” occurs when a researcher A cannot produce knowledge independently of researcher B; in such cases, A “can only judge its quality indirectly by reference to trust or reliance upon

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rough measures of proper (scientific) reasoning” (Wagenknecht 2015, 162). In other words, there is a necessity to subject (subordinate) A’s judgment to B’s testimony. This subordination occurs because A possesses neither evidence nor proper reasoning about p while B possesses evidence or proper reasoning about p. This example suggests that B might be an intellectual authority in relation to A, as depicted in Hardwig (1985). However, for epistemic dependence to function as a reliable source of knowledge in interdisciplinary practices, scientists need to trust each other’s judgments; therefore, it requires epistemic trust. Epistemic trust here is related to the acquisition of knowledge, i.e., the attitude of trust which A holds towards B with regard to p. Epistemic trust, or trust in knowledge, is thus an attitude inherent to scientific practice that can help manage epistemic dependence.1 Nevertheless, one intrinsic feature of trust is its incompleteness. People and scientists do not trust indiscriminately, blindly, deeply, and completely: there is an open window for epistemic vigilance (Wagenknecht 2015), and this may put us back into the disagreement path as it may favor doxastic attitudes. In the next section we will introduce an interdisciplinary collaboration, depicting how epistemic trust, epistemic dependence, and epistemic vigilance can occur in an academic disagreement.

Collaborative practice: an interdisciplinary case study The empirical case study is focused on an interdisciplinary research team, taking part in a six-​to ten-​year program funded by the Brazilian national government. It is a large network with more than 200 researchers from institutes and universities in the Global South and Global North. The overall project is highly heterogeneous in its domains (e.g., ecology, sustainability, marine biology, agriculture, evolution, genetics, anthropology, social epistemology, theoretical biology, epidemiology, animal behavior, ethnobiology, and so on). With 18 subprojects, it aims to develop disciplinary research and also inter-​ and transdisciplinary studies in ecology and evolution. The academic disagreement described here took place in a two-​day meeting and involved only part of this research team. With the goal of improving the research team sustainability practices to help manage environmental conservations by transdisciplinary means, this meeting gathered representative members involved in this transdisciplinary practice. The meeting was composed by eight senior scientists, two Ph.D. students, and a postdoctoral fellow. Each researcher belonged to different academic areas including ecology, philosophy of science, environmental management, and sociology. The two-​day meetings were recorded by the postdoctoral fellow and data from ethnographic methods were collected during the course of three years:2 eight hours of recorded interviews and fourteen recorded hours of “participant observation” (Bernard 2011).

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In the early stages of the research program, part of the research team gathered in this two-​ day meeting to deliberate about aspects of their transdisciplinary practices (i.e., transdisciplinary methods and theories therewith) to drive actions for environmental conservation. At the first-​day meeting Ecologist1 (E1) presented a framework for transdisciplinary collaboration that would guide other researchers in their investigations. After E1’s presentation, each researcher had 15 minutes to introduce themselves and contribute to this framework. Explaining the framework for transdisciplinary collaboration The framework for transdisciplinary collaboration presented by E1 (mainly elaborated according to Pickett et al. (2007) “anatomy of theories,” Scholz and Steiner (2015), and Bernstein (2015) “transdisciplinary approaches,” Fararo and Butts (1999) “generative structuralism,” Latour (2005) “actor-​ network theory,” and Sewell’s (1992) rules and resources in structures, and others) explores how the university and its domains (teaching, research, outreach for public sphere, and so on) can interact with society and, therefore, contribute to sustainability practices for environmental conservation. This framework relies on the assumption that individuals make a difference by changing their own—​and by influencing others’—​perceptions (conceptions and behaviors3) about environmental issues such as conservation, management, and sustainability. Therefore, a transdisciplinary practice, according to this framework, would be configured as an interaction network system, or an interactive social network … because a transdisciplinary process is a social process of interactions between people that belong to distinct groups, and [that, in a normal daily basis,] do not [exchange] with each other. [Therefore,] a transdisciplinary project is an attempt to break these cultural differences from a subset of people that will act and think things differently to develop a transdisciplinary process that might eventually, influence its original communities. (Ecologist1) The main features of this system are spatial and temporal organization. E1 then used Fararo and Butts’s (1999) interpretations of Bourdieu’s habitus, where the notion of space is multidimensional (space as types of capital), in this sense if the proximity between people and things depends on the interaction between them (i.e. if there are no fields, positions, spaces, localities and social interference beyond the interaction between people as it seems to be in the Actor-​ Network Theory), then these fields can be spatially represented in a diagram that is a network of people (and things)

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interacting. Therefore, conceptions and behaviours, that are properties of the individual, directly [and indirectly] influence (and are influenced by) other individuals’ conceptions and behaviours they interact [directly and indirectly] with. (E1’s handout) Thus, spatial scales are defined by networks of interactions instead of physical spaces that can be measured in meters. In this framework, the network is organized according to three hierarchical levels: communities of influence (upper level), transdisciplinary communities (middle level), and individual (lower level) (Figure 6.1). At the upper level there are sets of communities of influence. Each community is composed of individuals that can be recognized as permanent sectors of society based on its juridic or cultural identity with interests on the societal problem targeted by the investigation; i.e., stakeholders. At the middle level there are the transdisciplinary communities which are sets of individuals from

Figure 6.1 Hierarchical network representing a transdisciplinary collaboration proposed by E1. Note that upper left represents the network levels: individual, transdisciplinary communities and communities of influence. Downard right triadic representation of the levels (figure extracted from ecologist1 handout).

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Figure 6.2 Interactive network across scales. Black dots represent individuals’ modifications of behavior and conceptions (figure extracted from ecologist1 handout).

distinct cultural groups; its mutual interactions constitute a transdisciplinary process. And at the lower level there are the individuals. This represents those single individuals that are members of a community of influence, members of a transdisciplinary community, and whose conceptions and behavior are influenced by their own social network. The relevant events of this framework are those where modifications of behavior and conceptions take place throughout the distinct hierarchical levels. Figure 6.2 depicts the spatial scale where this modification occurs (black dots). A cacophonous academic disagreement A disagreement occurred when Sociologist1 (S1) pointed to several asymmetries regarding fundamental issues in E1’s transdisciplinary framework. Some topics were easily grasped and broadly in accordance with other research members, such as the requirement to refine the domain for this transdisciplinary process (in this case mutually defined as environment, ecology, and conservation). However, other topics, such as the notion of individual—​the individual

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level in the framework proposal for transdisciplinary collaboration—​were widely dissonant, especially to those from the humanities. “Individual” was a key concept in this framework. The individual, for the ecologists, was theoretically linked to a biological concept,4 which meant that the individual is capable of changing its own conceptions and influencing others’ conceptions. We understand this individual notion as bound to the biological notion of organism where “organisms can cast a web of significance in the world. In this world of significance, organisms moreover adapt … An organism interacts with its world, which it is part of ” (De Jaegher 2019, 8). S1 highlighted that, differently from the common-​sense notion of “individual”—​one focused on psychoanalytic notions such as ego or the self—​for her as a sociologist, “individual” is an epistemological concept; understood as involving a rational set of elements that establishes a possibility for dialogue. In S1’s words: when you speak at the individual level …, science can be individual, sociology can be placed as individual. For sociology, it is not this moral ethical individual. … the individual level would be the individual level of each area of scientific knowledge … [and] this perspective of individuality, it would be disciplinarity. We now highlight how epistemic asymmetry enters the research collaboration and how it was mirrored in conceptual disagreement, which we consider as triggers for epistemic vigilance. Being experts from distinct areas (sociology and ecology), the initial stance assumed by the discussants was to uphold their theoretical backgrounds, which we recognize as assuming a steadfast position when facing conceptual disagreement. S1 explained the differences between the meanings of the “individual” concept and the consequences of poorly clarified terminology: using a branch of sociology—​environmental sociology—​she referred to an important disciplinary paradigm, the Weberian notion of rationalization. In an attempt to exemplify the argument, S1 referred to another of the collaboration’s researchers, Ecologist2 (E2), who interacts with rural workers, to explain what she meant: We work with the concept of rational individuals that are not the biological individual: it is the individual that simply choses a form of rationality (which is not that rationality that has a very large cultural perspective). In other words, there are several layers of rationality. … One of the big impacts of working with rural communities, [for instance] E2 is going through this in her field work and she said: “Well, they make decisions that, sometimes, are not rational”. I would say that there are conflicts of rationality. They are not rational within an economic logic. They are not rational within a scientific logic, but they have an internal rationality that must be studied. (S1)

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The notion of individual was not the only difference to be addressed during these meetings. Other concepts and their empirical consequences were also widely discussed, such as discipline, sustainability, community, society, rationality, models, paradigms, etc. This resonated with what Petrie (1976) and Andersen and Wagenknecht (2013) argue, in that a minimum requirement for a successful interdisciplinary investigation is that the participants learn basic, key concepts from the different collaborative backgrounds. Facing such multitude of meanings around concepts, the S1 also remarked on the emergence of “cacophonous speech,” which was recognized by other collaboration members such as E3: when [S1] characterized this as cacophony, it agreed with my intuition. [However] I think we are still at risk to run over important conceptual differences here. We need time to see how we are going to deal with this. So far, in this moment of cacophony, I understand … that each of us read some texts and brought other things that we already knew … which needs to be integrated. Thus, … talking about cacophony makes sense and I think it starts by agreeing regarding fundamental concepts. This cacophony occurred due to the asymmetric nature of this research team. For instance, an asymmetry between disciplines amounts to different theoretical backgrounds, which in turn can reflect in the emergence of polysemic concepts, e.g., the notion of individual. When research members, such E1 and S1, start their discussion by embracing individual as biological or as sociological concept, they are assuming a steadfast position. This steadfast behavior would be maintained if the researchers did not acknowledge each other’s definitions. However this was not the case, and the agreement on the existence of this cacophony was also evident when collaboration members departed from steadfast positions about this fundamental concept. In other words, to acknowledge the existence of a cacophony, in this case, required suspending judgment. As shown previously, this is the rational attitude to adopt when facing an epistemic disagreement. We interpret this behavior as being connected to the development of a trust for knowledge between each other, and by acknowledging the position of the other members as experts in their respective fields of knowledge. This agrees with Wagenknecht (2015, 162) once we assume that such asymmetry in “skill[s]‌and background knowledge will make all team members relative lay persons in respect to team members with experience in a different field, sub-​field or in particular experimental techniques.” The next step was, then, to assume a conciliatory position, identified here as the agreement about the need to diminish this conceptual asymmetry in order to make transdisciplinary research work, which was also reflected by the non-​adoption of the term individual in later framework. Despite the conciliatory position already in development among the research members, we perceived that epistemic trust was also prompted by

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one of the team members, Philosopher1 (P1). This senior scholar, with experience in sociology and philosophy of science, as well as in biology, helped the researchers recognize the implications of having polysemic concepts, the role of communication between distinct theoretical backgrounds, and the importance of developing a common language for the team. In this sense, a next step suggested by P1 for the cacophonous disagreement, was to map the status quo of inter-​and transdisciplinarity in ecology and conservation, focusing on its theoretical tensions and gaps, e.g., identifying points of consonance and dissonance in this concept whenever used in inter-​and transdisciplinary literature. An ultimate framework for transdisciplinary collaboration To map the status quo of inter-​and transdisciplinarity in ecology and conservation was the next step to deal with the cacophonous disagreement. This step was accepted and agreed by all the research team. Such a map would guide how the multiple interdisciplinary fields would be able to communicate, and provide tools suggesting how researchers and projects could act in transdisciplinary investigations. However, this solution came with an unfeasible temporal cost and for that reason was discarded. A new resolution for this scenario was then to depict different ways universities could engage with society. Such a solution would avoid this temporal cost while its focus would still be aligned with its original interests, i.e., to elaborate a framework of transdisciplinary practices. Two years later, some of these researchers published an article in an interdisciplinary journal proposing a heuristic model of transdisciplinarity. This model suggests how scholars, working in discipline-​oriented universities, can strengthen disciplinarity activities or contribute to the transition to inter-​and transdisciplinarity across the full range of school activities, i.e., research/​outreach, student supervision and teaching, highlighting examples of success and main challenges. They presented two alternative situations. In the first, the interactions of scholars reflect and reinforce the disciplinary orientation at universities and contribute to an “ivory tower” relationship with society. In the second, the interactions of scholars are diversified and bidirectional, promoting inter-​and transdisciplinarity, and contributing to solving real-​world problems. They also depicted main factors in which these activities are constrained: previous academic training and current academic policies and culture. The development of this framework was an attempt to best accommodate the theoretical tensions that occurred previously. It required a modification of focus. Instead of individuals, the aim was then to identify the participants of inter-​and transdisciplinary processes, i.e., scholars, students, and practitioners. We believe that this modification not only mitigated the conceptual issues that might have triggered such disagreement but also allowed the researcher to focus on what was really important in the previous framework, the interactions between the agents that enable knowledge production. Thus,

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the suspension of judgment was followed by the adoption of a conciliatory view among the research members. Such an attitude was only possible once the peers started to establish an epistemic trust that is related to the trust of knowledge pertaining to the other members of the team.

An interplay between academic disagreement and epistemic trust The previous section showed that knowledge negotiation in an interdisciplinary research practice occurred according to an interplay of academic disagreement and epistemic trust. Our findings concerning this kind of collaboration complement and extend the works in social epistemology of research teams, which here focused on the works of Andersen and Wagenknecht (2013), and Wagenknecht (2015). First, we are in consonance with these authors by confirming core tenets such as epistemic vigilance and trust as elements of interdisciplinary research team practice. And second, we complement current studies by suggesting that a crucial aspect for knowledge production is the interplay between trust and disagreement during knowledge negotiation. This interplay supports our more general hypothesis that, in academic disagreements, the decision to adopt a conciliatory behavior or a steadfast position relates to the epistemic trust among the collaborators. The cacophonous scenario showed that each research member initially adopted a steadfast position when facing a conceptual disagreement, e.g., by defending a biological or sociological notion of the individual. The disagreement did not occur due to lack of trust between peers beforehand as some of the researchers were already longstanding collaborators, but the conceptual dissonance, responsible for the disagreement, triggered the epistemic vigilance between collaborators. This was overcome when they suspended their judgments in order to understand each other, and look for intersections between their areas. Moving from a steadfast position to the suspension of judgment occurred once the research members established trust in each other’s background knowledge, that is trust in knowledge, and therefore acknowledged the cacophonic scenario and the need for conceptual clarification. If a conciliatory position had not been achieved and a steadfast position had been maintained, members of the research team would not have acknowledged the distinct conceptualizations of the individual, and would have sustained their own adoption of individual as biological and sociological concept. However, this was not the case. Even though they didn’t reach a single definition for the polysemy concept, a conciliatory position was achieved with the agreement to map the debate of transdisciplinary research in ecology and conservation (even though this was further discarded) together with the non-​adoption of the polysemic concept in later transdisciplinary framework. This attitude suggests that the experts involved in the collaboration grasped, minimally, each other’s backgrounds, allowing trust in knowledge to occur. The role of an experienced researcher in interdisciplinary investigation, to bridge and conduct the dialogue in such

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scenarios of disagreement, enhanced the conditions to develop epistemic trust between research members. Nonetheless, such mediation was not a necessary condition to initiate a conciliatory position. The development of an ultimate framework for transdisciplinary collaboration between university and society was possible due to these disagreements. However, on how beneficial such a cacophonous situation might have been, there is still much work to be done, including concerning epistemic disagreements in academic scenarios for those with interdisciplinary collaborations. For instance, we have recognized that an interplay occurred in a transdisciplinary collaboration, but what is the amount of trust and disagreement required for a knowledge negotiation to be productive? How does this interplay occur in different interdisciplinary dynamics such as those depicted by Bammer (2020), Tress et al, (2005), and others? How is evidence assessed by different expertises in research teams? Furthermore, how to develop a well delineated conceptual structure in those types of collaboration? To sum up, we have tackled disagreement focusing on a conceptual dissonance, and how researchers understood it based on their own expertise. The academic disagreement, nonetheless, reflected a cacophony surrounding several fundamental concepts, such as community, model, society, paradigm, sustainability, and so on. Such dissonance not only serves to suggest that knowledge negotiation can occur through an interplay between trust and disagreement but it also calls attention to the importance of having a very well delineated conceptual structure when dealing with interdisciplinary practices.

Conclusion Recognizing how academic disagreements are structured represents a critical first step for addressing collaborative practices. While substantial disagreement might block scientific progress (Delsen 2020), what we have shown in this chapter is that academic disagreements, like those reflected in these conceptual dissonances, might actually enhance academic performance for inter-​ and transdisciplinary research when it stimulates different peers to create a dialogue, or even a whole theoretical body to bridge inherent knowledge gaps. This is in agreement with Elgin’s (2020) claim that borrowed capital may increase one’s epistemic resources, and if the results are successful, the base for the inquiry is enhanced and improved. However, disagreements alone are not responsible for knowledge production. In our perspective, a succeeding interdisciplinary collaboration occurs when the experts involved are willing to adopt a conciliatory behavior during knowledge negotiation, as a result of the normative interplay between disagreement and trust. Given these findings, our suggestion of how one should behave when facing an epistemic disagreement is to adopt a conciliatory position, which is only achieved through this interplay. However, the amount and balance of the disagreement needed for epistemic reasons of the vigilance and trust needed for the collaboration still requires further studies. Adequate normative perspectives for collaborative

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research teams need to be based on detailed empirical understanding of real interdisciplinary scientific practice. This chapter integrates normative analysis with descriptive empirical evidence on the basis of what scientists actually do during their collaboration; we have also shown that ongoing dialectical significance in scientific practice is not a linear process easy to identify and reconstruct. Considering the goal of addressing scientific collaborations, scientific case studies of particular collaborations are not only a key aspect but might as well be used as evidence to derive more general conclusions about scientific practice (see Mizrahi 2020; Poliseli 2020).

Acknowledgments Clarissa Leite is grateful for the postdoctoral scholarships received by the Brazilian Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Educational Personnel (CAPES) and the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. We also thank CNPQ (Grant Number 465767/​2014-​1) and CAPES (Grant Number 23038.000776/​2017-​54) for their support for the National Institute of Science and Technology, Inter-​and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-​ TREE). Both authors are thankful for this interdisciplinary research team cooperation, without it this chapter would not be possible. Special thanks to E1, who kindly provided the images and handouts used during the meetings. We highly appreciate the valuable comments from the editors that helped improve this work.

Notes 1 In this chapter the notion of trust used by Wagenknecht is bounded to the definition of trust (in knowledge) used by Baier (1986), however, important developments regarding trust, trustworthiness, and confidence are also found in the sociological literature; e.g., the work of Luhmann (1979), Sztompka (1999), Mayer et al. (1995), Shrum et al. (2001), Hardin (2002), and Reyes-​Galindo (2014). 2 Data were collected by the postdoctoral fellow, also co-​author of this paper C. Leite. Although this research group is a six-​to ten-​year program, Leite has studied this research group for over 3+2 years, and the academic disagreement tackled in this chapter took place during a two-​day meeting. The data collected from this episode of participant observations are therefore supported by multiple interviews carried out throughout these years. Both authors collaborated in the transcripts and analysis of the data. 3 For “conceptions and behaviors” the researchers used Clement’s (2006) Knowledge-​ Values-​Practices model; action-​decision theories (e.g., game theory, rational choice theories, market models); and Giddens’s (1984, 3–​5) stratification model, according to which the “mutual knowledge” embodied by the agents includes conscious aspects such as “discursive consciousness,” “practical consciousness,” and unconscious aspects that motivate actions. 4 For more information about the biological concept of individual see https://​plato. stanford.edu/​entries/​biology-​individual/​.

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References Andersen, H. & Wagenknecht, S. (2013). Epistemic Dependence in Interdisciplinary Groups. Synthese 190 (11), 1881–​1898. Baier, A. (1986). Trust and Antitrust. Ethics 96 (2), 231–​260. Bammer, G. (2020). Expertise in Research Integration and Implementation for Tackling Complex Problems: When is it Needed, Where can it be Found and How can it be Strengthened? Palgrave Communications 6 (5). Bernard, H. R. (2011). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 5th ed., Altamira Press. Bernstein, J. H. (2015). Transdisciplinarity: A Review of its Origins, Development, and Current Issues. Journal of Research Practice 11 (1), 1–​20. Bistagnino, G. (2011). Epistemology of Disagreement: Mapping the Debate. In Magni, B., Ferrera, M. & Jessoula, M. eds. Gli Annali di LPF. Centro de Ricerca e Documentazione Luigi Einaudi, 159–​187. Christensen, D. (2007). Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News. Philosophical Review 116, 187–​217. Christensen, D. (2009). Disagreement as Evidence: The Good News. Philosophical Review 116, 187–​217. Christensen, D. (2011). Disagreement, Question-​ Begging, and Epistemic Self-​ Criticism. Philosophers’ Imprint 11 (6), 1–​22. Clement, P. (2006). Didactic Transposition and the KVP Model: Conceptions as Interactions between Scientific Knowledge, Values and Social Practices. Proceedings of ESERA Summer School, Braga (Portugal). IEC, 9–​18. Collins, H. M. (1975). The Seven Sexes: A Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics. Sociology 9 (2), 205–​224. Collins, H. M. (1983). The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Studies of Contemporary Science. Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1), 265–​285. De Cruz, H. & De Smedt, J. (2013). The Value of Epistemic Disagreement in Scientific Practice: The Case of Homo florensis. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44, 169–​177. De Jaegher, H. (2019). Knowing and Loving: Reflections for an Engaged Epistemology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Delsen, F. (2020). Understanding and Progress, in Science and Beyond. Zoom Workshop. https://​understandprogress.wordpress.com/​events/​. Elga, A. (2007). Reflection and Disagreements. Noûs 41, 478–​502. Elgin, C. (2020). Understanding and Progress, in Science and Beyond. Zoom Workshop. https://​understandprogress.wordpress.com/​events/​ Fararo, T. J. & Butts, C. T. (1999). Advances in Generative Structuralism: Structured Agency and Multilevel Dynamics. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 24 (1), 1–​65. Gelfert, A. (2011). Who is an Epistemic Peer? Logos and Episteme 2 (4), 507–​514. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press. Hackett, E. J. (2005). Essential Tensions: Identity, Control, and Risk in Research. Social Studies of Sciences 35 (5), 787–​726. Hardin, R. (2002). Trust and Trustworthiness. Russel-​Sage Foundation. Hardwig, J. (1985). Epistemic Dependence. Journal of Philosophy 82, 335–​349.

Developing transdisciplinary practices  91 Knorr Cetina, K. (2009). Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard University Press. Lackey, J. (2008). A Justification View of Disagreement’s Epistemic Significance. Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy 53, 145–​154. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network Theory. Oxford University Press. Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and Power: Two Works by Niklas Luhmann. John Wiley & Sons. Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H. & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust. Academy of Management Review 20 (3), 709–​734. Mizrahi, M. (2020). The Case Study Method in Philosophy of Science: An Empirical Study. Perspectives on Science 28 (1), 63–​88. Petrie, H. G. (1976). Do you See What I See? The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Educational Researcher 5, 9–​15. Pickett, S., Kolasa, J. & Jones, C. G. (2007). Ecological Understanding: The Nature of Theory and the Theory of Nature. Elsevier. Pinch, T. (1986). Confronting Nature: The Sociology of Solar-​Neutrino Detection, vol. 5. Springer Science & Business Media. Pohl, C., Truffer, B. & Hirsch-​ Hadorn, G. (2017). Addressing Wicked Problems through Transdisciplinary Research. In Frodeman, R., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1–​16. Poliseli, L. (2020). Emergence of Scientific Understanding in Real-Time Ecological Research Practice. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42, 51. Reyes-​Galindo, L. (2014). Linking the Subcultures of Physics: Virtual Empiricism and the Bonding Role of Trust. Social Studies of Science 44 (5), 736–​757. Scholz, R. & Steiner, G. (2015). The Real Type and Ideal Type of Transdisciplinary Processes: Part I—​Theoretical Foundations. Sustainability Sciences 10, 527–​544. Sewell, Jr., W. H. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology 98 (1), 1–​29. Shrum, W., Chompalov, I. & Genhuth, J. (2001). Trust, Conflict and Performance in Scientific Collaborations. Social Studies of Science 31 (5), 681–​730. Straber, C., Šešelja, D. & Wieland, J. W. (2013). Withstanding Tensions: Scientific Disagreements and Epistemic Tolerance. In Ippoloti, E., ed. Heuristic Reasoning. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology, and Rational Ethics. Springer, 113–​146. Sztompka, P. (1999). Trust: A Sociological Theory. Cambridge University Press. Tress, B., Tress, G. & Fry, G. (2005). Defining Concepts and the Process of Knowledge Production in Integrative Research. In Tress, B., Tress, G., Fry, G. & Opdam, P. eds. From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning: Aspects of Integration, Education and Application. Springer, 13–​26. Wagenknecht, S. (2015). Facing the Incompleteness of Epistemic Trust: Managing Dependence in Scientific Practice. Social Epistemology 29 (2), 160–​184. Wagenknecht, S. (2016). A Social Epistemology of Research Groups. New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Chapter 7

Sustainability science as a management science Beyond the natural–​s ocial divide Michiru Nagatsu and Henrik Thorén

Introduction: sustainability science as a management science Sustainability science is an interdisciplinary enterprise devoted to exploring, understanding, and ultimately actively contributing to transformations towards more sustainable configuration of social systems (Kates et al. 2001; Jerneck et al. 2011; Komiyama and Takeuchi 2006). The field emerged out of discussions, especially in the 1980s, around sustainability and sustainable development and has in recent years developed into a full-​fledged and very active inter-​discipline. Interdisciplinarity remains a central methodological challenge, a core value, and is ultimately an essential feature of how the field understands itself (Jerneck et al. 2011; Persson et al. 2018; Thorén et al. forthcoming). In the discussions of interdisciplinarity in sustainability science, the main emphasis has almost always been on how to bridge the natural and the social sciences (Kates et al. 2001; Jerneck and Olsson 2020; Persson et al. 2018). Seeing the divide between natural and social sciences as the main obstacle for interdisciplinarity in sustainability science, however, is of limited heuristic use and can even be misleading. First of all, sustainability science explicitly models the complex couplings of natural and social systems, at bigger or smaller scales, which means that their target domain is both natural and social. Therefore, at the ontological level the natural–​social divide cannot be the dividing line, because modeling has to deal with both (DesRoches et al., 2019). Second, on the epistemic or methodological level, the often-​emphasized divide between quantitative or formal approaches of natural science and the qualitative or informal approaches of social science is a false dichotomy because these differences do not map onto the natural–​social divide at all. Economists and sociologists use mathematical and statistical modeling approaches as much as chemists and biologists; evolutionary theory was initially formulated in a verbal, non-​formal way. As we will show below, coupled management models have both natural and social components.

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Finally, on the practical level, sustainability science has explicit orientations toward certain sustainability goals and societal transitions, which do not fit it into either the natural or the social science camps. The received view in the philosophy of science is that science—​natural or social—​is a value-​neutral, primarily epistemic enterprise, at least as an ideal. The explicit commitments to sustainability goals of sustainability science are unique in this respect, and rather comparable to systems engineering or operations research (OR), which applies “scientific methods, techniques and tools to problems involving the operations of a system so as to provide those in control of the system with the optimum solution to the problem” (Churchman, Ackoff, and Arnoff, 1957, quoted in Strijbos, 2017, 295). Gass and Assad (2005, ix) note that OR is not a natural science. OR is not a social science. OR’s distinguishing characteristic is that OR applies its scientific and technological base to resolving problems in which the human element is an active participant. As such, OR is the science of decision making, the science of choice. The operational scales and scientific bases of sustainability science can be different from those of OR, but it is similarly committed to “resolving problems in which the human element is an active participant.” The connection between sustainability science and operations research is more direct in the fields that deal with resource management such as fisheries management (Lane 1989; Lane and Stephenson 1995). In what follows we call a science that concerns decision-​making in pursuit of certain goals a management science, following Herbert Simon (1960). Sustainability science is a management science aiming at sustainability goals. Thus characterized, the next question is where the sustainability goals of decision-​making come from. Here the contrast between natural and social science surfaces again as a conflict of value-​orientations. For example, in fisheries management there are two conflicting goals, namely resource allocation and conservation, studied by economics and biology, respectively. In ecological economics there has been a long debate over the extent to which natural capital is substitutable with other kinds of capital, where economists tend to defend substitutability while ecologists defend non-​substitutability. Because of this association, one might think that each science has conflicting values: social science for achieving human-​ centered values; biology and ecology for the conservation of non-​human species and environments. This association, however, is weak because if one sufficiently values long-​term intergenerational human welfare, then anthropocentric utilitarianism is often compatible with conservation. The question ultimately becomes what the appropriate discounting rate for the welfare of future generations should be, which is a political and ethical question of intergenerational justice that does not divide natural and social scientists.1

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Whether there exist values independent of humans as valuers (current or future) is a meta-​ethical question that, again, is not necessarily tied to the natural–​social divide. Moreover, valuing nature for its own sake, independently of human existence, is operationally equivalent to the current generation subjectively valuing non-​use of nature, independently from its instrumental benefit to the present or future generations. Also, seeing natural science as value-​free and social science as value-​laden and more like ethics is also unhelpful, as we will argue later in this chapter. An orthogonal contrast is that between social science as a critical reflection on certain prevalent social values (such as sustainability) versus natural science, which naively presupposes those values to be quantified and controlled (see, e.g., Mingers 1992, for a critique of traditional management science from a perspective of critical theory). The distinction between problem-​solving science that takes various social values as it finds them and develops solutions in accordance with those values, and critical science that targets and questions those very values (see, e.g., Mahmoud et al. 2018), which has sometimes been emphasized in sustainability science, comes to mind. Note, however, that reflexivity or critical awareness as such does not make a study value-​neutral or value-​superior relative to more naïve scientific and management practices. Thus, we consider it to be more fruitful to incorporate social scientific reflexivity as a useful resource for better sustainability science, rather than seeing it as a methodological obstacle that deeply divides natural and social scientists in the field. In sum, if we understand sustainability science as a kind of management science that draws on various scientific bases, then there is no stable or deep line that divides natural and social scientific elements in it, either at the ontological, methodological, or ethical levels. Our point is not that there are no such correlations to be identified, but rather that this line is not the most challenging obstacle in addressing interdisciplinary challenges to advance sustainability science. In the next section, we argue that an alternative, more interesting divide may be found between the so-​called soft and hard systems thinking.

Systems thinking, soft and hard Systems thinking is a family of approaches that has motivated a variety of inter-​and transdisciplinary movements in science and technology in the second half of the 20th century (Strijbos 2017). It was originally conceived as a general systems theory that can unify the sciences by modeling any given target of inquiry as a functional “system” operating and situated in a given environment, rather than a machine with parts to be studied separately by different disciplines. Prominent proponents of systems theory include the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–​1972) and the economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–​1995). Such a theoretical unification, however, has not

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taken place within natural sciences, within social sciences, or between them. Instead we have seen proliferation of subfields and interfields in science, somewhat contrary to the ideal of the unification of the sciences. Perhaps the influence of systems thinking is more prominent in engineering and management than in scientific theorizing.2 In these domains, systems thinking took root during World War II, giving rise to the post-​war OR and to management science. Systems thinking shifted the target of engineering from technical artifacts to larger systems comprising human-​artifact complexes, whose functions should be tweaked to achieve a desired goal identified by the analysis. Strijbos (2017, 296, quoting Checkland 1978, 107) characterizes the essence of systems engineering as follows: “There is a desired state, S(1), and a present state S(0), and alternative ways of getting from S(0) to S(1).” Problem solving, according to this view, consists of “defining S(1) and S(0) and selecting the best means of reducing the difference between them.” According to this characterization, “hard” systems thinking is nothing other than what philosophers call instrumental rationality. As such, it is nothing new and it is difficult to refute its centrality in any goal-​directed enterprises. What was new in the postwar period, however, were the developments in decision theory and game theory that provided axiomatic foundations for instrumental rationality, opening a path toward rigorously operationalizing the means and ends in applied contexts. In particular, Expected Utility Theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944; Savage 1954) gave a clear operational meaning to subjective beliefs and expected utilities, as well as their interactions, and game theory (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944; Nash 1951) provided powerful tools to analyze the aggregate-​level behavior of a system consisting of agents whose interests converge and diverge to a varying degree. Motivated by the perceived failure of these formal approaches to provide satisfactory results in many real-​world management situations, Peter Checkland (1930–​) proposed what is now called soft systems methodology (SSM), or soft systems thinking. SSM was developed to resolve unstructured management, planning, and public policy situations involving multiple objectives that are often unclear or contradictory (Gass and Assad 2005, 160). Such problems were characterized as “wicked problems” around the same time (in 1967) by the planning theorist Horst Rittel (Skaburskis 2008). While “tame” or technical problems can be solved by directly applying the “hard” systems approaches such as mathematical and statistical modeling, mathematical programming, computer simulation and decision and game theory, wicked problems are not well-​formulated, and as such resist straightforward applications of instrumental rationality, instead requiring a sort of perspectival shift. Similar calls for a shift in OR thinking were also made by Russell Ackoff (1919–​2009) and West Churchman (1913–​2004) in the USA. The contrast emphasized by Checkland (2000) is represented in Figure 7.1. Hard systems thinkers take a system modeled as if existing in the world, which can be engineered from “outside”; soft systems thinkers take a model

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Figure 7.1 The contrast between hard and soft systems stances. Inter-​and Transdisciplinarity in Bioeconomy –​Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. www. researchgate.net/​figure/​Systems-​practice-​in-​interdisciplinary-​research-​Ison-​2010-​Fig-​434-​ adapted-​from_​fig5_​321777799 [accessed Jan. 2021]

as a learning tool to organize the process of inquiry. This is a meta-​ methodological difference in stance toward the system: the hard stance sees it as a model of reality, while the soft stance sees it as a model of the inquirer’s own thinking about the world. A similar contrast figures in the metaphysical debates between scientific realism and instrumentalism in the philosophy of science, but note that the hard–​soft distinction is not a metaphysical but meta-​methodological one that highlights two complementary outlooks. In management science, many models are directly or indirectly connected to the problem situation to be resolved in a practical sense. For example, mathematical programming in a resource management context gives a model of the problem-​solution set: an objective function defines the problem as a mathematical one of finding the optimal management strategy given the constraints coming from the behavior of the system components, such as fish stock or tree growth. In this context, no one would debate over whether such a model as a whole (in contrast to its components models) represents the reality that exists independently from the modeler as a problem solver (it clearly doesn’t). Rather, what is highlighted by the soft systems stance is the fact that such a way of representing the problem situation is one of many ways the problem situation at hand can be formulated, which is not necessarily shared with other modelers or the agents modeled (who are often called stakeholders).

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Why is the soft–​hard stance a relevant distinction for sustainability science and the challenges of achieving inter-​and transdisciplinarity? First, if we understand sustainability science as a kind of management science with specific goals, as we proposed in the last section, then the choice of particular modeling approaches must have justifications—​implicit or explicit—​for its problem-​formulation, distinct from the usual epistemic ones, such as empirical accuracy and explanatory power. The enduring disagreements across scientific disciplines concerning sustainability—​such as between ecologists and economists—​can be partly explained if we assume that those from different disciplinary backgrounds tend to take a hard stance toward their own well-​ developed, so-​called legacy models. We can better understand self-​identified sustainability scientists (unlike, say, biologists or economists who study sustainability issues) who lament this state of interdisciplinary disagreements and call for more genuine inter-​and transdisciplinary sustainability science (e.g., Dorninger et al., 2020) if we interpret them as promoting soft systems thinking. These scholars have no presumption that sustainability science will eventually lead to a unified theory dreamed by general systems theorists. Instead, they reiterate the plurality and relativity of perspectives and highlight the importance of developing methods to arrive at a shared framing of the problem situation among the modelers and between the modelers and the modeled agents. In OR, soft systems thinking is operationalized as a family of methods called problem structuring methods (PSMs) (Smith and Shaw 2019). Among others, these methods share two important characteristics. The first one is that PSMs model subjective interpretations of the problem situation. This is exactly the main point of soft OR discussed above. It is naturally followed by the second characteristic, which is that PSMs actively involve stakeholders, namely those agents who have to make management decisions (e.g., authorities) and those agents who are modeled in the management model (e.g., fishermen). The second follows from the first because once the model is seen as a subjective construal of the problem situation, some validation mechanism is needed to ensure that the problem situation is intersubjectively shared. Such validation processes are expected to bring various benefits, including the enhancement of participants’ learning about the situation, development of buy-​in to politically feasible outcomes, and legitimization of the decisions through procedural rationality. In the literature on interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity is characterized either as an advanced form of interdisciplinary integration of theories, models and concepts (e.g., in systems dynamics models), or as co-​production of knowledge and solutions through the involvement of extra-​ scientific participants (Bernstein 2015). Sustainability scientists tend to adopt the latter, operational definition of transdisciplinarity as stakeholder engagement, which suggests that they subscribe to soft OR. Those who are skeptical about the merits of co-​production, in contrast, are implicitly adopting a hard stance and ipso facto assuming that the experts’ problem-​framing is the correct one.

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Now that we have introduced what we think is a relevant distinction, soft and hard systems thinking in sustainability science, we will look at two cases of model-​based sustainability science. We show that, despite the divide, it is possible to make use of both perspectives in a productive way.

How to use the soft and hard distinction: two illustrative cases In the last two sections, we argued that the soft–​hard distinction is more fundamental than the natural–​social divide in sustainability science. What we mean by “fundamental” is not that the divide is impossible to bridge, but rather that it is a useful explanatory hypothesis to understand the unique interdisciplinary landscape in sustainability science. In this section, we will argue that noticing the soft–​hard distinction is also useful for advancing sustainability science methodologically. The key idea is that, since soft systems thinking involves a shift in perspective or stance, you can improve existing “hard” looking management models in a “soft” direction, without abandoning these models or coming up with entirely new models. Game theory in natural resource management Game theory, which is mentioned in the last section, is a poster child of postwar social science. It is a versatile theory of interactive decision-​making that can model interactions of any n ≥ 2 agents—​human or non-​human agents such as states, groups, ants, and behavioral phenotypes. It can model non-​ cooperative as well as cooperative interactions. It has stimulated the explosion of experimental studies of human and system behavior in economics, political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and its use goes beyond social science and into evolutionary biology. When seen as a tool in OR, game theory provides a typical “hard” systems analysis. It models a problem situation as consisting of a set of players, who have a set of actions, which defines outcomes as the combination of the actions; each player has a preference ordering over these outcomes, and acts so as to satisfy her preference ordering, given that the other players are doing the same. Solution concepts, most importantly the Nash equilibrium, define how such games are “solved” at a steady state in which no player can do better by unilaterally changing her course of action. The use of game theory is traditionally categorized into descriptive and prescriptive uses. In the descriptive use, the game theorist-​qua-​observer uses the model as a scientific representation of a given strategic situation to be studied, in order to understand, explain, predict, and intervene in the behavior of the system. The descriptive use corresponds to hard systems thinking, in that the modeler assumes that the modeled situation exists “outside” the observer. For example, think about any social dilemma situation such as common resource

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management. The present state S(0) (e.g. overfishing) can be identified as a socially sub-​optimal Nash equilibrium, and the desired state S(1) is identified as an alternative outcome that is beneficial to all players involved (which may or may not be Nash). Finally, several options to change S(0) to S(1) are considered, such as changing incentives, beliefs, or some other aspects of the game through regulations. Many of the current uses of game theory for policy purposes are based on this descriptive hard stance. In the prescriptive (or normative) use, in contrast, the game theorist-​qua-​ consultant provides a player (the client) with recommendations as to what he should do in order to satisfy his preferences. A good example of this is the involvement of the game theorist Thomas Schelling in strategic planning during the Vietnam War. The validity of such recommendations is based on the descriptive accuracy of the model (who the players are, what options they have, what they prefer, whether they are “rational,” etc.), which in turn depends partly on the recommendations themselves because the client and his understanding of the situation are also part of the game.3 In this sense, the prescriptive use calls for a soft stance, because the specification of the problem situation is inescapably subjective, and therefore inter-​subjective validation of the model is essential for the success of the recommendations, such as that “threats must be credible.” Did North Vietnam see the situation the same way as the Pentagon? Were they playing the same game to begin with? Of course, in conflict situations the challenge is that the stakeholders may have incentives not to share their perspectives or available options, but regardless of these strategic subtleties, our point should be clear. There is nothing essentially “hard” in game theory, despite its strong axiomatic foundations and mathematical formalism. Game theory in itself is neither hard nor soft, but its use can be. The explicit soft use of game theory is apparent in what Redpath et al. (2018, 418) call a constructivist approach to the management of conservation conflicts, according to which “games are designed and used in iterative processes to understand conflict situations and help stakeholders to come up with solutions.” In particular, unlike the standard use of experimental games in economics, which, based on the hard stance, adheres to a set of strict methodological precepts, such as the use of real incentives and subject anonymity to guarantee experimental control for valid causal inferences, the constructive approach gives players “freedom to explore a range of possible outcomes in strategic situations such that they can reframe the problem and the game, and create new options not initially contemplated by the research team” (Redpath et al. 2018, 418). For example, Worrapimphong et al. (2010), in looking for sustainable fishing practices for the razor clams in a coastal wetland in the Gulf of Thailand, combined role-​playing games, computer simulation of agent-​based models, and co-​exploration of the situation with stakeholders (local government officials and fishermen and women). The researchers used game theory as a problem-​structuring template, and constructed the problem

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and solutions together with those who are modeled, instead of studying the problem situation as external to them and devising intervention strategies from “outside.” Behavioral and perspective changes of the involved parties are expected outcomes of the constructivist approach, not something to be suppressed and controlled. (See Redpath et al., 2018, 419, for another example of the use of the constructivist approach to the agro-​forestry system in India.) The constructivist approach is under-​explored in natural and social sciences, but as this example illustrates, the theoretical, experimental, and computational resources of game theory can be readily exploited by sustainability scientists as soft systems thinkers. Expected Utility Theory in the Integrated Assessment Model for climate action Expected Utility Theory (EUT) has a similar wartime history as game theory. In fact, its first axiomatization was made by von Neumann and Morgenstern in the process of developing game theory (published in the 1947 second edition of von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944). EUT is still the standard model of individual decision-​making under uncertainty, according to which the optimal action can be identified, given the probabilities of different outcomes, and the decision-​maker’s attitude toward risk in terms of risk preferences. The latter can be quantitatively measured as expected utilities that are unique up to positive affine transformation, but more intuitively categorized qualitatively into risk averse, risk neutral, or risk seeking. When the probabilities are interpreted as subjective degrees of beliefs of the decision-​maker that follow certain rules of probability calculus as in Savage (1954), then the theory is sometimes called Subjective EUT. Just like game theory, EUT has two interpretations, descriptive and prescriptive (or more commonly called normative). Descriptively EUT is seen as a predictive or explanatory model of how the agent (typically a human) makes decisions, while prescriptively it is seen as a model that tells the decision-​maker what the rational course of action to follow is, given her beliefs and preferences. Again, the descriptive–​prescriptive distinction roughly corresponds to the hard–​soft systems thinking in OR. While behavioral economists and psychologists took a hard stance and produced a lot of alternative descriptive models of choice under uncertainty, EUT still remains as the most widely accepted normative model. In other words, EUT is the dominant problem-​structuring framework for situations involving uncertainty. In sustainability contexts too, EUT is featured as a normative model to identify ideal climate mitigation strategies that maximize intergenerational expected utility, where “the decision-​ maker” is the whole of humanity (including both present and future generations), and the utility is operationalized as the net present value of the aggregate Gross Domestic Products (GDPs). To do this, an inter-​temporal decision model complements

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EUT by specifying time-​preferences (in terms of the discounting rate for the future utilities) in addition to risk preferences. A so-​called Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) couples this decision-​theoretic framework with some model of the macroeconomy and equations that relate atmospheric concentration of GHGs to economic growth by way of surface temperature changes (which is called a damage function).4 These damage functions are central to the outcome of the model but are typically very simplistic constructs. In one of the most influential IAMs in current use, William Nordhaus’s Dynamic Integrated Climate-​Economy model (DICE), the damage function is a quadratic function (Nordhaus 2017) and although they are rarely significantly more sophisticated (Pindyck 2013; 2017) standardly there is some observational basis (See Nordhaus 2017).5 Since this normative use of EUT in IAMs is in principle soft, according to our distinction, one can question whether it is a good way to frame the problem-​ situation humanity is facing, independently from questioning whether its components, such as the damage function, are accurate enough. Consider for example Winsberg’s (2018, 123, 125) following comments on the use of IAMs: there are “voices coming particularly from the world of economics, who believe that how we should act in response to the threat of climate change is a scientifically discoverable fact,” but “there is no scientific, as opposed to ethical, argument that one can make for” the claim that a certain discounting rate is justified; the IPCC’s adoption of classical decision theory “is not a scientifically warranted conclusion” (Winsberg 2018, 126). “While it may very well be true that, in policy making, we have to make [value trade-​ offs], it doesn’t follow that any particular choice of how to do this is scientific” (p. 127); IAMs “cannot be presented as more scientific alternatives to politically deliberated goals like the Paris goals” (p. 128). In these quotes, Winsberg (2018) criticizes economists for pretending to do science (modeling reality) when in fact they are doing ethics (making value-​ laden decisions). However, we find the science–​ethics dichotomy is ultimately unhelpful for advancing climate science. This is because the dichotomy cannot explicitly separate two distinct questions. One is the question of the frame-​choice—​is EUT a good problem-​framing? The other is the question of the value choice in a given frame—​should the discounting rate be 3% or less? Regarding the first question, Winsberg does not offer any alternative to EUT as a problem-​framing template, insisting that it is not a scientific but an ethical or a political question. But in answering the second question in passing with his favorite discounting rate (Winsberg 2018, 125 n. 7), Winsberg in fact implicitly adopts the EUT framework (as otherwise, he cannot start arguing for any value of the discounting rate). Also, his claim that stakeholders should be consulted to determine their true risk preferences (rather than using the default assumption of risk neutrality) suggests that he accepts the EUT framework as the ring on which to play sumo with economists, as it were.

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The soft–​hard distinction in systems thinking can help us avoid this type of conflation, by pointing out that the prescriptive use of decision theory such as EUT is essentially soft. Winsberg is frustrated with economists because they seem to take a hard stance toward EUT, but his criticisms, on close inspection, reveal that he accepts the usefulness of the problem-​framing to operationalize intergenerational ethical decisions and to involve stakeholders. EUT however is one of many frameworks for modeling the problem-​situations involving uncertainties. In fisheries management science, for example, practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds actively discuss the pros and cons of a range of alternatives, such as Multi Criteria Decision Analysis, Bayesian Belief Network analysis with the use of Influence Diagrams, etc. (see Benson and Stephenson, 2018). For philosophers to understand and contribute to these methodological discussions, it is crucial to notice the soft–​hard distinction in systems thinking, and in particular the soft realization that sustainability scientists as modelers are part of the sustainability problems they try to understand and solve.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that, in order to understand the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary dialectics in sustainability science, it is useful to see sustainability science as a kind of management science, and then highlight the hard–​soft distinction in systems thinking for OR. In the first section we argued that the natural–​social science dichotomy is relatively unimportant and unhelpful. In the second section, we outlined the differences between soft and hard systems thinking as a more relevant and helpful distinction, mainly as a difference between perspectives toward systemic modeling. Then we argued that the distinction is methodologically useful in advancing sustainability science, either to open up a possibility of using existing theoretical, experimental, and computational resources of the sciences in a soft way (the case of game theory), or to make explicit what exactly is at stake when particular disciplines (such as economics) are criticized (the case of EUT/​IAMs).

Notes 1 A salient example is Tyler Cohen, a prominent liberal economist who argues that there should be no discounting at all across generations. Although he is in the minority, this suggests that the rate of discounting is a philosophical question that does not map onto the natural–​social science divide. 2 Although we follow Strijbos (2017) in separating science and engineering as two domains in which systems thinking was applied, the reality is more complicated. In particular, systems thinking itself blurs the distinction between pure theory and applied domains. See also Mirowski (2002).

Sustainability as management science  103 3 Philosophers and sociologists of science characterize this way in which theory and reality are entangled as the performativity of scientific theories. 4 Although this type of IAMs is most frequently discussed, there are many different kinds of IAMs and not all of them are aggregated in this way, or even contain damage functions. See, e.g., Beck and Krueger (2016) for a helpful overview. 5 Interestingly with respect to both damage function and time-​preference a debate has been raging among climate economists since Nicholas Stern’s famous report was published (Stern 2007) about how to view these crucial parameters. Stern favored a “normative” approach, thinking of especially time-​preference as an ethical or policy issue, whereas, e.g., Nordhaus favored a “descriptive” stance taking these parameters to be quantities to be measured or estimated with uncertainties. See also Beck and Krueger (2016).

References Beck, M. & Krueger, T. (2016). The Epistemic, Ethical, and Political Dimensions of Uncertainty in Integrated Assessment Modeling. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 7 (5), 627–​645. Benson, A. & Stephenson, R. L. (2018). Options for Integrating Ecological, Economic, and Social Objectives in Evaluation and Management of Fisheries. Fish and Fisheries 19 (1), 40–​56. Bernstein, J. H. (2015). Transdisciplinarity: A Review of its Origins, Development, and Current Issues. Journal of Research Practice 11 (1), 1–​20. Checkland, P. (2000) Soft Systems Methodology: A Thirty Year Retrospective. Systems Research and Behavioral Science 17, S11–​58. DesRoches, C. T., Inkpen, S. A. & Green, T. L. (2019) The Eroding Artificial-​Natural Distinction? Some Consequences for Ecology and Economic. In Nagatsu, M. & Ruzzene, A., eds. Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. Bloomsbury Publishing, 39–​57. Dorninger, C., Abson, D. J., Apetrei, C. I., Derwort, P., Ives, C. D., Klaniecki, K., … & von Wehrden, H. (2020). Leverage Points for Sustainability Transformation: A Review on Interventions in Food and Energy Systems. Ecological Economics 171, 106570. Gass, S. I. & Assad, A. A. (2005). An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research: An Informal History. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Jerneck, A. & Olsson, L. (2020) Theoretical and Methodological Pluralism in Sustainability Science. In Mino, T. & Kudo, S., eds. Framing in Sustainability Science. Science for Sustainable Societies. Springer, 17–​33. Jerneck, A., Olsson, L., Ness, B., Anderberg, S., Baier, M., Clark, E., … & Persson, J. (2011). Structuring Sustainability Science. Sustainability Science 6 (1), 69–​82. Kates, R. W., Clark, W. C., Corell, R., Hall, J. M., Jaeger, C. C., Lowe, I., … & Faucheux, S. (2001). Sustainability Science. Science 292 (5517), 641–​642. Knierim, A., Laschewski, L. & Boyarintseva, O. (2018). Inter-​and Transdisciplinarity in Bioeconomy. In I. Lewandowski, ed., Bioeconomy. Springer, 39–​72. Komiyama, H. & Takeuchi, K. (2006). Sustainability Science: Building a New Discipline. Sustainability Science 1 (1), 1–​6.

104  Michiru Nagatsu and Henrik Thorén Lane, D. (1989). Operational Research and Fisheries Management. European Journal of Operational Research 42, 229–​242. Lane, D. and Stephenson, R. L. (1995). Fisheries Management Science: The Framework to Link Biological, Economic, and Social Objectives in Fisheries Management. Aquatic Living Resources 8, 215–​221. Mahmoud, Y., Jerneck, A., Kronsell, A. & Steen, K. (2018). At the Nexus of Problem-​ Solving and Critical Research. Ecology and Society 23 (4), 40–​55. Mingers, J. (1992). Recent Developments in Critical Management Science. Journal of the Operational Research Society 43, 1–​10. Mirowski, P. (2002). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge University Press. Morgenstern, O. & von Neumann, J. (1953). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton University Press. Nash, J. (1951). Non-​Cooperative Games. Annals of Mathematics 286–​295. Nordhaus, W. D. (2017). Revisiting the Social Cost of Carbon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114 (7), 1518–​1523. https://​doi.org/​10.1073/​pnas.1609244114. Norton, B. G. (2015). Sustainable Values, Sustainable Change: A Guide to Environmental Decision Making. Chicago University Press. Persson, J., Hornborg, A., Olsson, L. & Thorén, H. (2018). Toward an Alternative Dialogue between the Social and Natural Sciences. Ecology and Society 23 (4), 14–​55. Pindyck, R. S. (2013). The Climate Policy Dilemma. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 7 (2), 219–​237. Pindyck, R. S. (2017). The Use and Misuse of Models for Climate Policy. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 11 (1), 100–​114. Redpath, S. M., Keane, A., Andrén, H., Baynham-​Herd, Z., Bunnefeld, N., Duthie, A. B. … & Pollard, C. R. (2018). Games as Tools to Address Conservation Conflicts. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 33 (6), 415–​426. Savage, L. J. (1954). The Foundations of Statistics. John Wiley. Simon, H. A. (1977/​1960). The New Science of Management Decision. Revised ed., Prentice-​Hall. Skaburskis, A. (2008). The Origin of “Wicked Problems”. Planning Theory and Practice 9 (2), 277–​280. Smith, C. M. & Shaw, D. (2019). The Characteristics of Problem Structuring Methods: A Literature Review. European Journal of Operational Research 274 (2), 403–​416. Stern, N. (2007). The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Cambridge University Press. Strijbos, S. (2017). Systems Thinking. In Frodeman, R., Klein, J. T., & Pacheco, R. C. S., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, 291–​302. Thorén, H., Nagatsu, M. & Schönach P. (forthcoming) An Interdisciplinary Sustainability Science? In Krieg, P. & Toivonen, R., eds. Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts. Helsinki University Press.

Sustainability as management science  105 von Neumann, J. & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton University Press. Winsberg, E. (2018). Philosophy and Climate Science. Cambridge University Press. Worrapimphong, K., Gajaseni, N., Le Page, C. & Bousquet, F. (2010). A Companion Modeling Approach Applied to Fishery Management. Environmental Modelling and Software 25 (11), 1334–​1344.

Chapter 8

“Science must fall” and the call for decolonization in South Africa Chad Harris

Introduction Many people around the world are familiar with the African saying that it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps not as recognizable is a thematically related idiom that says: “If the youth are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down to feel its warmth.” The sentiment expressed by these words perfectly encapsulates the challenge posed by the movement known as “fallism.” This term refers to a series of protests started by university students across South Africa in 2015. This movement, which remained largely independent of any political grouping or any other influence outside of student-​centered issues, received the name because it took the form of a series of demands for certain public symbols, practices, and institutions to fall, especially those perceived as obstacles to a decolonized and more inclusive educational environment in South Africa (Mabasa 2017). The first major targets of the protests were cultural symbols and artworks deemed celebratory of colonialism and pro-​Western cultural chauvinism. A statue on the campus of the University of Cape Town depicting Cecil John Rhodes, Southern Africa’s most notorious colonist, epitomized the problem for the fallists, and hence one of their main initial demands was for the statue to be removed. This aspect of the protest, which dominated debate in the media and social media, was dubbed #RhodesMustFall. This pushback against the symbols of colonialism reverberated beyond the colony and made its way back to the heart of the old empire when students at Oxford University called for other statues of Rhodes to be removed (Cheeseman 2020; Coughlin 2020). Simultaneously, students began a protest against what they considered exclusionary financial practices. For example, South Africa’s privileged universities were targeted for charging exorbitant registration fees. The fallists argued that high fees and exclusions based on financial status were an extension of colonialism because they were a way of preventing students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the majority of whom are black, from accessing

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quality tertiary education.1 This aspect of the movement became known as #FeesMustFall. The most striking fallout from fallism, and the one especially significant for epistemology and philosophy of science, is what came to be known as the “science must fall” debate (abbreviated to SMF from here on). The incident that started SMF was a short exchange of opinions that on the face of it seemed of minor importance. During a seminar held in the middle of the upheaval, a fallist student argued that science should also be a target of the protests because it is one of the institutions standing in the way of decolonization.2 I will go into the specifics of the argument made against science in some detail in the next section, but what stood out in general about the incident was the divisive debate it provoked both in the seminar venue and in the broader South African society. The episode drew vitriolic criticism from certain sections of the population who used it as grist for the mill of dismissive attitudes towards the idea of decolonization, which some view as a form of reverse racism (Louw 2016) or a vindictive and misguided attempt to erase anything associated with Western knowledge and culture (Williams 2017). This misrepresentation of the rationale behind fallism is fueled by a lack of consensus about what “decolonization” actually means. The necessity of “decolonizing the curriculum and institutional culture” are steps invariably considered essential for transforming South African education for the better. However, the people and institutions driving this change display a marked reluctance to define the exact nature of this change. Still, the basic idea behind decolonization is not difficult to understand. The key to understanding it is to realize that South Africa’s transition to democracy was not a revolution denied but rather a revolution deferred. This means that the residue of colonial power, which includes things such as massive economic inequality, is still prevalent. It also means that the culture, beliefs, and knowledge of those on the receiving end of colonialism and Apartheid are still repressed to the point of invisibility. The desire for decolonization is simply the manifestation of the frustration of South Africa’s oppressed in changing the negative legacy of the past. This is why the idea of decolonization is vehemently rejected by some, but passionately pursued by others. In what follows, my aim is not to criticize or endorse either side in this impasse but rather to conduct a considered analysis of the perceptions of science motivating the SMF argument and what exactly the SMF’s argument against science amounts to. It is crucial to keep in mind that the call for science to fall came from within one of the country’s premier universities, by students who in the near future will constitute the next cohort of intellectuals leading public discourse in the country. This makes SMF a fascinating bellwether of the perception of science in a critical segment of the next generation of South African citizens and intellectuals, particularly those committed to decolonization. My aim is thus to extract lessons that can help philosophers develop

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an approach to epistemology and philosophy of science that does more than pay lip service to the idea of decolonization and that resonates with the next generation of critical thinkers who might take an interest in these fields. This makes the rest of this chapter essential groundwork for fostering the understanding of science rationality necessary to meet South Africa’s and the continent’s developmental goals.

The case against science The SMF argument charged that science is a product of Western modernity and is incompatible with decolonization. The claim was that science is not only foreign but is also “totalizing” in that scientific explanations are always presumed to trump any alternatives. As an illustration of its totalizing nature, we are told that, according to science, “it was Newton and only Newton who knew … that gravity existed and created an equation and that’s it.” This allegation is clearly motivated by what Philip Kitcher referred to as the “Legend” perception of science (Kitcher 1995). This implies that science is the story of a lineage of enlightened historical figures, the overwhelming majority from the West, who pass down the knowledge they glean. The implication is that these were the only figures in history who could have achieved this knowledge and so humanity would still be in the dark about the nature of gravity, for example, if not for Newton. This totalizing feature of science means that, instead of being decolonized, science should rather be “restarted from an African perspective.” This aspect of SMF is clearly motivated by a sentiment akin to the one that motivated standpoint theory for feminism, and in essence what is being called for here is a reconceptualization of scientific rationality along the lines of Sandra Harding’s notion of strong objectivity (Harding 1995). What this reconstructed science would look like is not spelt out, but we are given an example of the type of African knowledge that it would be required to accommodate. The speaker refers to a belief, widely held in communities across Africa, that certain traditional healers are able to direct lightning towards specific targets, and can therefore direct lightning strikes against people as well as property such as cattle (Trengrove and Jandrell 2015, 103). Belief in this type of phenomenon, known colloquially as “witchcraft,” is put forward by the speaker as the type of thing science struggles to accommodate, thus making science incompatible with decolonization and therefore something that must fall in the name of decolonization. It is this comment that generated most of the derision towards SMF, but I will argue later that the appeal to belief in “witchcraft,” as exemplifying the type of African metaphysical belief that is incompatible with scientific rationality, holds the key to understanding the sensitivities with which any localized approach to epistemology and philosophy of science needs to grapple.

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Given the above, we can reconstruct the SMF argument as follows: P1) Science is totalizing –​scientific explanations are incompatible with, and supposedly trump, all other explanations. P2) Decolonization is about making a place for African knowledge in public discourse. P3) African knowledge includes belief in phenomena such as witchcraft. P4) Scientific explanation is incompatible with witchcraft-​based explanation. Sub-​C) Science is incompatible with African knowledge. C) For decolonization to happen, science must fall. My contention is that it is incumbent on philosophers working in epistemology and philosophy of science in South Africa to develop some sort of response to this argument if a workable approach to decolonization of these fields is to be found. In what follows I evaluate the prospects of succeeding in this task by considering responses to each of the premises in turn.

Towards a decolonized epistemology and philosophy of science We can start by setting aside P2) as a relatively uncontroversial characterization of the public perception of decolonization, and hence not worth challenging. Granted, followers of the Fanon model of decolonization, as the wholesale and violent displacement of the colonizing culture by the colonized (Fanon 1963), may take umbrage and argue that this definition is not radical enough. For them, decolonization should be the total eradication of anything without an Indigenous pedigree. There are many responses to make against this view and the argument strays into politics, but it suffices for my purposes to point out that, as radical as SMF is, its call for scientific questions to start from an African perspective falls short of this extreme view. Certain comments from the seminar session seemed to call for a total eradication of science, but the overall tone of the argument implies something different. To ask for science to become sensitive to the African perspective is not tantamount to asking for science to be eradicated completely. The SMF appeal is rather for science to be reformed or reconceived in a way that is not dismissive of the lives and beliefs of those members of South African society unwilling to abandon traditions that are incompatible with the scientific worldview. The next premise to broach is P3), which speaks to the importance of witchcraft and related beliefs in Africa. To the outsider, it may seem like hyperbole to insist that witchcraft is the type of issue that uniquely characterizes African belief systems. While I am compelled by the restrictions of the SMF debate to focus on the topic of witchcraft, this should not be taken to imply

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that witchcraft is the only, the most important, or even the most interesting aspect to traditional African thought. It is simply the aspect highlighted by the SMF movement, and hence the one I am writing about here. It is also important to keep in mind that the idea of witches and witchcraft does not have the same connotations and associations in the African context as it does elsewhere (Parrinder 1956, 142). In places where Judeo-​Christian and Islamic values are dominant, for example, witchcraft is often understood as an inversion or perversion of societal values and therefore as something superlatively sinister or evil. In Africa, witchcraft is associated more with tension related to societal and familial strife. In fact, the practice of and belief in witchcraft are not considered fundamentally spiritual in nature (Stevens 2010), even if there is a secretive or mystical undertone to the phenomenon. This means that, instead of associating witchcraft in the African context with anything occult or evil, we should rather see it as a “form of subtext to social interaction” (Niehaus 2010, 66), or a way of allowing communities to speak about topics that are typically considered taboo or inappropriate for public discourse. Even with these caveats one might still reasonably question whether belief in witchcraft is as ubiquitous as these comments suggest, and whether the persistence of this belief is merely the residue of outdated traditions or a result of a lack of development on the continent. Surprisingly, there is no shortage of empirical evidence suggesting that the belief in witchcraft is indeed widespread across modern sub-​Saharan Africa (Trengrove and Jandrell 2015, 103), and that there is no strong correlation between witchcraft belief and development (Leistner 2014). Alternatively, one might take the line that while witchcraft in Africa is interesting, its analysis falls under the remit of the ethnographer rather than the philosopher. If we accept this then we may have created enough wiggle room to allow epistemology and philosophy of science an excuse to ignore this phenomenon. Unfortunately, this avenue is blocked by the fact that debate over the rationality and respectability of witchcraft belief has been ongoing in African Philosophy for decades. Kwasi Wiredu (1997), for example, holds the mantle for the type of dismissive exasperation that is the hallmark of the universalist or “Professional” school of African Philosophy when addressing witchcraft belief (Hountondji 1996; Appiah 1992). This line of thought correctly points to the universality of belief in the occult and argues that there is nothing inherently African about such beliefs. This school takes exception to those such as Robin Horton (1967) who look to compare African theories that postulate entities such as witches and ancestors with the theoretical entities postulated by science. This view insists the only appropriate comparison for traditional African beliefs are other traditional beliefs and witchcraft should not be characterized as a variety of African proto-​ science. The standard rejoinder in African Philosophy is that the rationalistic outlook motivating these philosophers is a result of their background

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in Western Philosophy (Ikuenobe 1997). They fail to understand witchcraft belief because they can only ever view such practices through the lens of the Western worldview. At the other end of the spectrum are those like Polycarp Ikuenobe (1995) who not only defend the saliency of witchcraft belief in African epistemology, but also mount a spirited defense of these beliefs as rational when considered against the backdrop of the social and metaphysical belief systems of African communities. Another example is the Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) movement (Kaya and Seleti 2014), which champions traditional African medicine as the type of knowledge that needs to be promoted if we are serious about decolonization. Traditional African healing practices are steeped in the same metaphysics that fosters belief in witchcraft (Mokgobi 2014) and traditional practitioners mount a similar defense of the rationality of their beliefs. It is also important to note here the extreme sensitivity that the question of rationality evokes in African Philosophy. This has been the case since the publication of Mabogo More’s seminal (1996) argument that skepticism about the existence of African Philosophy is motivated by philosophy’s tendency to valorize reason, combined with Western scholarship’s tendency to paint everything associated with African culture as irrational and defective. This paper was one of the earliest clarion calls for decolonization in post-​ Apartheid South Africa and is the forerunner for the program of approaching decolonization as a problem of epistemic injustice, exemplified recently in Ndlovu-​Gatsheni’s (2018) book. Limited space in this chapter means I am unable to explore arguments related to the intricate linkages between rationality, science, and philosophy but the main lesson for us in the context of SMF is the danger of hastily dismissing belief in witchcraft as irrational simply because it appears inconsistent with established scientific knowledge. This also means, to refer back to the SMF argument, that responding to P3) does not look like a promising way of making inroads towards a response to SMF’s anti-​science conclusion. This leaves us with P1) and P4), which claim scientific explanations eclipse or displace alternative explanations such as witchcraft-​related explanations. In other words, when science explains a phenomenon there is no room for any other type of explanation (Harding 1997). If science says that lightning is the discharge of electrical energy between the atmosphere and the surface of the earth then it is not possible to countenance any alternative explanations such as that the lightning strike was directed by a practitioner of witchcraft. If this kind of aggressive scientism is accurate then we seem forced to accept that decolonization and science are mutually exclusive, and SMF’s argument is sound. But there are arguments that cast doubt on the claim that scientific and other explanations are necessarily always incompatible. Godwin Sogolo (1998) argues that when it comes to causal explanations it is usually possible to identify more than one legitimate cause for any given effect. He asks us to

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consider the scenario where a young boy strikes a match and the resulting flame causes a building to burn down. Sogolo argues that a firefighter sent to the scene of the blaze would identify the boy as the cause of the fire whereas a forensic scientist or building inspector, for example, would look to factors such as the presence of accelerants in the vicinity of the match. A social worker might look to completely different factors as potential causes, such as the societal factors that led to the boy being unsupervised and playing with matches for instance. Sogolo’s point is that, far from being mutually exclusive, all of the factors identified as playing a causal role in the fire deepen our understanding of the event that occurred. This shows, for Sogolo, that our explanations for an event depend fundamentally on the nature of the event to be explained as well as the interest we take in the event (Sogolo 1998, 231). Recognizing the importance of this latter factor is crucial in responding to the SMF argument. What has to be acknowledged is that the interest a scientist takes in any given event, a lightning strike for example, is different to the interest that a tradition-​respecting African community takes in that event. This means that the explanations these two groups come up with to explain the strike can be considered alternative explanations without being considered rival explanations. Science is thus left free to perform its function without having to make concessions to metaphysical considerations outside its sphere of competence. Tradition, likewise, can function in these communities without the burden of having to position itself as a rival to science. Another possible model to emulate is the accommodation achieved between traditional African medicine and mainstream medicine in South Africa. Jones (2006) describes the ecosystem of potential medical treatments navigated by ordinary South Africans, who happily switch between the science-​backed medicine available in the public health system and the IKS-​ backed treatments on offer by traditional healers. It is incumbent on the relatively new field of philosophy of medicine to respond to this situation, as argued by Metz and Harris (2018), and develop theories of medicine that can make sense of this phenomenon of consulting multiple traditions. One such response is Cosmopolitanism, inspired by Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ethics (Appiah 2006) based on synthesizing insights from diverse cultures and traditions. A similar approach is adopted in Alex Broadbent’s book on philosophy of medicine, which endorses a commitment to, inter alia, epistemic humility and the prioritization of practice (Broadbent 2019, 256). The tenets of Cosmopolitanism allow philosophy of medicine to steer a middle ground between the radical scientism of the evidence-​based movement in medicine, and the extreme relativism that is characteristic of much of the discourse on decolonization of medicine. These views point to potential solutions to the main challenge SMF poses for philosophers: namely spelling out the form that a commitment to scientific rationality should take in a society with social, religious, and metaphysical

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commitments ostensibly at odds with science. These approaches give us reason to reject the view that science has to be as “totalizing” as SMF suggests. The understanding that different types of explanation can legitimately be marshaled with the aim of deepening our understanding of a phenomenon, is both liberating and powerful. This path of accommodation and inclusion leaves intact the integrity of scientific explanation while at the same time allowing for the possibility of tapping into African knowledge for a different type of edification. It gives societies such as ours a model for how a commitment to scientific rationality can be one of our societal values, without making it the overriding or dominant one. In conclusion, this approach gives us an answer to SMF that shows why science need not fall in order for decolonization to proceed. Instead, scientific rationality can be retained, along with the wisdom gleaned from tradition, as a powerful tool in our future decolonized society.

Notes 1 For a comprehensive account of the roots and demands of #FeesMustFall, see Godsell and Chikane (2016). 2 My description of the incident is based on video recording available on YouTube: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=C9SiRNibD14&t=23s.

References Appiah, K. A. (1992). In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. Oxford University Press. Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W.W. Norton & Co. Broadbent, A. (2019). Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press. Cheeseman, N. (2020). Oxford’s Position on Rhodes Must Fall is Bad Politics –​and Even Worse History. Mail & Guardian, 15 June 15. https://​mg.co.za/​opinion/​2020-​ 06-​15-​the-​university-​of-​oxfords-​position-​on-​rhodes-​must-​fall-​is-​bad-​politics-​and-​ even-​worse-​history/​. Coughlan, S. (2020). Oxford College Want to Remove Cecil Rhodes Statue. BBC News, June 18. www.bbc.com/​news/​education-​53082545. Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press. Godsell, G. & Chikane, R. (2016). The Roots of the Revolution. In Booysen S., ed. Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa. Wits University Press, 54–​73. Harding, S. (1995). “Strong Objectivity”: A Response to the New Objectivity Question. Synthese 104 (3), 331–​349. Harding S. (1997). Is Modern Science an Ethno-​Science? Rethinking Epistemological Assumptions. In Shinn T., Spaapen J. & Krishna V., eds. Science and Technology in a Developing World. Sociology of the Sciences, 19, Springer, 37–​64. Horton, R. (1967). African Traditional Thought and Western Science. Africa 37 (2), 155–​187. Hountondji, P. (1996). African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Indiana University Press.

114  Chad Harris Ikuenobe, P. (1995). Cognitive Relativism, African Philosophy, and the Phenomenon of Witchcraft. Journal of Social Philosophy 26, 143–​160. Ikuenobe, P. (1997). The Parochial Universalist Conception of “Philosophy” and “African Philosophy”. Philosophy East and West 47 (2), 189–​210. Jones, S. (2006). From Ancestors to Herbs: Innovation According to the “Protestant Re-​formation” of African Medicine. Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 1, 177–​197. Kaya, H. O. & Seleti, Y. N. (2014). African Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Relevance of Higher Education in South Africa. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 12 (1), 30–​44. Kitcher, P. (1995). The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions. Oxford University Press on Demand. Leistner, E. (2014). Witchcraft and African Development. African Security Review 23 (1), 53–​77. Louw, D. (2016). The Mirage of “Rainbowism” within the Nightmare of #MustFall Campaigns: Exploring the Penetrating Hermeneutics of Compassionate Being-​with Against the Background of Decolonising Activism and Xenophobic Suspicion. Stellenbosch Theological Journal 2(2), 321–​346. Mabasa, K. (2017). The Rebellion of the Born Unfrees: Fallism and the Neo-​colonial Corporate University. Strategic Review for Southern Africa 39 (2), 94–​116. Metz, T. & Harris, C. (2018). Advancing the Philosophy of Medicine: Towards New Topics and Sources. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 43 (3), 281–​288. Mokgobi M. G. (2014). Understanding Traditional African Healing. African Journal for Physical Health Education, Recreation, and Dance 20 (2), 24–​34. More, M. (1996). African Philosophy Revisited. Alternation 3 (1), 109–​129. Ndlovu-​Gatsheni, S. J. (2018). Epistemic Freedom in Africa. Routledge. Niehaus, I. (2010). Witchcraft as Subtext: Deep Knowledge and the South African Public Sphere. Social Dynamics 36 (1), 65–​77. Parrinder, E. O. (1956) African Ideas of Witchcraft. Folklore 67 (3), 142–​150. Sogolo, G. (1998). The Concept of Cause in African Thought. In Coetzee, P. H. & Roux, A. P. J., eds. Philosophy from Africa: A Text with Readings. Routledge, 228–​237. Stevens Jr., P. (2010). Witchcraft. The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/​acref/​9780195334739.001.0001. Trengove, E. & Jandrell, I. (2015). Lightning Myths in Southern Africa. Natural Hazards 77 (1), 101–​110. Williams, J. (2017). The “Decolonise the Curriculum” Movement Re-​ racialises Knowledge. Open Democracy, 1 March. www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​decolonise-​ curriculum-​movement-​re-​racialises-​knowledge/​. Wiredu, J. (1997). How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought. Transition 75/​76, 320–​327.

Chapter 9

Structural epistemic (in)justice in global contexts Inkeri Koskinen and Kristina Rolin

Introduction Since the 1980s, feminist philosophers of science have drawn attention to the role of ideologies and values in science and the interaction between power and knowledge. They have documented the under-​representation of women (and men in certain social groups) among professional scientists and examined how the dominance of men has influenced what is studied, how it is studied, and for what practical purposes scientific knowledge is sought. An inquiry that has started as a concern about social justice has developed into a concern about epistemic justice, that is, justice in the production, transmission, dissemination, and use of knowledge. Within the last ten years, the philosophical discussion of epistemic (in)justice has developed into a specialty within the larger field of feminist and liberatory philosophy of science and epistemology (Kidd et al. 2017). This chapter aims to understand how theories of epistemic (in)justices, particularly those addressing structural injustices, are relevant to global philosophies of science. We start with a brief literature review, after which we discuss epistemicide in the light of the notion of epistemic injustice, and then proceed to examine epistemic injustices that arise within global scientific institutions.

Varieties of epistemic injustice Miranda Fricker (2007), in her seminal book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, defines epistemic injustice as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. She introduces a distinction between two forms of such injustice: testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The former occurs when “prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word,” and the latter when “a gap in collective interpretative resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience” (2007, 1). For instance, when someone is not believed because he or she belongs to a marginalized social group, or when someone is not able to articulate or communicate to others

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an experience that is important in his or her life, because he or she lacks the adequate concepts, they are victims of epistemic injustice. Fricker argues that such situations are both wrongful and epistemically harmful. They wrong people in their capacity as knowers, which is essential to human value, and they lead to dysfunctions in epistemic practices or systems (2007, 43–​44). Fricker’s ideas have given rise to a lively discussion in which philosophers have refined and developed her original definition and distinctions. In addition to testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, several other forms of alleged epistemic injustice have been identified and named. Moreover, while Fricker (2007) originally focused on the individual level, offering individual epistemic and moral virtues as remedies to epistemic injustices, a collective and structural approach has been gaining attention recently (Anderson 2012; Brady and Fricker 2016; Koskinen and Rolin 2019). In this section, we will summarize some of the identified forms of epistemic injustice, and then focus on epistemic injustices at the structural level. Kristie Dotson (2011) has argued that repeated instances of testimonial injustice can lead to testimonial smothering: when a potential testifier realizes that their potential audience is either unwilling or unable to understand or believe what they have to say, they may remain silent. Along slightly similar lines, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr (2012) has argued that willful hermeneutical ignorance might be a more common form of epistemic injustice than the kind of hermeneutical injustice Fricker describes. In the former case, members of a marginalized group do not lack the conceptual resources to express their experiences, but “dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally” (Pohlhaus Jr. 2012, 722). Also, Fricker’s original definition of epistemic injustice has been developed further. In particular, the question of what it means to wrong someone in their capacity as a knower has gained attention. David Coady (2010) has suggested a distinction between discriminatory and distributive epistemic injustice. Testimonial and hermeneutical injustices are discriminatory, as they involve not believing or not understanding someone because of an existing social identity prejudice against them, or because they are marginalized in the generation of shared concepts. Distributive epistemic injustice happens when epistemically valuable goods such as education or information are distributed unfairly (see also Fricker 2010). Along similar lines Heidi Grasswick (2017) has argued that if epistemic injustice is a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower, the notion of “knower” should be understood in a broad sense. We should pay attention not only to those who claim to know something, but also to those who wish to attain knowledge. She focuses particularly on participatory epistemic injustice and epistemic trust injustice, which both are injustices towards people who seek knowledge. Participatory epistemic injustice occurs when someone is unfairly not recognized as a legitimate participant in a knowledge-​seeking

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practice such as a discussion, deliberation, or inquiry (Hookway 2010, 156). And epistemic trust injustice occurs when the members of a marginalized community have, given their previous experiences, good reasons not to trust scientists. They are wronged as receivers of knowledge because relations of epistemic trust that are necessary for the transmission of knowledge have been undermined by historical connections between science and social injustices (Grasswick 2017; see also Scheman 2001). Fricker’s (2007) focus was originally on epistemic injustice in transactions among individuals, and on the ways in which individuals can cultivate epistemic and moral virtues in order to overcome prejudices and thus avoid epistemic injustice. However, as Elizabeth Anderson (2012) has argued, many deep-​ rooted epistemic injustices take place on the structural level. This is because epistemic transactions that on the individual and local level are justified—​such as listening to a highly educated expert rather than an uneducated speaker—​can lead to stark epistemic injustices on the structural level. If members of a socially marginalized group suffer from distributive epistemic injustice and thus lack access to education, they will hardly be in the position of highly educated experts, whose words, with good reason, are listened to. Such interconnections between forms of epistemic injustice lead to cumulative effects, which in turn are easily cemented in diverse institutions, including academic ones. As we have argued (Koskinen and Rolin 2019), structural remedies, along with virtue-​based remedies and prevention measures, are needed to counteract such cumulative effects. In what follows, we will focus on structural epistemic injustices in the global context. First, we discuss epistemicide in the light of the notion of epistemic injustice. And secondly, we briefly examine epistemic injustices that arise within the global scientific institutions.

What is epistemicide? Epistemic injustices have been identified and analyzed not only in feminist philosophy of science but also in the epistemologies of the South; what Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to as “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (Santos 2014, x). In the epistemologies of the South, the focus has been on epistemic injustices that wrong not merely indigenous people, but also their knowledge systems. Epistemic injustices can lead to “epistemicide,” the killing or attempted killing of knowledge systems that are different from modern science by global scientific institutions and practices (Santos 2014, 92). While this may strike as a problematic generalization concerning modern science, we need to keep in mind that scholars and scientists often see other knowledge systems (e.g., indigenous knowledge systems) as single monoliths of folk

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beliefs. Hence, it is not surprising that, in the epistemologies of the South, science is painted in broad strokes as a Western-​centric way of producing and understanding knowledge (Santos 2014). In this section, we put aside these concerns about generalizations and focus on the question of what a knowledge system is, how such a system can be killed—​intentionally or unintentionally—​and how the destruction of such a system, as well as unconcerned processes that in practice can lead to the death of such a system, can be resisted. A knowledge system is closely related to a social practice which may be concerned with other things besides the production of knowledge, including subsistence, a way of living or the aims of a social movement. A knowledge system involves an epistemic community with shared standards, ways of sharing knowledge and mutual epistemic responsibilities among practitioners. Not all knowledge systems are supported by knowledge-​ producing institutions and formal educational systems. That modern scientific knowledge is produced and transmitted in higher education institutions with substantial resources enables modern science to gain an upper hand over other knowledge systems (Rolin 2017). Epistemicide can follow from unfair epistemic marginalization. One mode of unfair epistemic marginalization takes place when scientists and scholars working in or from the periphery (or semi-​periphery) are forced to seek recognition and epistemic affirmation for their work from scientists and scholars working in the metropole. The globalization of scientific research under conditions of inequality is also called “quasi-​globalization” (Connell 2014, 211). As Connell explains, This is very familiar in academic practice even in a rich peripheral country like Australia. We travel to Berkeley for advanced training, take our sabbatical in Cambridge, invite a Yale professor to give our keynote address, visit a Berlin laboratory, teach from USA textbooks, read theory from Paris and try to publish our papers in Nature or the American Economic Review. (Connell 2014, 211) Academic dependence is another way to describe the unequal relations between the periphery and the metropole (Alatas 2003). According to Alatas (2003, 604–​605), academic dependence has several dimensions: dependence on ideas (e.g., theory), the media of ideas (e.g., scientific journals), research funding, investments in education, and the demand for expertise in developing nations. One way to significantly weaken a knowledge system is to exclude it from both secondary and higher education (Seurujärvi-​Kari 1996). While educational institutions may not be able to eliminate other knowledge systems, they are capable of discounting them as non-​knowledge (e.g., folk beliefs, myths, religious beliefs). Moreover, knowledge systems that are discounted as non-​knowledge may become objects of academic scholarship. Consequently,

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the agents of these knowledge systems are no longer considered as epistemic authorities on their own knowledge systems, and the epistemic authority on these systems is relocated to academic scholarship and higher education institutions (see, e.g., Smith 1999; Garroutte 2003; Santos 2014). Epistemicide takes place when a social practice, a way of living, or a language is wiped out by economic, political, or military means. As Santos argues: “The destruction of knowledge is not an epistemological artifact without consequences. It involves the destruction of the social practices and the disqualification of the social agents that operate according to such knowledges” (2014, 153). In an extreme form of epistemicide, a system of knowledge is destroyed in a genocide (Santos 2014, 92). What does it take to resist unfair epistemic marginalization and epistemicide? To give an example, one strategy is to reform existing educational institutions. The critics of epistemicide emphasize the importance of rethinking the curriculum (both in schools and universities) and challenging the dominant canon of academic literature (Seurujärvi-​Kari 1996; Masaka 2018). Another strategy involves establishing novel educational and knowledge-​producing institutions. Such institutions may range from new universities to societies and networks for sharing knowledge (Hall and Tandon 2017). Both strategies emphasize the importance of restoring epistemic agency to people who have been excluded or marginalized by hegemonic knowledge systems (Masaka 2018). As Masaka (2018, 294) argues, “the rediscovery of the agency of the indigenous people of Africa is necessary if they are to speak for and of themselves from and on their own terms and conditions.” Restoring epistemic agency involves researching and documenting indigenous knowledge systems while at the same time recognizing the importance of oral sources in maintaining such knowledge systems. According to Masaka (2018, 286), “the indigenous people of Africa ought to take the lead in researching and documenting their knowledge” and “there ought to be a change of focus from principally identifying the badness of epistemicide to the identification of realistic and practical steps to correct the situation.” Epistemic marginalization and epistemicide are closely related to how global scientific institutions are governed. While the literature on epistemicide has drawn attention to injustices toward non-​academic knowledge systems, less systematic attention has been paid to structural epistemic injustices that arise within scientific institutions. In the next section, we will therefore discuss such injustices from a global viewpoint, bringing together some recent discussions that shed light on this topic.

Epistemic injustices in global scientific institutions In philosophy of science, and especially in the social epistemology of scientific knowledge, there has been a growing interest in the institutions that surround and support scientific knowledge production. By institutions we

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mean complex social entities that reproduce themselves, such as universities, research funding agencies, scientific societies, conferences, and journals, as well as explicit, norm-​governed social forms and practices that reproduce themselves, such as peer-​review, established research ethical guidelines, and academic degrees. On the one hand, philosophers of science have suggested improvements in existing institutions, for instance in peer-​ review (Heesen and Kofi Bright 2020), or in the governance and agenda-​setting of science (Kitcher 2001, 2011). On the other, they have expressed worries that certain existing institutions, or some of their features, can be epistemically harmful. For instance, the commercialization of scientific knowledge production can threaten critical interactions among scientists in those fields that are affected (Carrier 2008; Radder 2010; Fernández Pinto, Chapter 14 in this volume). Such critical interest in the institutions surrounding and supporting science has been influenced also by growing concerns expressed in many fields about the epistemically worrisome consequences of funding instruments that stress the ever-​faster publication of novel results (Ioannidis 2005; Smaldino and McElreath 2016; Reijula and Ylikoski 2020). Also, recent discussions about epistemic injustices in science have drawn attention to the institutional aspects of scientific knowledge production: institutional changes, such as diversity offices and diversity and inclusion plans, are common ways to target structural injustices in academia (Anderson 2012). But so far, the attention has largely been on national institutions such as universities and national research councils. Much less attention has been paid to structural epistemic injustices embedded in or arising from institutions that shape science worldwide. After all, many central scientific institutions, such as scientific journals, peer-​review practices, academic degrees, and even some funding instruments, are international—​not to mention global science policy trends and agreements. The ways in which they shape knowledge production can differ from one national context to another. Sabina Leonelli (2017; see also Bezuidenhout et al. 2017) has presented an interesting analysis of how inter-​or transnational practices which, at first sight, seem to be understandable and perhaps even fair, can nevertheless, through unintended cumulative effects, lead to the strengthening of already existing inequalities. In the life sciences, the use of certain expensive technologies in data production is often used as a proxy for data quality. The use of such technologies is also valued by journal editors and reviewers, and the technologies have been adopted by global digital databases hosting open data. While the use of such technologies as a proxy for data quality is seen as epistemically justified, given the crucial role of these technologies in knowledge production, Leonelli argues that it has both epistemically harmful and unjust consequences. Scientists working in low-​resourced research environments have no access to the expensive technologies. As Leonelli emphasizes, there is ample evidence, in such environments, of the successful use of less

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expensive means to produce high-​quality datasets. But the practice of treating the use of expensive technologies as a proxy for data quality has led to a situation where many scientists working in low-​resourced environments are unwilling to share their data, or to describe how they were produced, or even to publish internationally. We argue that this is a form of testimonial smothering brought about by practices embedded in the institutions that shape science globally. Scientists working in low-​resourced environments may produce excellent data and valuable results, but as they know that they will be undervalued in peer-​review and in open databases, they end up not sharing their achievements internationally. This, in its turn, reinforces the already existing inequalities in global scientific communities. Two chapters in this volume offer more examples of structural epistemic injustices embedded in or arising from global scientific institutions. Chun-​ Ping Yen, in Chapter 2, points out that the role of the English language as the most important lingua franca in philosophy leads to some worrisome consequences. One or a few languages that function as linguae francae are necessary in any international academic community, as its members must be able to directly communicate with each other. (By lingua franca we here mean a shared working language; for the problematization of the term, see Gobbo and Russo 2020.) However, this necessity creates inequalities between community members. Some can continue to use their mother tongue, for others the use of a foreign language imposes an extra burden. In a field like philosophy, where linguistic nuances and styles matter, this inequality is particularly clear, though it is something researchers in all fields live with. But as Yen notes, such an inequality can be more or less pronounced. She cites a study by Schwitzgebel et al. (2018) that compares English-​language philosophy journals with journals published in Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Polish. Articles published in the English-​language journals were very likely to cite only work originally written in English. In the other journals studied, the situation was quite different. For instance, in the Spanish-​language journals, 36% of the citations were of works written in other languages than Spanish or English (Schwitzgebel et al. 2018, 42). In other words, in the Spanish-​language journals, citing works in many languages was a common practice, unlike in the English-​language journals, which proved to be extremely monolingual: “Fully 97% of all citations in our sample of elite Anglophone journals are to works originally written in English, leaving only 3% of citations for all other linguistic traditions combined.” (Schwitzgebel et al. 2018, 44.) While not as globally used as English (as a first or second language), Spanish is still an academic lingua franca. Established citation practices in Spanish-​language philosophy journals, however, seem to differ from those of English-​language journals; in Spanish-​language journals, citing texts in various languages is seen as customary and acceptable. Practices embedded

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in scientific institutions such as journals and peer-​review can aggravate or ameliorate the inequalities created by the use of a live language as a lingua franca. While such practices are usually informal, citing literature written in other languages than English is quite clearly discouraged in English-​language journals. In individual cases such discouragement is not necessarily unjust: it can be deemed understandable to demand that the works cited in a paper are in a language the reviewers, editors, and readers understand. But we argue that at a structural level such discouragement amounts to testimonial injustice. Even people who are able to read a study written in, say, Finnish, cannot usually cite it in an international, English-​language publication. This reduces the value of the work many philosophers publish in their mother tongues, treating it as non-​existent in the international context. Manuela Fernández Pinto, in Chapter 14, discusses the impact of the globalized privatization of science in Latin America and the Caribbean. Citing a study by Feld and Kreimer (2019) she describes how international collaborations funded by governments in North America or Europe and/​ or by multinational companies, can be unsatisfactory for scientists working in the Global South. After studying research consortia that involve such collaborations, Feld and Kreimer (2019, 162–​ 163) noted that the collaborations shared some features that disadvantaged Latin American scholars and scientists. The latter were usually invited to participate in a consortium because its leaders wanted to study some phenomena in Latin America, and the invitation typically came so late that they could not influence the methodological design of the project or the distribution of the tasks. They usually did not lead any work packages, nor did they administer the resources. Their predominant activities were data collection and systematization, and technical work. As scientists working in the Global South often have scarce funding opportunities, participation in international research consortia is an attractive prospect. However, it can simultaneously narrow their roles in research to a degree that may amount to participatory epistemic injustice. Once again, at the individual and local level no one is necessarily doing anything wrong. But in the cases studied by Feld and Kreimer, Latin American scientists again and again ended up in subservient roles. As a result of the way in which the globally very unequally distributed funding instruments work, they were systematically not recognized as full participants in the search for knowledge. These three examples are meant to illustrate what we mean by structural epistemic injustices embedded in or arising from global scientific institutions. Many other examples remain yet unstudied by philosophers of science. For instance, we have good reasons to suspect that institutional pressures towards the fast publication of novel results in international journals have aggravated the replication crisis (Smaldino and McElreath 2016), and constantly feed the ever growing field of predatory publishing (de Rijcke and Stöckelová 2020) worldwide. But while these pressures and their adverse consequences affect

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academia worldwide, do they look even remotely the same in different parts of the globe? Or are they distributed in a way that results in epistemic injustices?

Conclusion In this chapter, we have argued that global philosophies of science can benefit from recent analyses of epistemic injustices in feminist philosophy of science and the epistemologies of the South. Feminist philosophers have identified several forms of epistemic injustice, such as testimonial injustice, testimonial smothering, hermeneutical injustice, and willful hermeneutical ignorance. Moreover, they have drawn attention to structural epistemic injustices. In the epistemologies of the South, scholars have discussed unfair epistemic marginalization and identified epistemicide as an extreme form of epistemic injustice. We have argued that in order to better address epistemic injustices taking place in various academic and non-​academic contexts in different parts of the world, philosophers of science should pay attention to structural epistemic injustices, including various forms of epistemic marginalization and epistemicide, and epistemic injustices that arise in scientific institutions.

References Alatas, S. F. (2003). Academic Dependency and the Global Division of Labour in the Social Sciences. Current Sociology 51 (6), 599–​613. Anderson, E. (2012). Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions. Social Epistemology 26 (2), 163–​173. Bezuidenhout, L. M., Leonelli, S., Kelly, A. H. & Rappert, B. (2017). Beyond the Digital Divide: Towards a Situated Approach to Open Data. Science and Public Policy 44 (4), 464–​475. Brady, M. S. & Fricker, M., eds. (2016). The Epistemic Life of Groups: Essays in the Epistemology of Collectives. Oxford University Press. Carrier M. (2008). Science in the Grip of the Economy: On the Epistemic Impact of the Commercialization of Research. In Carrier, M., Kourany & J., Howard, D., eds. The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited. University of Pittsburgh Press, 217–​234. Coady, D. (2010). Two Concepts of Epistemic Injustice. Episteme 7 (2), 101–​113. Connell, R. (2014). Using Southern Theory: Decolonizing Social Thought in Theory, Research and Application. Planning Theory 13 (82), 210–​223. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practice of Silencing. Hypatia 26 (2), 236–​257. Feld, A. & Kreimer, P. (2019). Scientific Co-​ operation and Centre–​ Periphery Relations: Attitudes and Interests of European and Latin American Scientists. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2 (1), 149–​175. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press. Fricker, M. (2010). Replies to Alcoff, Goldberg, and Hookway on Epistemic Injustice. Episteme 7 (2), 164–​178.

124  Inkeri Koskinen and Kristina Rolin Garroutte, E.-​M. (2003). Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America. University of California Press. Grasswick, H. (2017). Epistemic Injustice in Science. In Kidd, J., Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., eds. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge, 313–​323. Gobbo, F. & Russo, F. (2020). Epistemic Diversity and the Question of Lingua Franca in Science and Philosophy. Foundations of Science 25, 185–​207. Hall, B. L. & Tandon, R. (2017). Decolonization of Knowledge, Epistemicide, Participatory Research and Higher Education. Research for All 1 (1), 6–​19. Heesen, R. and Kofi Bright, L. (2020). Is Peer Review a Good Idea? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. doi.org/​10.1093/​bjps/​axz029. Hookway, C. (2010). Some Varieties of Epistemic Injustice: Reflections on Fricker. Episteme 7 (2), 151–​63. Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why Most Published Research Findings are False. PLoS Medicine 2 (8), e124. doi.org/​10.1371/​journal.pmed.0020124. Kidd, I. J, Medina, J., & Pohlhaus, G., eds. (2017). The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice. Routledge. Kitcher, P. (2001). Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford University Press. Kitcher, P. (2011). Science in a Democratic Society. Prometheus Books. Koskinen, I. & Rolin, K. (2019). Scientific/​ Intellectual Movements Remedying Epistemic Injustice: The Case of Indigenous Studies. Philosophy of Science 86 (5), 1052–​1063. Leonelli, S. 2017. Global Data Quality Assessment and the Situated Nature of “Best” Research Practices in Biology. Data Science Journal 16 (32), 1–​11. Masaka, D. (2018). The Prospect of Ending Epistemicide in Africa: Some Thoughts. Journal of Black Studies 49 (3), 284–​301. Pohlhaus, Jr., G. (2012). Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance. Hypatia 27, 715–​735. Radder, H., ed. (2010). The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University. University of Pittsburgh Press. Reijula, S. & Ylikoski, P. K. (2020). Tutkijan vapaus institutionaalisen tietoteorian näkökulmasta. In Väliverronen, E. & Ekholm, K., eds. Tieteen vapaus & tutkijan sananvapaus. Vastapaino, 73–​102. Rijcke, S. de & Stöckelová, T. (2020). Predatory Publishing and the Imperative of International Productivity: Feeding off and Feeding up the Dominant. In Biagioli, M. & Lippman, A., eds. Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research. MIT Press, 101–​110. Rolin, K. (2017). Scientific Community: A Moral Dimension. Social Epistemology 31 (5), 468–​483. Santos, B. de Sousa. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Routledge. Scheman, N. (2001). Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness. In Tuana, N. & Morgen, S., eds. Engendering Rationalities. SUNY Press, 23–​52. Schwitzgebel, E., Huang, L. T.-​L., Higgins, A. & Gonzalez-​Cabrera, I. (2018). The Insularity of Anglophone Philosophy: Quantitative Analyses. Philosophical Papers 47 (1), 21–​48.

Structural epistemic (in)justice  125 Seurujärvi-​ Kari, I. (1996). Cooperation in the Field of Education and Training among Indigenous Peoples. In Seurujärvi-​Kari, I. & Kulonen, U. M., eds. Essays on Indigenous Identity and Rights. Helsinki University Press, 170–​178. Smaldino, P. E. & McElreath, R. (2016). The Natural Selection of Bad Science. Royal Society Open Science 3 (9), 1–​17. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed.

Chapter 10

Excess and indigenous worldview Philosophizing on the problem of method Carl Mika

Introduction “Method” has a troubled relationship with indigenous research (Ryder et al. 2020; Simonds and Christopher 2013) because it has often been used, sometimes simply under the wider rubric of “research,” to alienate and exploit indigenous peoples. This is not to say that indigenous peoples never had ways of doing things, but given the holistic nature of our philosophy, it is difficult to imagine that the research methods we employ today align with traditional indigenous approaches. In this chapter, I offer some views on the mismatch of the concept of what I call method-​itself with an indigenous reading of holism. I am not advocating for a complete return to tradition here, but nor am I embracing a total relinquishing of the metaphysics that drove traditional practices. The fine line between traditional and contemporary views manifests in the theme of research methods, and so we have to deal with the possibility that research methods—​as they are currently employed—​do not correspond with oft-​cited indigenous first principles of existence which indicate that the world is interconnected (Southey 2020; Whitt et al. 2001). We cannot stop simply at critique, either; we have to propose new adventures with the world that provide an outcome of sorts but not, perhaps, in the way that an orthodox research method would lead us to. My argument in this chapter is that method-​itself is a more important point of consideration than simply method. For that part of this discussion, I draw on some of Heidegger’s thinking; he highlights the problem that a strict method brings about, through its restriction of how one can see the world. Method-​itself, in that light, points to a more fundamental issue than simply whichever method one is using in research. Method-​itself is difficult to explain using rational language but has significant outcomes for the indigenous researcher, due mainly to the fact that it can signify an almost spiritual notion of research. Whether that spiritual influence is holistic or fragmentary, though, is the primary question here; I go on to suggest that method-​itself tends to divide objects in the world and then order them in terms of human

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priority. I then consider, from my own cultural perspective (Maori), how there is always a greater concern that emerges from research—​one that transcends the outcome of the method. This excess, I argue, may be of interest for indigenous researchers more generally.

The restriction of method-​i tself Philosophy has not proven to be an attractive discipline for indigenous scholars. There are now several indigenous lawyers, doctors, and scientists, and a number have broad training in the social sciences, but philosophy appears to be off-​limits. This lack of participation is probably, for the main part, to do with philosophy’s deep-​rootedness in Western assumptions. However, it cannot be denied that philosophy—​even its Western form—​is important. Indigenous peoples can gain deeper insight into the machinery of oppression through philosophy, by questioning the foundational mechanisms that brought about colonization in its many forms. Philosophy allows for a critique of how the world and its objects are perceived, how one may discuss those things, and so on. Colonizing Western thought ingrains a particular encounter with objects (think here about how land, for instance, is forced on indigenous people as solid terrain, with no hint of its formerly spiritual nature). If no philosophical thought is brought to bear on the problem of colonization, then we mistake a problem for a technical one that centres on the social problem in front of us. Further, philosophy allows us to critique and rethink our own, home-​grown ideas, many of which may have hardened through their overuse in colonized contexts. Overall, philosophy can encourage both critique and mystery—​ hopefully both at the same time—​for the indigenous thinker. If there is one domain that calls for philosophy, it is research. In order to reignite mystery in our research, however, a sustained glance at “method” is necessary. From an indigenous perspective, “method” does something decisive to the world. Method assumes that we can arrange phenomena in our own way. Much of the discussion in indigenous research circles has (quite validly) turned on appropriate methods for research (Kovach 2009; Lee 2009), and so we have yet to explore fully what method itself does to things. To do that, we have to move beyond particular methodological technologies and towards the essential nature of “method”: thus, this chapter conceives method not as any one method, but as a general ordering of things in the world, including ideas about those things. This understanding of method is one that Heidegger (1993, 300) identified: (methodos), decides in advance what truth we shall seek out in the things. Method is not one piece of equipment of science among others but the primary component out of which is first determined what can become object and how it becomes object.

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Heidegger suggests here—​in much the same way as he insists that technē is the essence of technology rather than a particular piece of machinery (Heidegger 1977)—​that it is a misnomer to regard method as any one discrete approach. Method for him has an underlying predisposition. For indigenous peoples, this might be familiar in substance but slightly different in form. For instance, Maori, my own people, are quite familiar with an organizational force that establishes all things—​and so would understand Heidegger’s basic determination of method—​but they would be quicker to describe it as if it were animate and had a life-​force of some sort. In any case, we can tentatively concur with Heidegger that there is an underpinning phenomenon of any special method which establishes what things are important for our thinking at any one particular stage. With a particular method in service to method-​itself, we can single out objects, as Heidegger notes, and put them in an order that will be useful. For most of us, this fundamental approach to objects takes place in academia, where we have to specify what we are dealing with at a single time. Above all, academia encourages us to single out a research question, and then to define those things that will—​if they are placed in a line to produce a desired research outcomes (findings)—​be relevant for that question. In this vein, method-​itself is mostly self-​determination, but not in the usual political sense of autonomy; instead, the self-​determination meant here is that which defines the human being as the arbiter of what is relevant and what is to be discarded in research. In contrast, indigenous philosophy and practice would have traditionally established ways of dealing with objects. However, method-​itself, having dominated academic practice, strives for a distinction between the self and those objects. Moreover (and because of the importance of this point, to reiterate), it assumes that it is the human self that takes charge over things in the world. Even ideas are taken to be animate (Mika 2017), and so the indigenous researcher has to tread carefully when considering how to interact with them. To place oneself above any other phenomenon—​including the “idea,” which is the thing-​ in-​the-​world that the indigenous scholar treats with (Mika and Southey 2018)—​is a practice often resisted by indigenous philosophy (see Hoskins and Jones 2017 for an example of indigenous research that attempts to work with a phenomenon as interconnected with the world). Thus, when dealing with anything in the world, the indigenous scholar has to consider and represent how they are part of that idea, rather than how they can order and manipulate it. The cohering idea of indigenous philosophy is that things in the world are interconnected. The position here is that indigenous research should strive to be as holistic as possible. Let us now turn to a brief description of holism, and then to the unanticipated in research—​the excess—​and how it reveals itself despite our attempts to be focused on a research outcome through any particular method.

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Holism in research Indigenous metaphysics generally affirm the interconnection of things including, importantly, subject with object. Thus, I may make a statement or even simply construct a representation about the world, and these actions confirm my deep, essential relationship with the entities being talked about or represented (Mika 2017). It is important to note, however, that this confirmation is only something that allows us to remember the fundamental relationship between the world and myself—​it does not construct that fact as such. It acts more as a personal comfort, but it does not indicate that, suddenly, the world exists in an interconnected fashion because of that realization or memory. In general, for indigenous peoples the world does not exist due to one’s mental representation of it, unlike in idealist traditions in dominant Western thought. Indigenous peoples therefore tend to allow phenomena to construct their work, including the way in which they order things in the world. This apparently external constitution of an action is not, in fact, external: in the Maori language, for instance, within the meaning given to terms by dictionaries, there exists a deeper sense whereby the self is forever constituted by the so-​called external world. In other words: I-​am-​already-​that-​there! The exclamation mark is deliberately used here to indicate the mystery this event of thorough co-​constitution delivers to the human self, and it acknowledges the lesser role of the human in proposing a way with things in the world. Underpinning the entirety of holism is that indigenous philosophy does not concern itself with current, orthodox versions of rationality at all. Indigenous thought simply does not privilege the rationality of the ancient Greeks in the same way the West does. Thus, indigenous holism does not have an issue with the mystical. It is not uncommon to see this so-​called mysticism take place in ceremony, or in non-​academic settings such as tribal meetings, where individuals can hold conflicting positions on matters and express those in paradoxical ways. Indeed, labels such as “spiritual,” “physical,” “emotional,” and so on are only useful as a way of talking within Western contexts; in themselves, they represent artificial terminology that does not reflect the reality of indigenous existence. At certain points in an indigenous discussion, it is preferable that one refers back to one’s local origins. There are some relevant observations from my own Maori background that paint a context of how the holistic world has become somewhat marginal in thinking generally, and then in research. In Aotearoa, there has been a definite move towards ways that develop epistemic certainty about matters. This observation is, of course, anecdotal. The following stages have figured large in Maori approaches to thinking, according to Kirloskar-​Steinbach and Mika (2019): the 1980s saw attempts to wrest basic political control back, and this drive often relied heavily on spiritual ways of describing the world, including the connection between the human

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self and the non-​human world (and so the 1980s were perhaps the strongest for written and theorized responses to the fragmented, dominant knowledge of the West); the 1990s and the early 2000s saw a turn towards discussion of political issues about leadership and Treaty of Waitangi settlements—​and in this timespan empirical research also gained ascendancy. It was during this time that “mātauranga,” the Māori term for “knowledge,” appeared to come to prominence. It would not be out of order to suggest that mātauranga/​ knowledge meets the needs of empirical certainty, by providing support for research that delves into both Māori leadership and Treaty of Waitangi settlement issues and mechanisms. Research has hence come to rely heavily on the strict ordering of ideas, to evolve practical outcomes for problems that need workable solutions. For the enduring problem of holism though—​enduring, because several indigenous writers, including authors already mentioned, refuse to relinquish the idea that holism is still alive and well—​method-​itself is, on its own, a problem that needs addressing for the reasons I outlined earlier. There are several retorts to the tight restriction of the world inherent to method-​itself; one of these is a focus on excess, which to some extent reflects whatever lies outside that constraint. For indigenous holistic thought, there is always an excess calling for an explanation in our research. Method, in its most basic form of putting things in a particular order, allows us to arrive at an outcome that sits with that method but, despite our best attempts, there remains a greater story. This story sits outside of the one that method tells, and like our philosophy most generally, it demands attention.

The story of excess A Maori observation In Maori thought, there is always a greater entity or phenomenon that sits outside of the human self, including of his or her thoughtful practice (Southey 2020; Mika and Southey 2018). It waits for discussion, beyond each step of the research and sometimes unrelated to the outcome. It is likely that this excessive phenomenon gave rise to the research in the first instance, even though the researcher never detected it. It is fundamentally unknowable and therefore does not instill in the researcher any particular degree of confidence. Discussions about it have to be in the philosophical and speculative register, and so we have some facility to speak within it—​not about it, as method-​itself would have us do. This excess takes the place of a much greater story than the usual research outcome and is best accessed through emotional association, not through intellect on its own. In Māori philosophy, one term for the drive or inclination towards this narrative is “whakaaro,” which is often (unsatisfactorily) translated as “to think” or “thought.” It breaks down into “whaka” (to

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become) and “aro” (inclination or interest). Most fascinating for philosophy, this inclination is not solely the domain of humans but, instead, of all things. There is a distinctly Māori logic to this thinking: a tree, for instance, irrupts its way into the world, both with its own mode and also as an interconnected entity. The phenomenon that exists outside of the research that has evolved through method-​itself similarly has the capacity to grab our attention through its inclination towards the researcher (among others). The world beyond the research has us in its regard and waits for us to address it. Defying the confines of conventional language and method, this excess captures us and simply waits for us to acknowledge it. One example of this sort of excess is the act of simply sitting with another or with the world, and taking heed of the signs that naturally come about, through the speech of the other human or the non-​human world. For example, laughter with another, or with the unknowability of a thing as it sits in constitution with the rest of the world, instils a deep knowing that the self is an uncertain entity. The world and all other worlds have their own “whakaaro” or means of inclining towards the human self, and the human self then comes to some understanding through his/​her own whakaaro. The nature of this uncertainty, and its link with the All, is the point of contemplation—​not more knowledge about things in isolation from each other.

Indigenous research and the beyond-​r ational The excess finds its footing in research in several ways, one of these being within the immediate human realm. In general, it calls from beyond the questions asked during research. Many indigenous people will be familiar with how questions are often not immediately answered by elders, for instance. It is up to the elders (who are not necessarily older, by the way) to answer them; and answer them they may, but frequently what will be of more fascination to those elders is the emotional state of vulnerability, or excitability, that made one ask that question in the first place. This curiosity on the part of the elder might not be immediately obvious but could implant itself in the overall tenor of the discussion. In this instance, we see that normal rules around the strict ordering of question-​and-​answer are given short shrift—​and method-​itself is somewhat undermined in that act because it relies so heavily on that same strictly interlocking response. We get an inkling here of a weaving in and out of the research: a sort of excitement that has little to do with the formal research project of the Academy and much more to do with revealing the set of circumstances that give rise to the question in the first place.

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Interviewer: Can we start by talking about where you’re from? Elder (in response): Oh, ok—​you’re from there. That way of starting points to your origin and interest. Let’s think about that, then. A great deal of indigenous research seeks to ask questions, especially of knowledgeable people in the researcher’s community. Excess, though, takes the form of the following in these scenarios: it undermines the certainty that the questions occupy and anticipate; it reasserts the sovereignty of the non-​ human realm; and it is mostly not empirically accessible. However, as to that last point, the question-​answer mode of research, which then leads to analysis and logical finding, can provide the basis for the excess, by exposing its own gaps. When it does this, perhaps the researcher will have a sudden glimpse into another region that is not the immediate aim of the research. In line with Deloria and Wilkins’s (2012) metaphor, where the indigenous self would be led by all the phenomena of a forest but resist beating a predetermined path through it, the indigenous researcher walks with a special attunement in balancing research and the world. To extend on their metaphor: s/​he will follow that blurry path, and may backtrack according to new glimpses that the terrain offers. A courageous researcher might ignore the original research question and its method, preferring instead to follow the dark path of speculation. S/​he may doubt this path, and show this in their thinking. The research then becomes a story of self-​doubt, brought about by the interconnected world and its uncertainty. Excess is hence not to do with some preordained transaction between the researcher’s expectations and a symmetrical outcome. For the indigenous researcher, it signals the mystery of all worlds in their sum. For the indigenous researcher, there is a greater need—​now more than ever—​to reflect the world’s uncertainty in his or her work. While method-​itself can offer an initial prompt towards excess, on its own it traps the world and the researcher within its strict confines. It is up to the indigenous researcher to step outside the conventional mode of research and figure out a way to move towards the excess, without making that move a product of the method-​itself.

References Deloria Jr., V. & Wilkins D. (2012). The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. Fulcrum Publishing. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Tr. W. Lovitt. Garland Publishing, Inc. Heidegger, M. (1993). Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics. In Krell, D., ed. Basic Writings from “Being and Time” (1927) to “Task of Thinking”. Routledge, 267–​305.

Excess and indigenous worldview  133 Hoskins, T. & Jones, B. (2017). Non-​Human Others and Kaupapa Maori Research. In Hoskins, T. & Jones, A., eds. Critical Conversations in Kaupapa Maori. Huia Publishers, 49–​64. Kirloskar-​ Steinbach, M. & Mika, C. (2019). Refusing the “Foolish Wisdom of Resignation”: Kaupapa Māori in Conversation with Adorno. European Journal of Social Theory, 532–​549. Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations and Contexts. University of Toronto Press. Lee, J. (2009). Decolonising Māori Narratives: Pūrākau as a Method. MAI Review 2 (3), 1–​12. Mika, C. (2017). Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. Routledge. Mika, C. & Southey, K. (2018). Exploring Whakaaro: A Way of Responsive Thinking in Maori Research. Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (8), 795–​803. Ryder, C., Mackean, T., Coombs, J., Williams, H., Hunter, K., Holland, A. & Ivers, R. (2020). Indigenous Research Methodology—​ Weaving a Research Interface. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 23 (3), 255–​267. Simonds, V. & Christopher, S. (2013). Adapting Western Research Methods to Indigenous Ways of Knowing. American Journal of Public Health 103 (12), 2185–​2192. Smith, L. (2013). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed., Zed Books. Southey, K. M. (2020). Re-​presenting Māori and Indigenous Understandings of Being: Deconstructing the Notion of Mental Illness. Doctoral dissertation, University of Waikato. Whitt, L., Roberts, M., Norman, W. & Grieves, V. (2001). Belonging to Land: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and the Natural World. Oklahoma City University Law Review, 26, 701–​743.

Chapter 11

Radical alterity, representation, and the ontological turn Mark Risjord

Introduction Within European countries, differences in belief are used to express some of the deepest differences among us. Holy and unholy wars have been fought on the grounds that “their” beliefs are dangerous and “ours” are true. As the discipline of anthropology grew in the 19th and 20th centuries, human difference came to be described in intellectual terms. Deep differences among people were differences in “culture,” “conceptual scheme,” “worldview,” or simply “belief.” The dominant conception of culture in 20th-​century anthropology treated it as a shared system of meanings through which members of the culture understood themselves and their world. Radical alterity was fundamentally a difference in belief. As the 20th century progressed, the idea that we should think of ourselves and others in terms of our self-​conscious thoughts and attitudes was called into question from a number of quarters. Literary studies celebrated the death of the author; science studies adopted the perspective of the objects; while philosophy flirted with behaviorism, dasein, and varieties of pragmatism. Anthropology critiqued and largely rejected the culture concept (for reviews of this critique, see Kuper 1999 and Risjord 2007). Contemporary anthropology is marked by attempts to use a thin conception of culture, or to do without it entirely. The so-​called “ontological turn” is one of these attempts. The ontological turn is not a unified movement, though a suspicion of the category of “belief ” is a common theme. In their recent book, Martin Holbraad and Morten Pedersen argue that rejecting belief “provides perhaps the most incisive way of expressing the essential move of the ontological turn—​its bottom line, so to speak” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 188). After exploring what it might mean to reject “belief ” as a way of understanding ourselves and others, this essay will contrast two ways of doing so in anthropology. It will transpire that there are more and less radical ways to rethink radical alterity.

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Representation, culture, and alterity To treat radical alterity as a difference in culture—​and thereby a difference due to shared meanings, beliefs, and attitudes—​is to treat alterity in representational terms. The anthropological critique of culture, along with movements represented by slogans like “the death of the author” or studying science “from the perspective of the objects,” are part of a larger movement against representationalism. The idea that human differences are due to difference in beliefs, meanings, and attitudes is so fundamental that it is difficult to see an alternative. How can radical alterity be understood without appeal to difference in representations? Representationalism has been fundamental to Western understanding of human thought and language since at least the 17th century. A representationalist view proposes that the relationship between what we see, think about, and talk about, on one hand; and perception, thought, and language, on the other; is mediated by percepts, concepts, and meanings. We are directly aware of these representations and have only indirect knowledge of what they represent. For me to perceive the coffee cup in front of me, is for me to have a visual image categorized as “a coffee cup.” That visual image stands for, or represents, the real coffee cup. Commitment to representationalism generates all of the questions distinctive of European philosophy between the 17th and the 20th centuries. In virtue of what does my idea of a coffee cup represent a coffee cup? How do I know that the coffee cup exists at all? The idea that the human mind is fundamentally a producer and consumer of representations played a crucial role in the rise of the social sciences, including anthropology, in the 19th century. In this period the natural sciences were seeing unprecedented theoretical and practical success. There was hope that a scientific understanding of humans might yield similar success with social problems. The encroachment of science into the human realm was resisted on the grounds that humans were distinctive: only we have thought and language and only we can imagine a not-​yet-​existent future. The human capacity for representation meant that a human science must study those representations, not the material dimensions of human life. In this context, the anthropological concept of culture was developed as a way to account for human difference. As a result, until very recently, the popular conceptions of culture all included a strong representational component, such as shared beliefs, shared meanings, or shared concepts, not to mention shared stories, symbols, artistic representations, rituals, and so on. Belief plays a particularly important role in the cultural conceptualization of alterity. Beliefs may be mistaken or correct, but to say that a person has a belief is not to pass judgment on the truth or falsity of their belief. Understanding what people believe thus puts the focus on the content. When presented with a striking utterance or form of behavior that is very different

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from one’s own—​such as the assertion that shamans can turn themselves into bears—​the anthropologist inquires into what this belief means. How is a belief in metamorphosis connected to other beliefs, symbols, ritual activities, and so on? To draw out these connections among shared forms of representation is to understand the utterance in its cultural context. Radical alterity is a particularly interesting kind of difference in representational content. In a case like the belief in metamorphosis, the content is fundamentally at odds with the anthropologist’s beliefs. The project of understanding becomes one of explaining how and why such a belief can arise and be maintained. In spite of how appealing to differences in belief can naturally apprehend human-​difference, in recent times scholars have expressed reservations about using the category of “belief ” in this way. The argument rests on three central features of representationalism. First, representationalism presupposes that the world of representations and the world of natural facts are entirely distinct. There is one world of things, and our different representations (beliefs) give us different perspectives on it. Second, because beliefs can be evaluated as true or false, the use of belief to capture cognitive difference sets up an epistemological asymmetry. True belief does not stand in need of explanation; false belief does. Third, from a representationalist point of view, the only access any person or group might have to the truth or falsity of their beliefs is through more beliefs. To take someone’s belief to be false is to recognize that it is different from one’s own. These three points combine to treat radical alterity as a matter of false belief, and the anthropological response as a matter of explaining why “they” believe differently than “we” do (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017, 192). Since the epistemic asymmetry begins from the idea that the radically different beliefs are false, the explanation for why the beliefs are held often reinterprets the belief in dramatic ways. Faced with an informant telling a story of how a shaman turns into a bear, the anthropologist might treat the remark as a metaphor or other trope. Thus, “bear” in this context does not refer to ordinary bears: “bear” has a special, perhaps symbolic, meaning. Or, the anthropologist might see the whole practice of shamanism as having a social function not recognized by the informants. While they appear to be speaking about shamanistic metamorphosis, the informants are “really” talking about something else entirely, such as mechanisms for maintaining social status. The problem with such reinterpretations is that, in explaining difference, they explain it away. There is no conflict between the Ojibwa view that shamans can turn into bears and the anthropologist’s view that such things are impossible, because the Ojibwa do not really mean what they seem to say. Order is restored by eliminating the disagreement, and the anthropologists’ beliefs remain unchallenged. Such a consequence flies in the face of the longstanding anthropological commitment to reflexivity. We study others so as to arrive at a richer understanding of humanity, not to simply confirm

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our own categories. A strong commitment to this sort of reflexivity is a hallmark of the ontological turn. As Holbraad writes, “Rather than using our own analytical concepts to make sense of a given ethnography (explanation, interpretation), we use the ethnography to rethink our analytical concepts” (Holbraad 2010, 184). While the ontological turn takes many forms, all of them are grappling with the question of how to understand human difference without a representationalist concept of culture and the attendant notion of belief. As the argument above made clear, the strict distinction between culture and nature is a cornerstone of the representationalist approach to understanding radical alterity. Different approaches to the ontological turn result from different ways of rejecting the representationalist culture–​nature distinction. The first tries to collapse the distinction between concepts and objects. In Viveiros de Castro’s terms, where representationalism presupposes that there is one world but many cultures, perspectivism posits that there are many natures and one culture (Viveiros de Castro 2012, 112). As we will see in the next section, this approach retains crucial elements of representationalism. The second, more radical approach tries to uproot representationalism entirely and treat mind as an ecological phenomenon that is not separable from the environment at all.

An ontological turn: turning the culture–​n ature distinction upside down The ontological turn rejects the traditional approach to radical alterity wherein deep cognitive differences among people are treated as different perspectives on a single world. However, while it is easy to say that there are “many worlds,” the notion is difficult to unpack. Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell do so in two steps. They summarize the first step in these terms: We start with the ordinary (representationist/​epistemological) assumption that concepts are the site of difference. Then we argue that in order for difference to be taken seriously (as “alterity”), the assumption that concepts are ontologically distinct from the things to which they are ordinarily said to “refer” must be discarded. From this it follows that alterity can quite properly be thought of as a property of things –​things, that is, which are concepts as much as they appear to us as “material” or “physical” entities. (Henare et al. 2007, 13) The crucial idea here is to collapse the distinction between concepts and the things they represent. For these authors, this does not mean that we literally think with stones or flowers. Rather, it is to refuse to understand two different

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conceptual schemes as different perspectives on the same thing. When the Ojibwa spoke of metamorphosis, they were not encoding some aspect of a shared world in terms different from ours. They were expressing something entirely different, something incompatible with our thinking. To properly understand what it would mean for a shaman to take the form of a bear—​to take it seriously—​would be to take shamans as having the property of being bears. Persons are different in the Ojibwa world than they are in mine. The call to take difference seriously is thus crucial to the second step. Henare et al. characterize it this way: this view, anthropological analysis has little to do with trying to determine how other people think about the world. It has to do with how we must think in order to conceive a world the way they do. (Henare et al. 2007, 15) Taking difference seriously means committing to the alternative ontology, making it one’s own. This means reconceptualizing an entire field of ideas. If people can transform into animals and vice versa, we must think about what it means to be a person or an animal, what it means to have social relationships, and so on. The reflexivity of anthropological thought, on this view, requires adopting the foreign concepts as our own and working out the consequences of those new definitions. In this way we create, and thereby enter, a new world. While this version of the ontological turn makes salutary progress in upending the representationalist picture of radical alterity, it does so in a partial way. Identifying concepts with things is a rather unstable position insofar as it continues to identify radical alterity with conceptual difference. The focus turns to “definition” and the project is to explore the consequences of a new set of definitions. The provocative idea that concepts are things is thus not given its full force, for if concepts truly were things, they would not have definitions at all. Such a view clings to the idea that the human mind is fundamentally a consumer and producer of representations, since concepts with their explicit definitions are representations par excellence.

Another ontological turn: the ecological mind A different way to elaborate the provocative idea that alterity is a property of things is to entirely dispense with the language of “concepts” and “definitions.” Rather than begin with the assumption that “concepts are the site of difference” (Henare et al. 2007, 13), the alternative approach would reject concepts from the outset. Such an alternative could appeal to the variety of views that treat perception as ecological and cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (Gibson 1979; Clark 2008; Newen et al. 2018). These views treat language, thought, perception, and action as arising from relationships between human bodies and their environment.

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According to the ecological and extended views of the mind, there is a sense in which we do literally think with stones or flowers. Our cognitive system draws on the resources of and actively engages with aspects of the environment as part of its information processing. Cognition is not something that takes place “inside the head.” Rather, cognitive processes are composed of the brain and its body in dynamic interaction with the environment. And for humans, social practices are a crucial part of the environment (Hutchins 2011). To understand alterity in ecological terms, we must recognize the role that social practices play in shaping the ecology of the mind. Through social practices, objects are actively made to be components of our thought. People think differently because they engage with different objects, and those objects are different because they are partly constituted by different social practices. As an example of how such an approach to alterity might look in practice, consider Tim Ingold’s discussion of Ojibwa metamorphosis (Ingold 2000). Ojibwa lifecycle rituals included a puberty ritual wherein a boy would fast alone in the forest. The goal was to see a vision of a “grandfather,” a guardian who would help him later in life. Ingold writes: In one account, for example, a boy encountered a human-​like figure in his dream, who then turned into a golden eagle. This person was the “master” of the eagles. The boy, too, was transformed into an eagle in his dream—​thus winged and feathered, he flew to the south with his new protector, before returning to the point whence he originally departed. (Ingold 2000, 93) Dreams had epistemological significance for the Ojibwa. Hallowell discusses this extensively in his ethnographies of the Ojibwa: Although there is no lack of discrimination between the experiences of the self when awake and when dreaming, both sets of experience are equally self-​related. Dream experiences function integrally with other recalled memory images in so far as these, too, enter the field of self-​awareness. (Hallowell 1960, 40) The Ojibwa had a practice of treating dream experiences as genuine, knowledge-​producing experiences. The vision of a golden eagle, then, is not a hallucination. It was among the boy’s genuine, veridical experiences, albeit one that happened under the special circumstance of a vision quest. The Ojibwa thus put young men in a position to have the perception of metamorphosis. The experience emerged from a particular ecological relationship of the boy to his environment. Experiences of this kind are formative. This experience would then influence his later behavior and “contribute to the shaping of a person’s own sense of self, and of their attitudes and orientations towards the world” (Ingold 2000, 99). A golden eagle grandfather

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would require particular ritual and taboo observances, and the boy would be especially attuned to dreams of eagles or glimpses of eagles. Teaching the boy to hunt deer involves the practice of putting him in a position to see deer in the forest: turning the boy into a man involves the practice of putting him in a position to see a powerful grandfather. Through these practices and others, the Ojibwa created an environment populated by powerful spirit beings. The cognitive difference between the Ojibwa and myself is made quite explicit by Ingold’s account. It is not, at root, a matter of differing beliefs or concepts, and therefore alterity cannot be appreciated by coming to understand conceptual differences and their consequences. Proper understanding of radical alterity is much more difficult than defining concepts. Perhaps it is impossible. Insofar as human difference can be described in terms of beliefs or concepts, these must be understood as functions of the ecological context of the person. To have those beliefs and concepts, one must live in that environment with its physical and practical dimensions. It may be possible for a 21st-​century anthropologist to describe the environment in which the experience of metamorphosis became possible, and thereby reach some kind of appreciation of metamorphosis. But it is not possible to live in the environment of the late 19th-​century Ojibwa. That environment, those places, and practices are gone. This means that the anthropologist simply cannot have the Ojibwa concept of metamorphosis.

Conclusion The challenge of radical alterity is to understand and appreciate it, without assimilating it to one’s own view. This chapter has argued that the way traditional anthropology deployed the notions of “culture” and “belief ” distorted our understanding of alterity in subtle, but profound, ways. The anthropological concept of culture was informed by a historically contingent view of what it means to think and speak. Treating alterity in representationalist terms meant that deep differences were understood against the background of a problematic kind of sameness. Humans thus differed only in the content of their beliefs and concepts, culture and worldview. The critique of culture in the late 20th century, along with the development of alternative conceptions of what it means to think and speak, have made it possible to break out of the frame imposed by the representationalist culture concept. In all of its many manifestations, the ontological turn seeks to understand radical alterity without the representationalist culture concept. Both recognize that representationalism presupposes a nature–​ culture duality, and that this strict distinction must be effaced. As a result, neither approach understands radical alterity as a different perspective on a single, natural world. On the first approach, concepts and definitions continue to play a crucial role. Understanding radical alterity is a matter of working one’s way into a cluster of concepts and undertaking a commitment to follow through on

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their consequences. Fully understanding radical alterity is possible insofar as one is successful in adopting a new conceptual scheme. The ecological approach rejects concepts as a hold-​over from representationalism. Radical alterity is a profound difference of mind that arises from profoundly different practical and physical ecologies.

References Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford University Press. Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Hallowell, A. I. (1960). Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View. In Diamond, S., ed. Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin. Columbia University Press, 49–​82. Henare, A., M. Holbraad, M. & Wastell, S. (2007). Introduction: Thinking through Things. In Henare, A., Holbraad, M. & Wastell, S., eds. Thinking through Things. Routledge, 1–​32. Holbraad, M. (2010). Ontology Is Just Another Word for Culture: Against the Motion (2). Critique of Anthropology 30 (2), 179–​185. Holbraad, M. & Pedersen, M. A. (2017). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge University Press. Hutchins, E. (2011). Enculturating the Supersized Mind. Philosophical Studies 152 (3), 437–​446. Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge. Kuper, A. (1999). Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account. Harvard University Press. Newen, A., De Bruin, L. & Gallagher, S., eds. (2018). The Oxford Handbook of 4e Cognition. Oxford University Press. Risjord, M. (2007). Ethnography and Culture. In Turner, S. & Risjord, M., eds. Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology. Elsevier, 399–​428. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2012). Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory.

Part III

Negotiating science in/​w ith society

Chapter 12

The democratization of science Faik Kurtulmuş

Introduction The standard account of the relationship between science and democracy that was dominant in liberal democracies in the postwar period can be summarized, with some idealization, as follows. Science is a public good that provides various benefits to society. It improves the public’s health, increases economic productivity, and contributes to national defense. It helps to produce effective policies. For these reasons, science should be financially supported by the public. But it should be self-​governing. Outsiders cannot predict which research will promote the growth of science or produce social benefits. Their interventions will inevitably distort science (Bush 1990; Merton 1938; Polanyi 1962). The standard account insists on a strict division of labor between the public and scientists. The public, through the democratic process, sets social ends. Scientists then, inform the public about how to pursue those ends and the outcomes of different courses of action. Questions of ends and values belong to the public; questions of means and facts belong to the scientists (Weber 1949). This neat division of labor envisaged by the standard account relies on two assumptions. First, science is a value-​free enterprise. While cognitive values do play a role in science and ethical values impose certain limits, the context of justification is free of ethical and social values. Second, the public can reason about the ends it wishes to pursue independently of knowledge provided by science. According to the standard account, the choices that scientists have the authority to make do not influence the setting of public ends. They play a role only in the process of deciding how to pursue them. Both of these assumptions have been challenged by theory and experience. As a result, “an autonomous and authoritative science” has come to appear “intolerable” (Douglas 2009, 7, emphasis in original). One response to this state of affairs has been a call for the democratization of science.

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What is democratization of science? “Democratization of science” sometimes refers to the redistribution of epistemic authority between scientists and lay people to make it more equal. In this sense, it encompasses efforts to “democratize expertise” that erode the boundaries between scientists and lay people by recognizing various forms of “lay expertise” (Collins and Evans 2002; Solomon 2009). While political and epistemic considerations cannot be fully separated, there is also a political sense of democratization. In the latter sense, the democratization of science seeks to widen the scope of democratic rule for it to include decisions about science. This chapter is about this second sense of democratization. A domain of social life is democratically governed when all relevant parties enjoy equal opportunity to influence it in light of an accurate conception of their preferences, interests, and values (Kolodny 2014, 289; Pettit 2012, 21–​22). Accordingly, democratization of science refers to (a) the increase of the public’s influence over various aspects of science; and (b) the equalization of the opportunity for influence among members of the public; coupled with (c) an increased ability of members of the public to form an accurate conception of what will promote their interests and values. Since its different dimensions come in degrees, the democratization of science is not an all or nothing matter. This has two implications worth noting. First, when pursuing the democratization of science, we need to pay attention to the trade-​offs between its different dimensions. Second, calls for democratization of science can demand partial democratization, and do so on principled grounds. This definition does not identify democracy with a specific decision procedure or an institution. Rather, it identifies a set conditions that may be realized by different institutional arrangements and practices, which are to be evaluated in terms of how well they realize democratic rule (Pettit 2012, 180; see also Dewey 2012, 120–​121). In contemporary societies, the democratization of science will make use of both representative institutions and mechanisms of direct participation, such as citizen juries, consensus conferences, and deliberative polls.1 Given that the public has limited resources, it can increase its influence over outcomes by delegating some decisions to other agents (Plotke 1997). Provided the public gets to decide which decisions fall into which category, who it delegates decisions to, and retains control over its agents, this does not diminish democracy since such measures increase its influence. Descriptive representation can also supplement traditional forms of publicly authorized and accountable representation. As the community of scientists begins to include members of excluded groups and comes to resemble the society at large, this will also contribute to the democratization of science, because their choices will, to some extent, reflect the perspectives of social groups they come from. In addition to combining direct and representative forms of decision-​ making, the public deliberation and influence required by the democratization of science will take place in many different sites (Habermas 1996, 307–​308;

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Mansbridge et al. 2012; Pettit 2012, 187–​280). The crucial insight of the proponents of the systemic approach to deliberative democracy applies to the democratization of science as well: it is the joint operation of various associations and institutions—“including informal networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non- profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, and the courts”—that will realize the democratization of science, “including informal networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non-​profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, and the courts” (Mansbridge et al. 2012, 2; Moore 2017). Calls for the democratization of science are sometimes ridiculed for demanding absurdities such as voting on the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses. But, as we’ve seen, democracy is not just counting heads. And it is not the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses that the proponents of the democratization of science want to address. It is, rather, decisions about the production, dissemination, and application of science like the following. In the production of scientific knowledge, there are decisions regarding the setting of research priorities and the allocation of resources; decisions about the epistemic and practical goals that shape the design of experiments or studies, the operationalization of variables and the setting of evidentiary standards; more broadly, there is the question of how much critical scrutiny and evidence is necessary before a scientific finding becomes the basis of public action. There are also decisions regarding the dissemination of research. Should there be journals devoted to publishing negative results? Should the gender analysis of data be mandatory in medical journals? Finally, there are decisions on the application of scientific research in a specific context. Of the many candidate policies or technologies to achieve a given end, which one should be employed? Which local conditions should be paid particular attention to?

Why democratize science? The argument from impact and instrumental benefits The principle that all affected by a decision should have a say in it, provides one reason for democratizing science. Science and the technologies based on it can cause immense benefits and harms. They have a deep and often unavoidable impact on the lives not just of scientists but of everyone. Scientists, by themselves, cannot take into account all these interests that their activities will affect. It is only if people can influence science that they can protect and promote their interests. Thus, everyone who is affected by science should have a say in its governance—​especially when it is publicly funded or when it can harm people’s weighty interests (Kitcher 2001, 2011). The democratization of science also improves the application of scientific research by making better use of knowledge dispersed across society. It does this, first, by facilitating discussions that help identify and articulate public

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needs. Second, it takes better advantage of the epistemic diversity in soceity and people’s local knowledge compared to top-​down approaches (Anderson 2006; Callon et al. 2009, 89–​94; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993; Wynne 1992). Evidence for the effectiveness of a policy or technology will come from a specific context: its efficacy elsewhere is an open question that hinges on local conditions (Cartwright and Hardie 2012). The people who will use a technology or scientific finding will have this knowledge. It will be farm workers who will use a pesticide every day, for instance, who know if the precautions sufficient for its safe use in lab conditions can be reproduced in the field (Irwin 1995, 17–​21). Public participation in research, in particular the participation of marginalized groups, can also provide “transformative criticism” of epistemic goals and practices. It can encourage scientists to consider alternative research paradigms and shape research in ways that will better serve the public (Longino 2004, 134–​135; Wylie 2015; Brown et al. 2006). The public can fully benefit from science and follow science-​based policies only if it trusts scientists. Democratization can help build well-​placed trust. Mini-​publics enable a small number of citizens, who are demographically representative of the larger population, to interact with scientists and deliberate about technically complex issues. These mini-​publics can act as “trusted information proxies” and offer members of the public scientific information they can trust (MacKenzie and Warren 2012). In controversial cases, they can help the public find out whether the disagreement between them and scientists is due to conflicting interests or different levels of knowledge (Keren 2015, 1293). Democratic influence over scientific decisions can make science more trustworthy for the public. When the public and scientists disagree about the badness of the consequences of different kinds of error in research, they cannot fully trust scientists (Irzık and Kurtulmus 2019). Democratic deliberation can lead to revisions and alignments in these value judgments. It can thereby provide the basis for enhanced forms of trust. Many sciences have been complicit in the domination of certain social groups and have neglected their interests—​as has been the case, for instance, with medical science and African Americans, women, and LGBTI individuals. Ensuring that these groups have a voice in the governance of science can help build trust between them and scientists (Scheman 2001; Grasswick 2010; Koskinen and Rolin 2019). The argument from collective self-​g overnment As previously noted, the standard account assumes that science can and ought to be free of social and ethical value judgments. This vision has been criticized by philosophy of science, putting pressure on the vision of autonomous science in the standard account by suggesting that an autonomous science can become an unaccountable source of power that undermines collective self-​government. For example, the well-​established observation that no

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amount of evidence, by itself, entails a hypothesis, prompts two influential critiques of the value-​free ideal of science: Longino’s argument from underdetermination and Douglas’s argument from inductive risk. Longino has argued that some fact is evidence for a hypothesis only in virtue of background beliefs which are essential for evidential reasoning (Longino 1990, 40–​45). These beliefs embody ideologies and social values: thus, values cannot be excluded from scientific inquiry (Longino 1990, 216). Douglas’s critique is based on the existence of inductive risk (2009; see also Lacey’s Chapter 13 in this volume). Since no evidence entails a hypothesis, there is always the risk of error in its acceptance or rejection: one can mistakenly accept a false hypothesis or reject one that is true. Usually, these risks cannot be minimized simultaneously. Thus, when setting standards for accepting or rejecting a hypothesis, value judgments regarding the badness of these two kinds of errors come into the picture. Douglas restricts her argument to “the choice of methods” and “the characterization and interpretation of data” (2009, 112). Biddle and Kukla (2017), however, point out that all stages of inquiry, not just the inference from evidence to hypothesis, are riddled with risks of error and value-​laden choices. The operationalization of concepts, the inclusion or exclusion of borderline data points, and the choice of models involve risks of error and invite value judgments too. If science provides crucial input for policy and if values play an ineliminable role in scientific inquiry, then scientists, whose work is not informed by the values of the public, can encroach on the public’s powers. Suppose, for instance, that the public intends to shut down a factory if the chemicals it releases into the air harm public health. They consult scientists to determine whether this is the case. Now, suppose that these scientists use a very high evidentiary standard for accepting and asserting that the chemicals are harmful. This would make it unlikely that the factory would be shut down. The scientists who adopt this evidentiary standard, or other actors who can influence their decisions, would be exercising political power that is not rightfully theirs. They would, thereby, be undermining the public’s right to collective self-​government. Such encroachments can be avoided by democratizing science and ensuring that the public’s values figure in these decisions (Douglas 2005; Elliot 2011; Pamuk n.d.). The argument from collective self-​government does not stand or fall with the critique of the value-​free ideal. The proponents of the value-​free ideal concede that values play a role when choosing research topics (Weber 1949, 21–​22, 72–​73). Those choices can also shape political decisions, because they are sensitive to the existing policy options and what is known about them. If scientists develop certain policy options and neglect others or study the costs of some policies while ignoring the costs of others, their research can shape political decisions (Sarewitz 2010; Lacey 1999). For instance, scientists may concentrate their research efforts on preventing cancer or treating it. When studying its causes, they may focus on individual behavioral or environmental

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and social factors. The choices they make can shape the health policies a society will adopt. What the public knows, thanks to science, also shapes the ends it seeks to pursue. The public can seek to avoid risks only if it knows of their existence. It can only pursue goals that it thinks are possible to attain. If existing research or the research that reaches the public suggests that there is uncertainty about the existence of a problem or the possibility of solving it, then this can effectively preserve the status quo. Very often, a social problem becomes a public concern only when scientists validate it (Weingart 1999, 155). In all of these cases, scientists or powerful actors who can influence their research will enjoy substantial agenda-​setting power: they will be determining what becomes an issue to be addressed politically and which options the public can choose from (Pamuk 2019, 11–​12). The choices that shape scientific research may be unintentional. They may be due to disciplinary biases or the demographic makeup of researchers. They may also be the intentional outcome of the interests of scientists or those who fund them (Fernández Pinto, Chapter 14 of this volume). The tobacco industry, for instance, has selectively produced and shared research in order to create uncertainty about the harms of tobacco (Oreskes and Conway 2011). This has helped them forestall public policy harmful to their interests. Recent studies of how this strategy works suggest that the problem is not necessarily biased research (Weatherall et al. 2020; Holman and Bruner 2017). Individual researchers may be impeccable, but the overall body of research that is produced and is filtered to the public and policy makers can create bias. If it is the total body of research that shapes political decisions, then democratic control of only the use of scientific research as an input to policy making is not enough: control should come at earlier stages—​for instance, in the setting of research agendas. Both science for policy and policy for science should be subject to democratic control.2

Worries and challenges The major worry about the democratization of science concerns citizens’ competence. If citizens’ uninformed views shape science, then “projects with epistemic significance would often be dismissed, perceptions of short-​term benefits would dominate, and resources would be likely to be channeled toward a few ‘hot topics’ ” (Kitcher 2001, 117). In the application of science, it would be the arguments of demagogues rather than the best science that shapes decisions. Worries about public competence should figure in all efforts to democratize science, but they do not justify outright rejection: case studies have documented how members of the public can achieve competence in scientific understanding. AIDS patients and activists have influenced AIDS research for the better (Epstein 1996); the residents of Woburn, Massachusetts, have discovered a leukemia cluster in their area and traced its cause (Brown and

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Mikkelsen 1990); parents of children with spinal muscular atrophy have collected clinical data on the disease and set up a research institute (Callon et al. 2009); and many social movements have reshaped scientific research agenda by drawing attention to “undone science” (Frickel et al. 2010). Although exceptional cases of stakeholders influencing research, they demonstrate that ordinary citizens can acquire the relevant knowledge and skills—​and also utilize their personal and local knowledge—​to improve scientific research and practice, when engaged. They remind us that competence is not a given, but can change. Thus, efforts to increase public participation in science should be coupled with efforts to increase citizen competence. Kitcher’s proposal for deliberative polls, where scientists tutor a representative sample of citizens and citizens deliberate about the governance and application of science is one institutional innovation that can serve this goal (Kitcher 2011). The account of democratization offered in this chapter incorporates representative mechanisms. In some instances, the competence required of citizens will only be the ability to identify those who will successfully act on their behalf. Finally, since values play a crucial role in science, scientific competence is not the only competence that matters. The ability to articulate and to take into account different social interests and to deliberate about the common good also matters. Decision-​making bodies that include citizens are bound to do better in this dimension than those that exclude them. A second worry is that efforts to democratize science are open to abuse. In a democratic society, having citizens support your favored policy matters. As many corporations have realized, having citizens who appear to support your policy is a second-​best. Thus, the hijacking of public participation in science by other actors is a persistent danger (Wilholt 2014, 171). For instance, many patient advocacy groups receive industry funding that they don’t disclose (Fabbri et al. 2020). Pharmaceutical companies use efforts to take into account the diverse medical needs of different social groups to extend patents (Fernández Pinto 2018). Corporations set up astroturf groups that pretend to be grassroots organizations. These organizations create the appearance of public support for positions friendly to corporations and misinform the public (Otto 2016, 292–​293). The observation that efforts to increase the public’s role in the governance of science are sometimes abused is not a reason for rejecting the ideal. The danger of abuse exists for any public ideal since rogue actors will always have an incentive to hide their actions behind such ideals. The fact that efforts to increase the public’s role in the governance of science are sometimes abused is not a reason for rejecting the ideal, and This observation only reminds us that we should take the necessary precautions when designing mechanisms for public participation. Finally, despite all the changes brought on by decades of globalization, contemporary democracy operates at the level of the nation-​state. Science, however, is a global enterprise. Even though much of it is done in affluent parts of the world, it affects the entire world population. Therefore, the argument from impact suggests a global extension of the democratization of science

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(Kitcher 2011, 117–​118). Science produced in the affluent parts of the world also figures in policy making in the rest of the world through the transfer of research among scientists and through international organizations like the World Bank, the IMF, and the WHO. Thus, the argument from collective self-​ government also reaches beyond the nation-​state. How to carry out such an extension in practice remains a challenge for the democratization of science.

Notes 1 For a survey of direct public participation in science see (Bucchi and Neresini 2008). For a study of the role of representation in the democratization of science, see (Brown 2009). 2 I am grateful to Zeynep Pamuk for suggesting this formulation.

Acknowledgments I thank Gülru Göker, Gürol Irzık, Zeynep Pamuk, and the editors of this volume for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter.

References Anderson, E. (2006). The Epistemology of Democracy. Episteme 3 (1–​2), 8–​22. Biddle, J. B. & Kukla, R. (2017). The Geography of Epistemic Risk. In Elliott, K. C. & Richards, T., eds. Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science. Oxford University Press, 215–​237. Bucchi, M. & Neresini, F. (2008). Science and Public Participation. In Hackett, E. J, Amsterdamska, O., Lynch, M. & Wajcman, J., eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. 3rd ed., MIT Press, 449–​472. Brown, M. B. (2009). Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. MIT Press. Brown, P. & Mikkelsen, E. J. (1990). No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action. University of California Press. Brown, P., McCormick, S., Mayer, B., Zavestoski, S., Morello-​Frosch, R., Altman, R. G. & Senier, L. (2006). “A Lab of Our Own”: Environmental Causation of Breast Cancer and Challenges to the Dominant Epidemiological Paradigm. Science, Technology, and Human Values 31 (5), 499–​536. Bush, V. (1990). Science—​The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postward Scientific Research. National Science Foundation. Callon, M., Lascoumes, P. & Barthe, Y. (2009). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. MIT Press. Cartwright, N. & Hardie, J. (2012). Evidence-​Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing it Better. Oxford University Press. Collins, H. M. & Evans, R. (2002). The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social Studies of Science 32 (2), 235–​296. Dewey, J. (2012). The Public and its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry. Pennsylvania State University Press.

The democratization of science  153 Douglas, H. (2005). Inserting the Public into Science. In Maasen, S. & Weingart, P., eds. Democratization of Expertise? Exploring Novel Forms of Scientific Advice in Political Decision-​Making. Springer, 153–​169. Douglas, H. E. (2009). Science, Policy, and the Value-​ Free Ideal. University of Pittsburgh Press. Elliott, K. C. (2011). Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research. Oxford University Press. Epstein, S. (1996). Impure Science: AIDS, Activism and the Politics of Knowledge. University of California Press. Fabbri, A., Parker, L., Colombo, C., Mosconi, P., Barbara, G., Frattaruolo, M. P., Lau, E., Kroeger, C. M., Lunny, C., Salzwedel, D. M. & Mintzes, B. (2020). Industry Funding of Patient and Health Consumer Organisations: Systematic Review with Meta-​Analysis. BMJ 368, 1–​13. Frickel, S., Gibbon, S., Howard, J., Kempner, J., Ottinger, G. & Hess, D. J. (2010). Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting. Science, Technology, and Human Values 35 (4), 444–​473. Funtowicz, S. O. & Ravetz, J. R. (1993). Science for the Post-​Normal Age. Futures 25 (7), 739–​755. Grasswick, H. E. (2010). Scientific and Lay Communities: Earning Epistemic Trust through Knowledge Sharing. Synthese 177 (3), 387–​409. Habermas, J. (1996). Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Polity. Holman, B. & Bruner, J. (2017). Experimentation by Industrial Selection. Philosophy of Science 84 (5), 1008–​1019. Irzik, G. & Kurtulmus, F. (2019). What is Epistemic Public Trust in Science? British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4), 1145–​1166. Irwin, A. (1995). Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise, and Sustainable Development. Routledge. Keren, A. (2015). Science and Informed, Counterfactual, Democratic Consent. Philosophy of Science 82 (5), 1284–​1295. Kitcher, P. (2001). Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford University Press. Kitcher, P. (2011). Science in a Democratic Society. Prometheus Books. Kolodny, N. (2014). Rule over None II: Social Equality and the Justification of Democracy. Philosophy and Public Affairs 42 (4), 287–​336. Koskinen, I. & Rolin, K. (2019). Scientific/​ Intellectual Movements Remedying Epistemic Injustice: The Case of Indigenous Studies. Philosophy of Science 86 (5), 1052–​1063. Lacey, H. (1999). Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding. Routledge. Longino, H. E. (1990). Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press. Longino, H. E. (2004). How Values Can Be Good for Science. In Machamer, P., & Wolters, G., eds. Science Values and Objectivity. University of Pittsburgh Press, 127–​142. MacKenzie, M. K. & Warren, M. E. (2012). Two Trust-​Based Uses of Minipublics in Democratic Systems. In Parkinson, J. & Mansbridge, J., eds. Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge University Press, 95–​124.

154  Faik Kurtulmuş Mansbridge, J. J., Bohman, J., Chambers, S., Christiano, T., Fung, A., Parkinson, J., Thompson, D. F. & Warren, M. E. (2012). A Systemic Approach to Deliberative Democracy. In Parkinson, J. & Mansbridge, J., eds. Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale. Cambridge University Press, 1–​26. Merton, R. K. (1938). Science and the Social Order. Philosophy of Science 5 (3), 321–​337. Moore, A. (2017). Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy and the Problem of Expertise. Cambridge University Press. Oreskes, N. & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury. Otto, S. L. (2016). The War on Science: Who’s Waging it, Why it Matters, What we can Do about it. Milkweed Editions. Pamuk, Z. (2019). Justifying Public Funding for Science. British Journal of Political Science 49 (1), 1–​16. Pamuk, Z. (n.d.). Examining the Experts: Science in a Democratic Society. Manuscript. Pettit, P. (2012). On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge University Press. Pinto, M. F. (2018). Democratizing Strategies for Industry-​ Funded Medical Research: A Cautionary Tale. Philosophy of Science 85 (5), 882–​894. Plotke, D. (1997). Representation is Democracy. Constellations 4 (1), 19–​34. Polanyi, M. (1962). The Republic of Science. Minerva 1 (1), 54–​73. Sarewitz, D. (2010). Normal Science and Limits on Knowledge: What we Seek to Know, What we Choose Not to Know, What we don’t Bother Knowing. Social Research 77 (3), 997–​1010. Scheman, N. (2001). Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness. In Tuana, N. & Morgen, S., eds. Engendering Rationalities. SUNY Press, 23–​52. Solomon, S. (2009). Stakeholders or Experts? On the Ambiguous Implications of Public Participation in Science. In van Bouwel, J., ed. The Social Sciences and Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, 39–​61. Weatherall, J. O., O’Connor, C. & Bruner, J. P. (2020). How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policymakers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71, 1157–​1186. Weber, M. (1949). Methodology of Social Sciences. 1st ed., Taylor & Francis Group. Weingart, P. (1999). Scientific Expertise and Political Accountability: Paradoxes of Science in Politics. Science and Public Policy 26 (3), 151–​161. Wilholt, T. (2014). Review of Philip Kitcher: Science in a Democratic Society. Philosophy of Science 81 (1), 165–​171. Wylie, A. (2015). A Plurality of Pluralisms: Collaborative Practice in Archaeology. In Padovani, F., Richardson, A. W. & Tsou, J. Y., eds. Objectivity in Science: New Perspectives from Science and Technology Studies. Springer, 189–​210. Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science. Public Understanding of Science 1 (3), 281–​304.

Chapter 13

Science and values Multi-​s trategic research and traditional saberes Hugh Lacey

Values in science There is broad agreement that ethical, social, political, and other non-​cognitive values do and must play roles within the various activities of science: research, evaluation, teaching, writing, application, etc. (Douglas 2009; Elliott 2017; Elliott and Steel 2017). However, there are disputes about what roles non-​ cognitive values may have at different moments (phases) of scientific activities; particularly about whether they may have roles at the moments of appraising theories and hypotheses and in making methodological decisions. There are also disputes connected with distinguishing between cognitive and non-​cognitive values, and with value neutrality as an ideal of scientific research practices. Arguments are made in the publications cited above that there is not a methodologically significant distinction between cognitive and non-​cognitive values, from which it has sometimes been inferred that the criteria for accepting scientific hypotheses and theories may incorporate or presuppose non-​cognitive value judgments. In criticizing these arguments (Lacey 2017), I first argued that the notion of “acceptance” is ambiguous, that it hides distinctions among holding scientific hypotheses and theories as bearers of knowledge and understanding, deploying theories for shaping and directing research projects, and endorsing hypotheses or judging them to be sufficiently confirmed to be used legitimately to inform practical activities. Then, I defended that non-​cognitive values have important and legitimate roles connected with deploying theories and endorsing hypotheses—​but that the criteria for holding scientific hypotheses and theories do not incorporate or presuppose non-​cognitive value judgments. Then, I concluded that this reflects that there is a methodologically significant distinction between non-​cognitive (ethical, social, etc.) and cognitive values, and that soundly held scientific claims cannot be challenged rationally on grounds that involve upholding non-​cognitive values. Being soundly held, however, does not imply that a claim should be universally regarded as having social value or significance—​ since, e.g., it would be unlikely to have much social value in social/​ecological

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spaces that (because of the non-​cognitive values embodied in them) do not foster practices informed by it. Regarding neutrality, although it has been repeatedly proclaimed throughout the modern scientific tradition, a large literature has accumulated in recent decades maintaining that the trajectory of modern science is not responsive to it, and that neutrality does not and cannot function as an ideal (e.g., Kourany 2010). Neutrality has been used in many different senses. I concur that, in none of them, does neutrality function as an ideal of the scientific practices that are currently being engaged in. Nevertheless, there is one sense in which neutrality could come to function as a regulative ideal—​ provided that science is interpreted to incorporate multi-​strategic research. I call it inclusivity and evenhandedness; it pertains to scientific knowledge considered as a totality and not to each item considered separately, and may be stated: for all value outlooks (adhered to in democratic societies), items of scientific knowledge can be identified that inform practices that embody the values they contain, and overall none of these value outlooks is served disproportionally at the expense of others (Lacey 2016).

Multi-​s trategic research My views about neutrality and the distinction between cognitive and non-​ cognitive values are embedded in a general account of the different roles that non-​cognitive values may play at different moments of scientific activities (Lacey 1999, 2019a; Lacey and Mariconda 2014). According to this account, a key moment of a research project is that of adopting a strategy for constraining the kinds of theories/​hypotheses entertained in it, and selecting the kinds of data needed for generating and testing them. Non-​cognitive values may play important roles at this moment. Adopting different kinds of strategies may be required to investigate different kinds of phenomena: e.g., one kind to investigate technoscientific objects, their mechanisms, and the efficacy and reliability of using them; other kinds to investigate the impact of using them in and on the social/​ecological spaces in which they are used, as well as the possibilities of practices in which using technoscientific objects may have relatively little salience, e.g. traditional/​indigenous, agroecological, and community-​based social medical practices. Thus, if science aspires to deal comprehensively with all phenomena in the lifeworld, its research methodologies must allow adopting whatever strategies are appropriate in view of the phenomena being investigated, i.e., it must uphold multi-​strategic research (Lacey 1999, 2019a; Lacey and Mariconda 2014). The phenomena investigated in particular research projects—​and, hence, the strategies adopted in them—​ tend to be chosen for investigation, at least in part, because the outcomes are expected to provide knowledge and understanding of phenomena that are valued in the social/​ecological spaces in which the research is promoted; and to identify the possibilities they afford,

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and thus to inform practical activities and interests that embody values highly embodied in those spaces. The same values tend to have roles at the moments of adopting strategies and of application of scientific knowledge, so that adopting strategies in a research project, and upholding values embodied in the social/​ecological spaces in which the research is promoted, tend to mutually reinforce each other (Lacey 1999, 2019a). Hence, the strategies adopted in research projects, and so the kinds of phenomena investigated, may vary with the values embodied in the social/​ecological spaces in which the research is promoted. Therefore, if science does not actively uphold multi-​strategic research, and allows adopting only a limited range of strategies, its outcomes would serve especially well dominant interests (and perhaps at the expense of others) in the social/​ecological spaces that promote the research conducted under these strategies: so inclusivity and evenhandedness would not function as an ideal of scientific research practices (Lacey and Mariconda 2014).

The social significance of modern scientific knowledge The idea that science belongs to the shared patrimony of humankind has long been linked with the ideal of neutrality. Interpreting neutrality as inclusivity and evenhandedness fits well with this. More often, however, this idea has been linked with neutrality interpreted quite differently, as the ideal that scientific research contributes to further the values of rationality and progress, which are presumed to be universal values adhered to by all rational individuals and to trump other values that may be embodied in the various social/​ecological spaces of the lifeworld (Lacey 1999, 75–​76). According to that interpretation of neutrality, soundly held scientific knowledge (ceteris paribus) has not only unmatched cognitive credentials, but also universal social significance or value. This means, in the first place, that to act informed by items of scientific knowledge is constitutive of rational action; in principle, relevant items of it are available to inform the rational activities of everyone and serve their personal interests, regardless of the values embodied in the social/​ecological spaces in which they live, even if such rational activities may lead to changing the space so profoundly that the embodiment of those values ceases to be viable. And, secondly, that it contributes to progress—​and to serve everyone’s interests—​to transform social/​ecological spaces into spaces in which soundly held scientific knowledge (with allegedly unmatched cognitive credentials) is readily applicable, to foster the ways of life that are viable in them, and to consolidate the ongoing spiral of research and generation of new forms of the transformed social/​ecological spaces. Neutrality, understood in terms of furthering rationality and progress, does not incorporate inclusivity and evenhandedness, and being responsive to it does not require engaging in multi-​strategic research. Upholding it tends to be based on appeal to the countless technological developments, to which modern science has given rise, whose implementation has profoundly transformed the character

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of the social/​ecological spaces of modern life in the name of rationality and progress. In scientific research (physics, chemistry, molecular biology, etc.) that aspires to produce knowledge that informs technological developments, as well as in a significant part of basic research, decontextualizing strategies (DSs) are adopted (Lacey 2016, 2019a; Lacey and Mariconda 2014). DSs constrain theories/​hypotheses so that they can represent and explain phenomena and encapsulate their possibilities by reference to their underlying structures, their processes and interactions, and (sometimes) their levels of organization, the processes and interactions of their components, and the laws that govern them, dissociating the phenomena from any place that they may have in social/​ ecological spaces; and select empirical data to include only those obtained by means of measuring, instrumental, and experimental operations (frequently automatized and conducted in laboratories). DSs are fruitful and versatile, and the research in which they are adopted has given rise to countless technological innovations as well as to soundly held knowledge of the mechanisms of their efficacious functioning. Although these innovations on the whole have widely been recognized to have great social value, how widely it should be recognized is increasingly being questioned, since using many kinds of technological objects contributes significantly to global warming and climate change; and the social value of some innovations (e.g., GMOs and nuclear power plants) is questioned in view of issues raised, not about their efficacy, but about their benefits and how they are distributed and the seriousness of the harm and risks occasioned by using them in social/​ecological spaces in the lifeworld. This questioning, although implicated in value judgments, raises issues for empirical investigation that have to do with phenomena in the social/​ecological spaces in which the innovations are used, and so cannot be adequately addressed in investigations in which only DSs are adopted. Strategies that do not involve dissociating phenomena from their places in social/​ecological spaces—​context-​sensitive strategies (CSs) that, together with DSs, are among the strategies recognized in multi-​strategic research—​also need to be adopted in them (Lacey 2019a; Lacey and Mariconda 2014). CSs also need to be adopted in order to investigate the contribution of scientific knowledge to progress, especially if progress is understood in terms of furthering the well-​being of people in general, and not just the embodiment of values of technological progress and of capital and the market in increasingly more social/​ecological spaces; to investigate the sustainability of the trajectory of progress; as well as (paradoxically) to investigate whether or not knowledge obtained under DSs really has unmatched cognitive credentials. Research conducted under CSs confirms that the values of technological progress and of capital and the market are deeply embodied in the hegemonic institutions of advanced industrial societies, including scientific institutions and their funding sources (private and public); and that adhering to those values and adopting DSs mutually reinforce each other. It also confirms that reference

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to these two facts provides the key to explaining the primacy (to the point of exclusivity) granted to adopting DSs in contemporary research projects, especially those of “commercialized science” (Lacey 1999, 2016; Fernández Pinto in Chapter 14 of this volume). That explanation neither grounds nor presupposes that in general knowledge generated under DSs or in modern scientific institutions has universal significance, but only that it has value within the trajectory of technological progress and of capital and the market. (This is not to deny that many items of knowledge confirmed under DSs do have value in spaces outside of this trajectory—​but that cannot be discussed here.) Thus, within multi-​strategic research, evidence is not obtained to support that neutrality—​interpreted in terms of progress and rationality—​could function as an ideal of scientific research, and it seems to provide evidence that it could not; whereas inclusivity and evenhandedness could so function—​provided that, for each (democratically defensible) value-​outlook embodied in social/​ ecological spaces in the lifeworld, there is a strategy included in the range of CSs actually adopted in research projects, such that adopting it and upholding the values of the outlook mutually reinforce each other. This conclusion provides a context for rethinking the idea that modern science and traditional/​indigenous saberes are profoundly incompatible.

Traditional/​i ndigenous saberes A saber incorporates a form of knowledge; an established body of knowledge of that form; and the procedures and methodological approaches adopted for obtaining, evaluating, and transmitting the knowledge.1 It is socially, culturally, and historically situated, i.e., promoted and transmitted from generation to generation in the social/​ecological spaces (of wider or narrower extent) occupied by social or cultural groups whose practices and ways of life are informed by items of the knowledge. The knowledge characteristically has to do with salient phenomena in these spaces, their properties, constituents, and relations with one another, their causes and origins, and the possibilities afforded by their interactions with one another and with human beings, and is especially attuned to inform exemplary activities in those spaces and to address problems that arise in them. Furthermore, it may be expressed using categories that reflect the conceptions of nature (and what its constituents and causal agents are), of human nature and well-​being, and of relations of human beings with nature (and, perhaps, other dimensions of being), that underlie the values upheld and embodied in these spaces, including (for most traditional/​indigenous saberes), respect for, attunement with and sustaining of nature (Lacey 2019b). The social/​ecological spaces in which saberes are promoted are constantly changing (more or less profoundly and rapidly), incorporating new objects and losing others, in many respects occasioned by the actions of human beings that reflect their values and saberes—​so that, together, the social/​ecological spaces and the saberes exhibit historical

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dynamics. Moreover, the saber promoted in a particular social/​ecological space may not have the cognitive resources to comprehend all the significant causal factors that affect the lives of those who live in it. That may make it vulnerable to the inroads of others, who are bearers of different saberes, and become weakened and lost, victims of epistemicide (Koskinen and Rolin, Chapter 9 of this volume). Or it may become transformed and enriched, if its agents complement their knowledge and enhance their practices by engaging in dialogue with those others; and this may occasion changes in the space and perhaps incorporate it into a larger complex of social/​ecological spaces and new saberes that represent syntheses that emerge from the dialogue.

Multi-​s trategic research and traditional/​i ndigenous saberes When science is understood to incorporate multi-​strategic research, there appear to be two ways to interpret scientific practices and traditional/​indigenous saberes so that the alleged opposition between them would be diminished: (1) The knowledge obtained in a traditional saber could be interpreted as if it were generated under a CS, where adopting this CS in empirical investigation, and upholding the values embodied in the way of life and practices of the group that promotes the saber, mutually reinforce each other. (2) Multi-​strategic research could be interpreted to consist of a set of saberes (“scientific saberes”), each one identified by a strategy (DS or CS), which belongs to a larger set of socially, culturally, and historically situated saberes that also contains traditional saberes, all of whose members (including DS-​saberes) in principle generate knowledge with comparable cognitive credentials. On the first interpretation, traditional saberes would be incorporated into an enlarged science; on the second, scientific activities, like traditional saberes, would be recognized as socially, culturally, and historically situated. The second states, and the first implies, that scientific knowledge and (at least some) knowledge produced in some saberes share cognitive standards and achievements, so that neither interpretation is consistent with claiming that knowledge obtained under DSs (or in scientific institutions) necessarily or generally has superior cognitive credentials. Moreover, neither supports that there are compelling reasons to accept that, regardless of the social/​ecological space of action, it is always rational to act (and form policies) in ways that are informed by knowledge obtained under DSs rather than knowledge that might be obtained under CSs or from particular saberes. The test that knowledge claims of traditional/​ indigenous saberes have sound empirical credentials is that they have been reproduced, empirically

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confirmed, and developed across generations, and that their capacity to inform practices in the social/​ecological spaces that promote the saberes has been supported by reliable testimony. To have those credentials it is not necessary that saberes incorporate knowledge established under DSs, or that their knowledge-​generating practices be kept separate from the daily activities of a group that cultivates them; generating and testing knowledge may be an integral part of the reflective exercise of the practical know-​how of agents engaged in productive activities in social/​ecological spaces in which the saberes are promoted. This test has been passed in a variety of areas. They include the following: the selection of seeds that are well adapted to available agroecosystems, novel possibilities for producing crops, management of sustainable agroecosystems and forests and preserving biodiversity in them, restoration of devastated ecosystems (and lands, soils, and waters), medicinal plants and practices, and the conditions necessary for the well-​ being of local communities. Prima facie it is plausible to interpret the knowledge obtained in these areas as if it were generated under CSs as specified in the first interpretation. How extensive may be the body of knowledge that has passed the test needs to be rigorously appraised and illustrated in the light of detailed testimonies about and reports of the practices of traditional/​indigenous communities, supplemented by the extensive anthropological, ethnoscientific, sociological, and historical literatures that provide analyses of the knowledge obtained and the ways of generating it fostered in the various saberes, and how it informs activities in them. Be that as it may, accepting the first interpretation would lead to incorporating (where plausible) the traditional saberes (and their associated CSs) into multi-​ strategic research, and that would be likely to enhance the responsiveness of science to the ideal of inclusivity and evenhandedness, as well as (relatedly) to enable the saberes to play a constructive role in investigations that can adequately address the benefits and risks of using particular technoscientific innovations, and what the alternatives to using these innovations may be. Given the definition of “saber” above, it is not misleading to consider each strategy (DS or CS) adopted in multi-​strategic research to identify a saber (Lacey 2019b). Each strategy defines a form of knowledge (by virtue of constraining the kinds of theories/​hypotheses entertained and selecting the kinds of data that are relevant), encompasses a body of established knowledge of this form, and specifies the methods for generating and testing knowledge claims; and, since adopting it and upholding certain values mutually reinforce each other, it is promoted in social/​ecological spaces in which those values are embodied. In the case of DS-​saberes, these are spaces within the trajectory that embodies values of technological progress and of capital and the market, so that they, like traditional saberes, are socially, culturally, and historically situated. Thus, the second interpretation conflicts with the claim that knowledge obtained under DSs generally has universal social significance or value.

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At the same time, it provides a perspective from which to affirm the significance and autonomy of the traditional saberes and the cultural practices that give rise to them and that they inform. Furthermore, it strengthens the motivation to recover the saberes that have been pushed aside and undermined—​ in the course of colonial conquest as well as the unrelenting expansion and penetration of interests that highly embody the values of technological progress and of capital and the market—​often partly in the name of the alleged cognitive superiority of modern science. Traditional/​ indigenous and DS-​ saberes unfold in different kinds of contexts. DS-​saberes, in contrast to traditional ones, generally are cultivated in institutions that are especially set up for the sake of generating knowledge (and technoscientific innovations) and that are largely separated from the social/​ecological spaces in which knowledge produced in them may be applied to inform social practices and to provide understanding of phenomena. DS-​saberes are also promoted in social/​ecological spaces that are located socially and historically within the trajectory shaped by interests that embody values of technological progress and of capital and the market (and that aim to transform as many social/​ecological spaces as possible so that they become part of this trajectory). The different contexts in which they unfold point to differences in the forms of knowledge valued and cultivated in the different saberes, the features of the social/​ecological spaces in which they are promoted and the knowledge obtained is generally applicable, and the quantity and variety of the knowledge obtained in their investigations. But they do not indicate that the empirical credentials of knowledge claims generated in the traditional and scientific saberes are not on a par, and they do not imply that the knowledge obtained in saberes, qua knowledge as distinct from its significance (value, interest, or applicability), is relative to the spaces in which the saberes are cultivated. Since the saberes are promoted in specific social/​ecological spaces and the knowledge gained in them is applicable primarily (although not exclusively—​a point that I cannot develop here) in those spaces, the various saberes/​strategies are probably best seen as complementary. However, these spaces may overlap, and they are constantly changing, often (especially in view of the expansionary thrust of the trajectory of technological progress and of capital and the market) as a result of having been brought into interaction with one another. Then, we might expect avenues of dialogue to be opened among them that, if democratically desirable conditions were in place, could lead to the emergence of important syntheses (and new saberes/​strategies). That could put new meaning into the idea that science belongs to the shared patrimony of humankind, by providing an important role for traditional/​indigenous knowledge, together with knowledge obtained in research conducted under DSs and CSs (with all forms of knowledge developed, and perhaps transformed in dialogue), in deliberations about the crises, problems, possibilities, and aspirations present today in the lifeworld.

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Note 1 The term “saber” connotes the entangled totality of items listed in this sentence. I cannot think of a word in English has all these connotations, and so that adequately translates it. This is especially apparent when the phrase “diálogo de saberes,” a key component of the emancipatory activities of popular and indigenous movements, is sometimes translated by “dialogue of knowledges.” The plural of knowledge is rarely used in English; in addition, “knowledges” does not incorporate all the dimensions of “saberes.”

References Douglas, H. (2009). Science, Policy, and the Value-​ Free Ideal. University of Pittsburgh Press. Elliott, K. (2017). A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science. Oxford University Press. Elliott, K. & Steel, D., eds. (2017). Current Controversies of Values in Science. Routledge. Kourany, J. (2010). Philosophy of Science After Feminism. Oxford University Press. Lacey, H. (1999). Is Science Value Free? Values and Scientific Understanding. Routledge. Lacey, H. (2016). Science, Respect for Nature, and Human Well-​Being: Democratic Values and the Responsibilities of Scientists Today. Foundations of Science 21, 883–​914. Lacey, H. (2017). Distinguishing between Cognitive and Social Values. In Elliott, K. & Steel, D., eds. Current Controversies of Values in Science. Routledge, 15–​30. Lacey, H. (2019a). Roles for Values in Scientific Activities. Axiomathes 28 (6), 603–​618. Lacey, H. (2019b). Ciência, valores, conhecimento tradicional/​indígena e diálogo de saberes. Desenvolvimento e Meio-​ambiente 50, 93–​115. Lacey, H. & Mariconda, P. R. (2014). O modelo das interações entre as atividades científicas e os valores. Scientiae Studia 14 (4), 643–​668.

Chapter 14

Science and industry funding Manuela Fernández Pinto

Introduction Funding and performance of research and development (R&D) worldwide has shown a decisively increasing trend towards the privatization of scientific research in recent decades. In the USA, private industry finances 67% of R&D and performs around 72% of it (National Science Board 2018). Similarly, in the EU, private funding amounts to 65% of the R&D total (Eurostat 2018). Unsurprisingly, this move in the direction of private science has brought about a shift towards the commercialization of scientific research, privileging research that leads to marketable products. Industry-​driven science introduces powerful commercial goals in the making of science, which can contrast, compete, and many times clash with the traditional epistemic and social goals of research. As some philosophers of science have emphasized, the current commercialization of scientific research presents a number of epistemic and social challenges (Brown 2000; Krimsky 2003; Radder 2010). In addition, and given the current globalized privatization of science (Mirowski 2011), the move towards commercially driven research in the Global North has significant repercussions both for scientists working and for people living in the Global South. Given the global scope of research today, including the massive outsourcing and offshoring of many aspects of the research process, commercial interests have a direct influence in the type of research performed and the products obtained worldwide, which don’t always align with the epistemic and social necessities of local communities. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I present an overview of the current philosophical debates regarding the commercialization of science, especially concerning the epistemic and social challenges that emerge with privatization. Second, I analyze the further impacts of such commercialization at the global scale, highlighting the consequences for scientists and communities in the Global South, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean. In order to illustrate both points, I use the example of clinical research driven by the pharmaceutical industry. I first show cases in which the pharmaceutical industry has privileged commercial goals over epistemic and

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social goals to the detriment of the latter. I then show cases in which clinical research sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry has further implications for scientists working and people living in the Global South. I conclude by highlighting the few works in philosophy of science that focus on the topic and suggesting how we could better contribute.

Philosophical analyses of industry-​f unded science Although the commercialization of science has not been a traditional research topic for philosophers of science, in recent years we are seeing more and more philosophical analyses of the significant changes that privatization has brought to scientific research. Philosophers are increasingly contributing to scrutinizing the current social organization of research and have played a crucial role in identifying and evaluating the changes that scientific research is undergoing. Four of the main areas of philosophical analysis are intellectual property (IP), academic science, the manufacture of doubt, and financial conflicts of interest. In the USA, for example, since the 1980s some of the most important legislative changes regarding the production of scientific knowledge and technological innovation have focused on strengthening IP rights. Initially, these changes aimed to encourage private investment in scientific R&D through patent protection, as well as to expand the scope of patentable inventions with the inclusion of genetically engineered organisms, and to increase collaborations between universities and private industries through private-​ profit of publicly funded research, as established by the Bayh-​ Dole Act (Mirowski 2011). While some philosophers of science have examined cases in which the patent system has been successful in the development of new technologies (Wilholt 2006; Carrier 2011), others have presented a more critical stance by showing ways in which strong IP rights have stifled, rather than encouraged, the production of R&D (Biddle 2014a, 2014b; Sterckx 2011). Another source of concern is the consequences that industry funding is having for universities and academic research—​such as the shaping of research lines, with increased funding for applied science while reducing basic research; and changes in hiring, retention, and promotion criteria, where industry sponsorship is favored, and even full professorships are directly paid by private industry (Brown 2000; Radder 2010)—​all of which are slowly but surely changing the culture of academic science (Lee Kleinman, 2010). Not lessening the relevance of these changes, the move towards commercially driven science has importantly also taken research out of academia. In countries which invest the most in R&D globally, the vast majority is performed in the private sector: in the USA, for example, 72% of R&D is done in private research institutions, while universities account for only 13% (National Science Board 2018). In this sense, the major changes to scientific research are occurring outside the university.

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Given the increasing concern for the role of science in public policy (Douglas 2009; Kitcher 2011), philosophers of science have also become engaged in the debate regarding the manufacture of doubt, i.e., the manipulation of public discourse to confuse the general public about scientific facts, and social production of ignorance in industry-​funded science that impact major public policy issues, such as GMO consumption, cost and quality of medication, climate change, etc. In recent years, science studies scholars have uncovered the ways in which private companies use and manipulate scientific research in order to favor their commercial interests to the detriment of the common good. Research on topics as diverse as tobacco smoking (Proctor 2012), climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2010), pharmaceuticals (Sismondo 2009; Goldacre 2012), chemicals (Michaels 2008), and the financial crisis (Mirowski 2013) has been deliberately shaped by private parties with economic interests at stake. Philosophers of science have made important contributions to this debate, helping to identify, examine, and evaluate the practices of ignorance production underlying these cases (Elliott 2011, 2013; Biddle and Leuschner 2015; Fernández Pinto 2015, 2017; Jukola 2016; Kourany and Carrier 2020). One of the main concerns here has been the corrupting effects that commercial interests can have in science for public policy, leading to obstructions and delays in regulation that clearly impact society’s well-​being, as well as the public trust in science (de Melo-​Martín and Intemann 2018; Fernández Pinto 2020). Another major topic of debate has been the undeniable financial conflict of interest that industry funding introduces in scientific research. Contrary to the neutrality that scientists frequently appeal to, mounting evidence shows that private funding leads to research results in favor of commercial sponsors (Bekelman et al. 2003; Lexchin et al. 2003; Lundh et al. 2017). Accordingly, conflicts of interest have become a central topic for ethical analysis among philosophers of science (Krimsky 2007; Resnik 2007; Elliott 2008; de Melo-​ Martín and Intemann 2009; Irzik 2010). Moreover, the same systematic reviews that illustrate industry bias also show that industry-​sponsored studies have better quality, according to the available quality assessment tools, than independent studies (Lexchin et al. 2003, 1170; Lundh et al. 2017, 16), a fact that has spawned philosophical interest. In order to show how this might be the case, philosophers have suggested mechanisms such as industry selection bias (Holman and Bruner 2017), as well as other methodological biases that emerge with micro-​decisions during the research process not captured by quality assessment tools, such as determining research questions, primary outcomes, comparison groups and doses, data interpretation, presentation of results, publication strategies, etc. (Brown 2010; Resnik 2010; Holman and Elliott 2018; Fernández Pinto 2019b). With the privatization of scientific research, the pharmaceutical industry has gained great advantage, becoming one of the most productive sectors of R&D (National Science Board 2018). Accordingly, examples from clinical

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research on new drugs are good illustrations of the concerns philosophers have in mind. Cases include those where specific treatments have been pushed into or maintained in the market, despite evidence of their danger, such as Vioxx, SSRIs, and OxyContin, and also those pertaining to research strategies that promote commercial gain, such as the use of weak surrogate outcomes, unnecessary placebo-​controlled trials and ghostwriting.

The Vioxx scandal Vioxx, an arthritis medication from Merck, was initially marketed as a painkiller without secondary gastrointestinal effects. A major clinical trial, the Vioxx Gastrointestinal Outcomes Research Study (VIGOR), was conducted in 1999 with the aim to prove that rofecoxib, the active component in Vioxx, was superior to one of its main competitors, naproxen. The study, however, showed that “the incidence of myocardial infarction was lower among patients in the naproxen group than among those in the rofecoxib group (0.1 percent vs. 0.4 percent)” (Bombardier et al. 2000, 1520). Instead of acknowledging that Vioxx increased the risk of myocardial infarction, researchers incorrectly took the results as evidence of a cardioprotective effect of naproxen (Jüni et al. 2004). Another study found that Merck used ghostwriting and guest authorship for the marketing of rofecoxib in at least in 96 published papers: Merck employees drafted manuscripts, contract research organizations (CROs) were hired to write them, and academically affiliated researchers were paid—​ between $750 and $2,500—​for their authorship (Ross et al. 2008). Vioxx was withdrawn from the market only in 2004, after approximately 80 million patients had taken the drug (Topol 2004) and it had caused an estimated 55,000 deaths (Harris 2005). The Vioxx scandal clearly illustrates some of the main epistemic and social concerns emerging from industry-​funded science. Strong IP rights allow pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck, to shape scientific research and publications in their favor, using for instance ghostwriting practices in which the actual authors of the manuscripts remain unknown (Sismondo 2009). Financial conflicts of interest have a clear corrupting effect on the scientific process, encouraging the manipulation of scientific results to the advantage of industry—​ as in the VIGOR trial—​ even if it implies putting at risk human lives (Michaels 2008). Conflicts of interest also create incentives for academic scientists to behave unethically, serving as independent facades for publications, which have been carefully managed by the industry, slowly changing what is perceived as allowed in academic science (Resnik 2007). And finally, the deception actively misleads both prescribing physicians and patients about the safety and efficacy of medicines, as in the Vioxx case, encouraging the consumption of drugs that pose serious health risks: resulting in the production of ignorance, instead of medical knowledge (Fernández Pinto 2017).

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Impacts of industry-​f unded science in the Global South Changes in the social organization of science in North America and Europe, which combined produce the majority of R&D worldwide, drive changes everywhere else. The privatization of science has additionally encouraged different research strategies, including the outsourcing and offshoring of research as well as transnational trade agreements, which have direct consequences for scientific and technological development in the Global South. The transition from the Cold War model of publicly funded science to the current globalized privatization model has caused, among other things, the replacement of large in-​house corporate labs with the outsourcing of R&D. Some of this outsourcing has been located in universities, through new and strengthened collaborations between industry and academia, but most has been located in new research structures, such as CROs and think tanks (Mirowski and van Horn 2005; Medvetz 2012). The transition also entailed the signature of new transnational trade agreements, such as the agreement on Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) which legally binds all members of the World Trade Organization to international IP rights. Along with TRIPS, CROs, and think tanks came the offshoring of research to low-​ wage countries with weaker regulatory environments (Mirowski 2011). Accordingly, emerging economies in the Global South, such as Latin American countries, have become very attractive for international research collaborations, creating conditions in which local research interests and needs have been subordinated to the research agendas of the Global North (Kreimer 2006). With a very small investment in R&D—​only 0.67% of the region’s GDP—​ Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) are far from producing the quantity of scientific knowledge and technology produced by the Global North. Local governments in the region still finance the majority of scientific R&D (59%) and research is done mainly in the public sector (28%) and universities (39%) (OEI, 2018). In the race to increase funding for R&D, LAC countries have opted for collaborations with governments in North America and Europe as well as with multinational companies interested in their local resources, regulatory flexibility, and research institutions. Although Latin American institutions have benefitted from some of these collaborations, mainly through international publications and networks, funding for R&D has not been clearly secured (Feld and Kreimer 2019). From both an epistemic and a social perspective, the globalized privatization of science has imposed a number of restrictions on R&D in LAC. First, research questions are normally aligned with the interests of the Global North: both for financial reasons in the case of external funding, and because local researchers become more interested in bolstering their international

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collaborations and publications, which turns their focus to topics unrelated to LAC needs. Second, when international collaborations are in place, researchers in LAC normally don’t participate in experimental design or data processing, being restricted to data collection and systematization (Feld and Kreimer 2019). Unsurprisingly, the knowledge produced does not respond to local needs, while the small, local scientific capital that is invested simply strengthens the research agendas of the Global North. Philosophers of science, at least those located in the Global North, have shown less interest in the consequences of the privatization of science in the Global South. Despite this, philosophers working in LAC have made contributions to the topic. For example, Oliveira (2013, and Chapter 15 in this volume) has examined the limitations of innovation policies in Brazil, highlighting the problems of integration between the academy and the private sector. Lacey (2005) analyzes the case of GM crops in Brazil, and examines agroecology as an alternative model to industrial agriculture challenging the logic of commercial R&D. Fernández Pinto (2019a) examines the case of patient recruitment by CROs in Latin America, uncovering the disadvantages that commercially driven clinical trials have for patients and society at large in the Global South. In general, these works show that in addition to issues on IP rights, ignorance production, conflicts of interest, and academic culture as studied by philosophers, industry-​funded science establishes further epistemic and social obstacles for the Global South. Again, pharmaceutical cases are relevant to illustrate this point. These cases include treatments developed in the Global South, but which do not contribute to the well-​being of the local populations, as they do not target the relevant diseases, are not available, or are unaffordable (Fernández Pinto 2019a). Given the lack of financial potential, pharmaceutical companies are not interested in conducting research on diseases that particularly affect LAC countries, such as Chagas, Leishmaniasis, or Chikungunya (da Silva et al. 2018). Even when research does target diseases common to both Latin America and the Global North, the resulting treatments are often unaffordable in LAC, due to limited healthcare resources and reduced economic power. For example, Aflibercept, a drug tested in Latin America to treat wet age-​related macular degeneration and recently approved by the FDA, costs 46 times the minimum wage in Brazil and 58 times the minimum wage in Argentina (Homedes and Ugalde 2016, 5). The above examples show that the knowledge produced by pharmaceutical companies for their commercial benefit in the Global North proves inadequate for the needs of LAC. Examining research funded by the pharmaceutical industry strongly suggests that the epistemic and social costs of commercially driven science at the global scale are therefore much broader than has been acknowledged in current debates in philosophy of science.

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Acknowledgments The author would like to thank the editors for their invitation to participate in this volume, and in particular David Ludwig and Inkeri Koskinen for their useful comments on previous versions of this chapter.

References Bekelman, J., Li, Y., and Gross, C. (2003). Scope and Impact of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research. JAMA 289, 454–​465. Biddle, J. (2014a). Can Patents Prohibit Research? On the Social Epistemology of Patenting and Licensing in Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 45 (1), 14–​23. Biddle, J. (2014b). Intellectual Property in the Biomedical Sciences. In Arras, J. D., Fenton, E. & Kukla, R., eds. The Routledge Companion to Bioethics. Routledge, 149–​160. Biddle, J. B. & Leuschner, A. (2015). Climate Skepticism and the Manufacture of Doubt: Can Dissent in Science be Epistemically Detrimental? European Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (3), 261–​278. Bombardier, C., Laine, L., Reicin, A., Shapiro, D., Burgos-​Vargas, R., Davis, B., … Schnitzer, T. J. (2000). Comparison of Upper Gastrointestinal Toxicity of Rofecoxib and Naproxen in Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis. New England Journal of Medicine 343 (21), 1520–​1528. Brown, J. (2000). Privatizing the University—​The New Tragedy of the Commons. Science 290, 1701–​1702. Brown, J. (2010). One-​Shot Science. In Radder, H., ed. The Commodification of Academic Research and the Modern University. University of Pittsburgh Press, 90–​109. Carrier, M. (2011). Knowledge, Politics, and Commerce: Science under the Pressure of Practice. In Carrier, M. & Nordmann, A., eds. Science in the Context of application. Springer Science, 11–​30. da Silva, R. E., Amato, A. A., Guilhem, D. B., de Carvalho, M. R. & Novaes, M. R. C. G. (2018). International Clinical Trials in Latin American and Caribbean Countries: Research and Development to Meet Local Health Needs. Frontiers in Pharmacology 8, 961. de Melo-​Martín, I. & Intemann, K. (2009). How do Disclosure Policies Fail? Let us Count the Ways. Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal 23 (6), 1638–​1642. de Melo-​Martín, I. & Intemann, K. (2018). The Fight Against Doubt: How to Bridge the Gap between Scientists and the Public. Oxford University Press. Douglas, H. (2009). Science, Policy, and the Value-​ Free Ideal. University of Pittsburgh Press. Elliott, K. (2008). Scientific Judgment and the Limits of Conflict-​of-​Interest Policies. Accountability in Research 15 (1), 1–​29. Elliott, K. (2011). Is a Little Pollution Good for You? Incorporating Societal Values in Environmental Research. University Press Scholarship Online. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​acprof:oso/​9780199755622.001.0001.

Science and industry funding  171 Elliott, K. (2013). Selective Ignorance and Agricultural Research. Science Technology and Human Values 38 (3), 328–​350. Eurostat. (2018). Eurostat Regional Yearbook. Available at: https://​ec.europa.eu/​ eurostat/​statistics-​explained/​index.php?title=Eurostat_​regional_​yearbook. Feld, A. & Kreimer, P. (2019). Scientific Co-​ operation and Centre–​ Periphery Relations: Attitudes and Interests of European and Latin American Scientists. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2 (1), 149–​175. Fernández Pinto, M. (2015). Tensions in Agnotology: Normativity in the Studies of Commercially Driven Ignorance. Social Studies of Science 45 (2), 294–​315. Fernández Pinto, M. (2017). To Know or Better Not to: Agnotology and the Social Construction of Ignorance in Commercially-​ Driven Research. Science and Technology Studies 30 (2), 53–​72. Fernández Pinto, M. (2019a). Doubly Disadvantaged: On the Recruitment of Diverse Subjects for Clinical Trials in Latin America. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 2 (1), 391–​407. Fernández Pinto, M. (2019b). Scientific Ignorance: Probing the Limits of Scientific Research and Knowledge Production. THEORIA: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science 34 (2), 195–​211. Fernández Pinto, M. (2020). Commercial Interests and the Erosion of Trust in Science. Philosophy of Science 87 (5), 1003–​1013. Goldacre, B. (2012). Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Faber & Faber. Harris, G. (2005). FDA Official Admits “Lapses” on Vioxx. New York Times, 2 March: A15. Holman, B. & Bruner, J. (2017). Experimentation by Industrial Selection. Philosophy of Science 84 (5), 1008–​1019. Holman, B. & Elliott, K. C. (2018). The Promise and Perils of Industry-​Funded Science. Philosophy Compass 13 (11), 1–​14. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​phc3.12544. Homedes, N. & Ugalde, A. (2016). Health and Ethical Consequences of Outsourcing Pivotal Clinical Trials to Latin America: A Cross-​Sectional, Descriptive Study. PLoS ONE 11 (6), 1–​17. Irzik, G. (2010). Why should Philosophers of Science Pay Attention to the Commercialization of Academic Science? In EPSA Epistemology and Methodology of Science: Launch of the European Philosophy of Science Association. Springer, 129–​138. Jukola, S. (2016). The Commercialization of Research and the Quest for the Objectivity of Science. Foundations of Science, 89–​103. Jüni, P., Nartey, L., Reichenbach, S., Sterchi, R., Dieppe, P. A. & Egger, P. M. (2004). Risk of Cardiovascular Events and Rofecoxib: Cumulative Meta-​Analysis. The Lancet 364 (9450), 2021–​2029. Kitcher, P. (2011). Science in a Democratic Society. Prometheus Books. Kournay, J. & Carrier, M. (2020). Science and the Production of Ignorance. MIT Press. Kreimer, P. (2006). ¿Dependientes o integrados? La ciencia latinoamericana y la nueva división internacional del trabajo. Nómadas (Colombia) 13 (1), 199–​212. Krimsky, S. (2003). Science in the Private Interest. Rowman & Littlefield. Krimsky, S. (2007). When Conflict-​of-​Interest is a Factor in Scientific Misconduct. Medicine and Law 26, 447–​463.

172  Manuela Fernández Pinto Lacey, H. (2005). Values and Objectivity in Science: The Current Controversy about Transgenic Crops. Lexington Books. Lee Kleinman, D. (2010). The Commercialization of Academic Culture and the Future of the University. In Radder, H., ed. The Commodification of Academic Research and the Modern University. University of Pittsburgh Press, 24–​43. Lexchin, J., Bero, L., Djulbegovic, B. & Clark, O. (2003). Pharmaceutical Industry Sponsorship and Research Outcome and Quality: Systematic Review. British Medical Journal 326 (7400), 1167–​1170. Lundh, A., Lexchin, J., Mintzes, B., Schroll, J. & Bero L. (2017). Industry Sponsorship and Research Outcome. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, issue 2. Art. no.: MR000033, 143. Medvetz, T. (2012). Think Tanks in America. University of Chicago Press. Michaels, D. (2008). Doubt is their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens your Health. Oxford University Press. Mirowski, P. (2011). Science-​ Mart: Privatizing American Science. Harvard University Press. Mirowski, P. (2013). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. Verso. Mirowski, P. & van Horn, R. (2005). The Contract Research Organization and the Commercialization of Scientific Research. Social Studies of Science 35 (4), 503–​548. National Science Board. (2018). Science and Engineering Indicators 2018. NSB-​2018-​ 1. National Science Foundation. www.nsf.gov/​statistics/​indicators/​. Oliveira, B. d. M. (2013). On the Commodification of Science: The Programmatic Dimension. Science and Education 22 (10), 2463–​2483. Oreskes, N. & Conway, E. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press. Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI). (2018). El Estado de la Ciencia: Principales Indicadores de Ciencia y Tecnología Iberoamericanos. www.oei.es/​ historico/​divulgacioncientifica/​?el-​estado-​de-​la-​ciencia-​principales-​indicadores-​de-​ ciencia-​y-​tecnologia. Proctor, R. (2012). Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press. Radder, H. (2010). The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University. University of Pittsburgh Press. Resnik, D. B. (2007). The Price of Truth: How Money Affects the Norms of Science. Oxford University Press. Resnik, D. (2010). Financial Interests and the Norms of Academic Science. In Radder, H., ed. The Commodification of Academic Research and the Modern University. University of Pittsburgh Press, 65–​89. Ross, J. S., Hill, K. P., Egilman, D. S. & Krumholz, H. M. (2008). Guest Authorship and Ghostwriting in Publications Related To Rofecoxib: A Case Study of Industry Documents from Rofecoxib Litigation. JAMA 299 (15), 1800–​1812. Sismondo, S. (2009). Ghosts in the Machine: Publication Planning in the Medical Sciences. Social Studies of Science 39 (2), 171–​198.

Science and industry funding  173 Sterckx, S. (2011). Patenting and Licensing of University Research: Promoting Innovation or Undermining Academic Values? Science and Engineering Ethics 17 (1), 45–​64. Topol, E. (2004). Failing the Public Health: Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA. New England Journal of Medicine 351 (17), 1707–​1709. Wilholt, T. (2006). Design Rules: Industrial Research and Epistemic Merit. Philosophy of Science 73 (1), 66–​89.

Chapter 15

Innovationism North and South Marcos Barbosa de Oliveira

Introducing innovationism In The Economics of Industrial Innovation, English economist Christopher Freeman (1974, 22) wrote: We owe to Schumpeter the extremely important distinction between inventions and innovations, which has since been generally incorporated into economic theory. An invention is an idea, a sketch or a model for a new or improved device, product, process or system. Such inventions may often (not always) be patented but they do not necessarily lead to technical innovations. In fact the majority do not. An innovation in the economic sense is accomplished only with the first commercial transaction involving the new product, process, system or device, although the word is used also to describe the whole process. This passage is a decisive turning point in the field of science and technology policy (STP), defining an innovation as a profitable invention; an invention that is adopted by a firm in order to increase its profits. The book also proposes the principle that the production of innovations is the primordial aim of scientific research: the root of the movement I call innovationism. After the first edition, two enlarged and extensively revised versions were published, Freeman (1982) and Freeman and Soete (1997). Freeman (1921–​2010) was the author who contributed most decisively to the promotion of innovationism—​part of the developmentalist lineage formed after World War II—​and throughout his career devoted himself centrally to the theme of economic development. He exerted strong leadership through both theoretical work and institutional activities. In 1965 he founded the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), one of the most important centers in the field of STP, and directed it for a significant time. He acted as a consultant for the OECD as well as UNESCO, and was responsible for the preparation of important documents published by those institutions.

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The diffusion of the term “innovation” as defined by Freeman was initially slow, but in the 1980s it accelerated due to the national innovation system concept—​to whose formulation Freeman also made a fundamental contribution (Sharif 2006, 750). From the mid-​1990s, innovation became established as the key concept in STP; first mostly in prosperous countries and later in emerging economies. More recently, its use has spread to other domains of discourse, particularly as a buzzword in advertising. An offshoot of the innovationist movement was the creation of a new academic tradition, Innovation Theory (Fagerberg et al. 2005).

Innovationism as a facet of neoliberalism That innovationism is a facet of neoliberalism is not a difficult thesis to defend. Its first premise is that the social organ that determines what is and what is not profitable is the market. Innovationism therefore tends to put the direction of scientific research in the hands of the market. Innovationism in this sense is a dimension of the process of the commodification of science.1 The second premise is a perspective that is commonly adhered to by innovationism supporters, even those who reject the label “neoliberal”: the radicalized capitalist view that the market, accompanied by the drive to commodify all aspects of social life, is the best organizing principle for the economy and for society, i.e., a neoliberalism. The innovationism-​ as-​ neoliberalism thesis is also supported by many strands of historical evidence. The first one is chronological: innovationism appeared in the 1970s, the same period when neoliberal ideas gathered strength in the wake of the crisis of the Welfare State. Freeman is far from being a typical proponent of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, his positions regarding innovation do not diverge from mainstream neoliberal views. The concept of National Innovation System, central in Innovation Theory and its precursor, the Research and Development (R&D) System also introduced by Freeman, are adaptations of the concept of Knowledge Industries, introduced by Fritz Machlup (1962)—​ a card-​ carrying member of the Mont Pelerin Society (Freeman 1974, 18ff.; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). The second strand of evidence has to do with an important trait of innovationism, namely its drive against basic science. It is undeniable that basic science has given rise to profitable applications. Why then should it be devalued by innovationism? The answer draws upon the characterization of innovationism as a movement that promotes establishing the production of innovations as the primordial aim of scientific research—​in the sense of inventions that are not just profitable, but securely profitable in the short term. The last clause may seem a rhetorical exaggeration, but in fact it shows the anti-​basic-​science drive of innovationism for it highlights that the innovative potential of each research project in the domain of basic science is uncertain. Its practical applications, when they exist, come into being only in the

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medium to long term. Conversely, neoliberalism—​in what is clearly a radicalization of a capitalist principle—​demands secure and short-​term profits. In Innovation Theory, the devaluation of basic science is tied to the critique of the so-​called Linear Model of Innovation (Oliveira 2014). Before presenting a critique of innovationism, it is worthwhile to make one last remark. To understand the power of the innovationist ideology, and its undoubted success, it is essential to keep in mind that its definition of innovation differs from the usual dictionary definition of innovation as something new; something that did not exist and came into being. In Innovation Theory, the commercial definition is always present, either implicitly or explicitly. In the broader universe of public debate, the commercial aspect is usually hidden, with the rhetorical advantage that it reinforces the value attributed to innovation by implying that it transcends capitalism. Thus, even critics of neoliberalism may not feel any problem in adhering to the innovationist ideology. The truism that not everything new is good, not everything old is bad, is conveniently forgotten.

Critique of innovationism at the global level In my writings, I have raised two types of criticism of innovationism: innovationism is a global movement, and the first type (discussed in this section) applies generally to all countries with a non-​negligible level of scientific activity. It is based on the fact that the valorization of innovations implies the undervaluation of the domains of research that are devoid of the potential to generate innovations, yet capable of yielding benefits to society. That undervaluation manifests itself as a shrinking of the prestige of those domains and, at a more concrete level, affects them negatively in the allotment of research funds. There are at least three domains in that category that deserve consideration. The first one has already been mentioned: basic science, which can be defended for its cultural value, and the value of scientific knowledge as an end in itself, and not only for its instrumental value as an ultimate source of innovations (Oliveira 2014, 141ff). The second domain is the humanities. A full argument in their defense would be out of place here, and for brevity can only be general: the humanities play a fundamental role in carrying out the critical mission of the University. Innovationism militates against this, however; in particular, it hinders the adoption of a critical attitude towards innovationist policies themselves, thereby giving rise to a feedback loop where each innovationist advance brings about a reduction in the capacity to recognize the detrimental consequences of the process. Innovationism thus acts as an addictive drug, undermining the cognitive faculties needed for its users to properly consider the ills caused by the drug, and to accept they have become addicts. The third domain is that of public interest science (Krimsky 2003), defined as science oriented by a concern for public welfare, especially of the disadvantaged

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sectors of the population: public interest science thus addresses problems not susceptible to being solved within the market system. Public interest research seeks applications that generally are not profitable, i.e., applications that are not innovations; it also plays a crucial role in detecting problems, particularly environmental ones. In many cases, the results of such research not only do not yield profitable applications, but jeopardize the profits of corporations by motivating the imposition of restrictions on their practices. The main fields of investigation of public interest science also often deal with critical issues: environmental problems of all kinds; risks of new technologies, particularly genetically modified organisms and nanotechnology; the harmful consequences of the technological model of agriculture and the development of alternative forms, like agroecology; preventive medicine and, in particular, the impact on human health of the various forms of pollution, of chemicals present in foodstuffs that may come from agrotoxics or that are added in the process of industrialization; and neglected diseases, which affect mainly the populations of poor countries that lack the purchasing power needed to ensure that research aimed at their prevention or treatment be lucrative, amongst others. To sum up this section, if the innovationist principle were taken to its extreme, i.e., if the production of innovations became absolutely the only aim of research, then basic science, the humanities, and public interest science would disappear. While this does not happen, as research in these domains still retains some measure of support, the negative impact of innovationist STP is also nowadays evident. It must also be said, however, that there have been signs of retreat in the scientific establishment’s positions about innovationism recently, as well as of a tendency to moderate the tenets of the movement. This is illustrated by the 8th Annual Meeting of the General Research Council (GRC), held in São Paulo in May 2019. The GRC is a forum for debates and exchanges among heads of research funding agencies from around the world. It was created in 2012, as an initiative of the US National Science Foundation, and since has held annual meetings, each year in a different city. At the end of each meeting, a Statement of Principles is released. The São Paulo meeting was attended by 50 heads of funding agencies from 45 countries. The first two paragraphs of its Statement of Principles give an initial indication of the mentioned retreat from innovationism. In the wake of changes already under way in some countries, it sketches a view of scientific research as responsible for various kinds of impacts—​including scientific, social, and economic ones—​related to the advance of knowledge, to the development of societies, and to innovations. Unlike innovationism, which identifies the primordial aim of scientific research as the production of innovations, the view transcends economic impact—​or, more precisely, the private enterprise economic sector.

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The second indication is that, in opposition to the innovationist bias, the Statement defends a favorable position towards basic science while, at the same time, preserving the role of applied research: GRC participants strongly reaffirm the value of both investing in research that advances and transcends the boundaries of knowledge as well as supporting research that may deliver more immediate and measurable societal and economic impact. Therefore, while GRC participants need to consider the expectations of their funders, they also have a responsibility to ensure a balanced approach in supporting different forms of research within national systems. (Global Research Council 2019) Another domain of research harmed by innovationism, as already remarked, is that of the humanities. Although not explicitly mentioned in the Statement, they have been defended in pronouncements by a one of the most influential participants of the 8th Meeting, Peter Strohschneider, head of Germany’s main funding agency: I share the idea that societies would be plainly incapable of developing and prospering without the humanities. Without them, we would be condemned to a naïve and limited vision concerning societies and their structures, dynamics and challenges. (Andrade 2019, 35)

Critique of innovationism in Brazil I turn now to the second type of criticism of innovationism, keeping the focus on Brazil. With a certain delay—​as usually happens when foreign ideas are imported from the developed countries—​innovationism arrived in Brazil around the year 2000, but its policies soon started to be energetically pursued. At the juridical level, the main landmarks of that process were the creation of the first fundos setoriais (funds for the support of innovation-​ driven research, for each sector of economic activities) in 1999; the Law of Innovation, promulgated in 2004; the 2005 so-​called Lei do Bem (“Law of the Good,” a complement to the Law of Innovation specifying fiscal and other financial advantages to be granted to innovative enterprises); the inclusion of the term inovação in the name of the Ministry for Science and Technology, in 2011; and in the 2014 Constitution through the Marco Legal de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, established in 2016. At the economic level, the funding agencies and similar organs of federal and state governments created various programs for financing innovation-​ driven research and for involving private enterprises, through agreements, subsidized loans, straight-​up grants, scholarships, etc. At the institutional

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level, many organs have been founded, both in the public sector (like “innovation agencies” in Universities) and in the private one (like entrepreneurial associations, consultancies, NGOs, etc.). Campaigns and contests are promoted, aiming at instilling in the public the “culture of innovation,” such as the University of São Paulo’s Innovation Olympics. A phrase in an official publication expresses the animus of movement: “Brazil has a gigantic, urgent need to inoculate innovation into all pores of the economy” (Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia 2010, 35). There has been, in short, an enormous mobilization involving a considerable expenditure of public funds as well as of the nation’s intellectual and emotional energies. What is the result so far of all that effort? Considering all the evidence, it is difficult not to conclude that it has been a clear failure. In the 20 years since the innovationist policies started to be implemented, the level of innovative activities in Brazil, instead of growing, has been decreasing or at best stagnating. The evidence includes, first of all, official statistics like those in Pintec (Research on Technological Innovation), collected once every three years by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics); data from the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office); international innovation rankings, and others. For concreteness, consider only the media headlines on the release of Pintec’s statistics: “Stagnated innovation”; “Brazil does not turn science into profits”; “Science in the private sector continues to frustrate”; “Innovation in low gear”; “Disquieting calm”; “Little encouraging situation.” The stagnation was officially recognized in an audit carried out in 2018 by the TCU (Union Accounts Tribunal) on the policies aimed to promote innovation (Secom TCU 2019; Andrade 2020). What are the causes of this failure? TCU’s audit points to inadequacies in the policies, mainly the multiplicity of initiatives—​no less than 76—​the lack of coordination among them, and the absence of processes of evaluation of the results. Another explanation put forward by advocates of innovationism is based on the supposed weakness of the “culture of innovation” among private enterprise executives; but critics contest that, by claiming that their real reason for not investing in R&D is the fact that it is not a good deal (Dagnino 2010). And why is it not a good deal? The answer resides in structural aspects of the Brazilian economy: essentially, its role in the international division of labor, as a producer of commodities (in the sense of primary product or raw material), with the accompanying de-​industrialization of the productive sector that has been increasing for some time. A specialist in the field of innovation, Fernanda De Negri, criticizes TUC’s audit for ignoring that such underlying factors are responsible for the failure (Andrade 2020, 40). In an earlier article, she wrote: the main bottlenecks that block innovation in the private sector reside in the interaction of three main factors: the sectorial structure concentrated in sectors where the technological dynamic is weak; the low production

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scale of firms, particularly in knowledge intensive sectors; and the high internationalization of Brazilian productive structure, which shifts the nucleus of knowledge to other countries. (Negri 2012, 93)2 The implication of Negri’s diagnosis is that the innovationist program will only succeed if and when a structural change in the economy takes place, including reindustrialization, reduction in the role of producer of commodities, and some form of nationalization of the economy.

Conclusion Regarding the considerations that follow, I remark that the adherence to the innovationist program in Brazil was not a top-​down process: it was not imposed by those in charge of determining national policies and implementing them (many of them former scientists): it had the endorsement by and large of the whole of the scientific community. The successful conquest of the scientific community’s mind can in part be explained in terms of the propensity of ex-​ colonies to imitate uncritically cultural elements of the metropolis, including ideas, customs, values, laws, fashions, words, etc., the aim being to turn the country into member of the club of the developed countries (Oliveira 2018). More concretely, however, it reflects efforts by the scientific community to justify its claim for public funds by forcefully putting forward the claim that scientific research is essential for the economic development of the country—​ often identified by GDP growth. In my interpretation, the usefulness of the innovationist principles derives from the fact that they bolster the argument of the connection between the production of innovations and economic development as evident. The failure of the innovationist program, of course, undermines this argument intended to justify the scientific community’s claim for public funds; and, in line with this, the TCU’s audit mentioned above radically challenges the proclamations of the scientific community, when it states that “The national strategy for science, technology and innovation cannot be considered central to the resumption of the country’s growth” (Secom TCU 2019). In light of this, the scientific community needs to reconsider its allegiance to innovationism and to devise sensible strategies to increase the contribution of scientific research to serving the well-​being of the population. This cannot be done without allowing a great deal of time and energy for reflection and public debate. Unfortunately, the present conjuncture is far from favorable to that enterprise. The economic crisis in 2016, and the austerity measures designed to overcome it, led to substantial cuts in the financing of scientific and academic activities. The situation deteriorated much more at the start of Bolsonaro’s presidency at the beginning of 2019. Besides even more stringent cuts being imposed, adding insult to injury, the government—​prompted by

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its anti-​scientific, anti-​intellectual, and authoritarian character—​mounted a campaign of vilification of public universities and research institutes. As a consequence, the energies and time of the scientific community are directed to fighting the cuts, adapting to the imposed penury, and responding to the attacks at the symbolic level. The only hope one can have, for the medium and long term, is that the impending demise of neoliberalism will carry with it the demise of the innovationist movement.

Notes 1 In Oliveira (2013) I identify two other dimensions: one pertaining to the corporatization of the academy, the other to the expansion and strengthening of intelectual property laws. 2 Fernanda De Negri is a prominent figure in the field of innovation, working at IPEA (Institute for Applied Economic Research) and has occupied a number of important posts in in federal institutions, as well as authored books and articles on the topic. Her diagnosis of the failure of innovationism in Brazil as due to underlying structural causes does not prevent her from engaging in initiatives aimed at improving pro-​innovation legislation and policy (Negri 2018).

References Andrade, R. de O. (2019). Liberdade para buscar o desconhecido. Pesquisa Fapesp 20 (280), 32–​35. Andrade, R. de O. (2020). Estratégias desconectadas. Pesquisa Fapesp 21 (288), 37–​41. Dagnino, R. (2010) . Por que os nossos empresários não inovam? In Dagnino, R., ed. Estudos sociais da ciência e tecnologia & política de ciência e tecnologia: alternativas para uma nova América Latina. EDUEPB, 111–​120. Fagerberg, J., Mowery, D. C. & Nelson, R. R., eds. (2005). The Oxford Handbook of Innovation. Oxford University Press. Freeman, C. (1974). The Economics of Industrial Innovation. Penguin Books. Freeman, C. (1982). The Economics of Industrial Innovation. 2nd ed., MIT Press. Freeman, C. & Soete, L. (1997). The Economics of Industrial Innovation. 3rd ed., MIT Press. Global Research Council. (2019). Statement of Principles. www.globalresearchcouncil. org/​ f ileadmin//​ d ocuments/​ G RC_​ P ublications/​ G RC_​ 2 019_​ S tatement_​ o f_​ Principles_​Expectations_​of_​Societal_​and_​Economic_​Impact.pdf. Krimsky, S. (2003). Science in the Private Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? Rowman & Littlefield. Machlup, F. (1962). The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton University Press. Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia. (2010). Livro Azul: 4ª Conferência Nacional de Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável. Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos. Mirowski, P. & Plehwe, D. , eds. (2009). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press.

182  Marcos Barbosa de Oliveira Negri, F. D. (2012). Elementos para a análise da baixa inovatividade brasileira e o papel das políticas públicas. Revista USP 93, 81–​100. Negri, F. D. (2018). Novos caminhos para a inovação no Brasil. Wilson Center. Oliveira, M. B. de (2013). On the Commodification of Science: The Programmatic Dimension. Science and Education 22 (10), 2463–​2483. Oliveira, M. B. de (2014). Technology and Basic Science: The Linear Model of Innovation. Scientiae Studia 12 (special issue), 129–​146. Oliveira, M. B. de (2018). O inovacionismo no Brasil: uma ideia fora do lugar? In Sáez, M. A., Montero, M. G. & López, F. S., eds. Simposios innovadores: memoria del 56.º Congreso Internacional de Americanistas. Universidad de Salamanca, 120–​127. Secom TCU. (2019). TCU detecta ausência de estrutura de coordenação das políticas federais de fomento à inovação. https://​portal.tcu.gov.br/​imprensa/​noticias/​tcu-​ detecta-​ausencia-​de-​estrutura-​de-​coordenacao-​das-​politicas-​federais-​de-​fomento-​ a-​inovacao.htm. Sharif, N. (2006). Emergence and Development of the National Innovation Systems Concept. Research Policy 35, 745–​766.

Chapter 16

Post-​t ruth and science Looking beyond the Global North Luis Reyes-​G alindo

Introduction While fake news and post-​truth are now part of common English vocabulary, serious scholarly and philosophical research on post-​truth is only recently beginning to emerge: for example, Peters et al. (2018); Stenmarck et al. (2018), who assemble reflections from a wide academic spectrum oriented towards the social and cultural effects of post-​truth; and Overell and Nichols (2019) who place more emphasis on both traditional and new digital media practices in the post-​truth era. This chapter aims to carve out an analysis of post-​truth that explicitly uses social scientific work to promote a comprehensive perspective of post-​truth considered as a genuinely global phenomenon. I argue that any useful description of post-​truth ought to engage with the significant amount of empirical social science work that is directly relevant to the subject, even in cases where post-​truth is to be analyzed with a “philosophical eye”: events tagged as “post-​truth” comprise a wide family of situations in which significant social forces are harnessed to make untruth appear before the public as “truth.” Moreover, sociologically oriented accounts of post-​ truth would depart from epistemologies that seek access to the meaning and role of truth in contemporary societies without first gaining an understanding of the current state of those societies and the political histories underlying them. In examining “post-​truth” in a Latin American context as I will do here, this is exacerbated by the vast differences in sociocultural and historical trajectories that distinguish the Global North and South. According to political pundits (d’Ancona 2017) a historic tipping point was reached in politics with the 2016 USA election and the UK’s Brexit referendum, events which were marked by political discourse in which “truth” lost practically all argumentative force when faced with popular “sentimental appeal” (Lewandowsky et al. 2017, Peters 2015). Focusing on the US context, McIntyre (2018) describes post-​truth as grounded on several factors: deliberate attacks on science through strictly political arguments; the successful political exploitation of universal psychological biases; a devaluation of science and its legitimate impact on policy and public discourse; and an increasingly

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overwhelming presence of political lobbying against public interest issues, amongst others. While deceit, lies, and misinformation typical of the post-​ truth era are, in and of themselves, practices that appear throughout human history, the justification for describing the current situation as a new era is that “never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality” (McIntyre 2018, xiv). More problematically, as I will discuss further down, McIntyre connects the erosion of traditional epistemological values in post-​truth political rhetoric to “relativist” and “postmodern” academic traditions. While McIntyre and other commentators typically connect post-​ truth to historical and social aspects of recent American history, Corner (2017, 1106) makes the important point that in existing accounts there is a narrative that has become “too Washington-​centric or Trump-​centric a view of the issues [that] will exert a reductive influence already apparent in some commentaries.” In contrast, one of few existing interpretations of post-​truth from a truly non-​ Anglocentric perspectives, Mika and Matapo’s (2018, 195) description of what post-​truth might look like through Samoan and Maori perspectives, suggests “post-​truth” could be deployed by indigenous researchers as epistemic strategies involving “far more expressive parameters of debate than simply ignoring what is taken to be ‘truth’.” In the same spirit, Fuller (2018) argues that philosophy, rather than position itself as an ally of the idea of “truth”, should look back to its own history and embrace its inescapable and epistemologically productive post-​truth roots. Given the present volume’s preoccupations with the shapes that epistemology and philosophy of science can take in multiple global contexts, including from indigenous and non-​“Western” viewpoints, one should at least consider the possibility that the post-​truth condition is not reducible to American/​ British experiences, nor is it exhausted by Anglophone perspectives. In attempting to increase the diversity of angles on post-​truth, this chapter asks what post-​truth policy/​science relationships could mean in a Global South context. This will be done by exploring recent sociological, anthropological, and epistemological-​historical research on science–​society relations in contemporary Brazil, and what this entails for post-​truth philosophical analyses.

Science and policy through the eyes of Science and Technology Studies A topic that transcends the 2016 American election and Brexit, but that features prominently in the concerns of post-​truth analysts, is the relationship between contemporary politics and science/​experts, given science’s privileged epistemological status in Western societies. This is a theme which has produced extensive scholarly work, particularly empirical work, in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) (see Felt 2016 and essays therein).

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Given the philosophically oriented, pedagogical nature of the present work, it must be remarked that the STS tradition is grounded on, or engages closely with, “constructivist” social studies of science (Jasanoff 2017). This is relevant because a significant number of philosophers such as McIntyre characterize constructivist sociology and “science studies” (actually a precursor to STS) as “postmodernist,” “humanist,” “deconstructivist,” or “relativist” critique that lacks methodological rigor and that, willingly or unwillingly, serves the purposes of destabilizing scientific knowledge.1 I remark that, while the idea that “[t]‌he political landscape we are experiencing in the Trump and Brexit era reflects and is influenced by postmodern relativism” (Sassower 2018), may or may not hold under careful scrutiny, the philosophers and intellectuals most commonly associated with this cultural movement, for example. Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacan, would hardly be recognized by most STS scholars as relevant to today’s empirical STS work. The topic, it must also be noted, has been discussed ad nauseam since the so-​called “Science Wars” in the 1980s and the issue of whether STS and constructivism have indeed been an instrument for post-​truth politics has been seriously discussed within the field itself (see Sismondo 2017 and the responses by Collins, Jasanoff, Lynch, and Fuller in the same volume). STS diverges into two streams of scholarship regarding policy–​ expert relations. The first, “participatory turn” STS, includes influential work by Jasanoff (2009, 2011), which using comprehensive, multi-​sited, empirical case studies on topics such as the role of experts in courts of law and the influence of science on framing industrial accidents, has drawn attention to how science in contemporary democracies has become a powerful institution in its own right. Scholarship in this vein has drawn attention to how science and technology have acted as allies for statecraft and the implementation of political and economic power, often to the detriment of public interest or the effective governance of risk and uncertainty (Irwin 2001; Wynne 1992, 1996). This is seen as particularly pernicious when it involves sciences that are of immediate concern to critical public issues, when “mainstream science, when linked to mainstream politics, may simply appear apolitical” (Delborne 2008, 533). This literature covers a wide spectrum of issues, held together by a methodological commitment to expert–​policy studies that, overall, start from situated empirical or archival work (Felt 2016). Regarding its normative aspirations, the standard view is to posit that an increased “democratization” of science and the widening of citizen participation provides for a better governance of science (Stilgoe and Guston 2017). A second vein of scholarship centered on the role of consensus as a formative element of science (Studies on Expertise and Experience or SEE), admittedly espoused by a more limited number of scholars, has insisted on a more privileged role for science in the policy-​making process, including a severe concern with the rise of populist, anti-​science leaders in contemporary

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politics (Collins 2014; Collins et al. 2020). Somewhat constrained by its normative aspirations and a significant lack of policy-​making case studies to call its own, this scholarship nevertheless engages with other recent socio-​ historical explorations of policy making that “illegitimately” undermines established scientific consensus (Oreskes and Conway 2010). The tobacco industry’s extensive and well-​documented manipulation and manufacture of tobacco-​related “health science” is perhaps the best known of these episodes of such “manufactured controversies” (Proctor 2011). Although these two contrasting visions have given rise to significant friction (Jasanoff 2003; Collins and Evans 2003), the lessons from both camps are relevant to post-​truth discussions. On the one hand, the significant number of participatory turn case studies should make it evident that science has had an increasingly important role in determining, organizing, and at times even dictating crucial aspects of public life, and that the delegation of absolute epistemic power to science in public affairs, even those where scientific input is relevant, is not a satisfactory solution to the post-​truth condition. On the other hand, the clearly dangerous effects of “manufactured controversies” suggests that science must remain an important safeguard against political or commercial interests that use deceptive science-​like discourse; cases in which the autonomy of science is necessary to shield policy makers from post-​truth like effects. These debates then hover around a question central to understanding post-​truth: are there circumstances in which politicians, decision-​makers, or indeed, society at large can legitimately disregard or curb the political/​epistemic power of science in policy making?

Brazil and COVID-​1 9 As of the writing of this chapter, societies across the entire globe have suffered massive levels of disruption to daily life due to the rapid spread of the SARS-​ CoV-​2 coronavirus and the resulting COVID-​19 pandemic. While the full extent of the long-​term changes that societies will endure because of the pandemic’s evolution are yet uncertain, it is already clear that the economic and social consequences of the rising numbers of contagions and deaths, the looming threat of other pandemics in the immediate future, the already visible contraction of global economies, a complete interruption of formerly “natural” person-​to-​person interactions, the deepening of social inequalities and social fragmentation, just to name a few very already visible impacts, make the COVID-​19 pandemic a key moment in history. The media presence of scientific expertise as the primary weapon against COVID-​19 has given science, perhaps more than at any other point in history, a prominent and very public position as a direct and apparently uncontroversial policy-​making tool. Whilst most global governments have, with different intensities and speeds, taken up global scientific networks and international health-​science institutions’ advice in shaping public policy to curb the pandemic’s effect, notable exceptions exist. Brazilian far-​right president

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Jair Bolsonaro has been a particularly notable contrarian, one of the few world leaders to consistently question not only the internationally sanctioned guidelines for controlling the rapid spread of the disease, but indeed the very seriousness of the pandemic. Bolsonaro’s infamous declarations on the Brazilian COVID-​19 crisis have ranged from denying the reality of the pandemic, to exhibiting a cavalier attitude in offhandedly shrugging off as unimportant the absurdly high numbers of COVID-​19 deaths in the country (Duarte 2020). Much worse than Bolsonaro’s inflammatory discourse regarding the pandemic, however, have been the direct consequences of his actions on health policy. Bolsonaro twice removed different Health Ministers when they appeared to contradict his contrarian claims against international consensus on COVID-​19 control, so that the post remained vacant even as the pandemic was seen to be spiraling out of control. Though regional state governors distanced themselves from the president’s views and implemented politics aligned with internationally sanctioned guidelines (later loosened considerably), Brazil has nevertheless become one of the worst hit countries and generally regarded as a failure of COVID-​19 policy implementation (The Lancet 2020) The ongoing crisis, however, is only the apex of a “war” declared by Bolsonaro on the country’s scientific and educational institutions since entering office, particularly for science that is taken as opposed to Bolsonaro’s immediate political projects (Monteiro 2020). This itself is part of wider political developments that have distorted Brazil’s relatively young democracy with a decisive swing towards a significantly remilitarized far right government (de Almeida 2019; Chagas-​Bastos 2019; Daly 2019). As Hunter and Power (2019, 70) remark, this “perfect storm” scenario came about because of several interrelated factors, including an economic crisis caused by a prolonged recession, a political crisis of rising polarization and falling trust in established parties, a corruption crisis brought to the fore by the Lava Jato investigation, and the deterioration of an already dismal public-​security environment. The anti-​ science, anti-​ democratic institutional crisis in Brazil may best be expressed through Bolsonaro but is not limited to his declarations. The Brazilian crisis of “post-​truth politics” and its effects on science are therefore impossible to understand outside of the socio-​historical elements that led to Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

Brazilian post-​t ruth from an STS perspective Anthropological and STS works reflecting on the rise of populism(s) across the globe have described socio-​political conditions that translate into fertile ground for post-​truth politics to proliferate (Mazzarella 2019), with empirical

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studies on neoliberal populism in the digital age pointing to a marked influence of social media manipulation in Bolsonaro’s rise (Evangelista and Bruno 2019; Cesarino 2020a, 2020b). Unlike descriptions of post-​truth in which technology is a causal factor in the appearance of post-​truth, these studies begin from the STS maxim that there is a “co-​constructive” loop between technology and the society (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005). Kalpokas (2019, 36) remarks on a related sense of “co-​construction” from a digital media studies perspective, or how in descriptions of the current digital landscape it is no longer sufficient to explain the role of content-​consumers by considering them as passive agents; rather they are to be reformulated as “citizen-​consumers” who are driven by market values while simultaneously seeking to “maximise their utility and satisfaction received from their acts of consumption.” Kalpokas’ use of Spinoza’s theory of affects, reformulated in the light of contemporary technology and social media, offers an interesting alternative to more straightforward “echo chamber” effect explanations of bias. Kalpokas posits a situation in which digital media consumers are, in fact, exercising ontological self-​affirmation through peer-​interaction when consuming content that, for external observers, might otherwise be described as “flawed,” “misleading,” “biased,” or “false” information. In the Brazilian case, social-​media echo chambers exacerbated contemporary political segmentation, but were also based on historical conflicts that have marked Brazilian politics for decades (Napolitano 2014). The rise of post-​truth politics in Brazil, and particularly Bolsonaro’s disdain for scientific expertise, is perhaps more remarkable because Brazil is generally considered Latin America’s scientific powerhouse, with Brazilian science being an important global player in areas such as aerospace engineering, agriculture, and biomedicine, all important sources of wealth and economic power. While Latin American science is generally considered to be in a more precarious state than its Global North counterparts, it might not be immediately clear why in the Brazilian situation a scientific apparatus that has been crucial to the nation’s political and economic development may then fall so strongly out of favour. Looking at socio-​historical contexts is paramount in understanding that the rise of certain sectors of Brazilian science is tied to their historical links with the military regimes of pre-​democratic Brazil and its directives for increasing productivity and scientific autonomy (Dias 2009). At the same time, Brazilian science suffers when misaligned to state power. Like in most of Latin America, Brazil has historically worked on a highly centralized scheme of overwhelmingly publicly funded science which is maintained to this day (Reyes-​Galindo et al. 2017). This makes sectors of Brazilian science particularly vulnerable to the effects of antagonism in government, such as environmental science conflicting with the logic of Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector, or in the case of COVID-​19, epistemological advice that appears to affect the capitalist interests of Brazil’s highly unequal economy.

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Holman (2019) describes the American post-​truth context by noting how what “[the Right] share in common is the rejection of institutions that had previously served as transpolitical arbiters of discourse. The media, science, career civil servants, the judiciary, and any other arbiter of political discourse has been cast as partisan.” In this scenario, American scientific institutions have become public protesters of Trump politics; very visibly in the March for Science demonstrations, which were also organized in Brazil (Escobar 2019). At the same time, the funding autonomy of a significant part of American science compared to Brazil is an important difference. Engagement by scientists as scientists in such a direct way is unusual in Brazil, where scientific institutions often cling to political “neutrality” to argue their own objectivity, but also to protect institutional interests (Reyes Galindo et al. 2017; Reyes-​ Galindo and Monteiro 2018; Oliveira Andrade 2019). Duarte (2020) has argued that the Brazilian COVID crisis offers an excellent example of how STS scholarship can deliver heuristic and even normative directives for dealing with Global South political contexts in which post-​truth has arisen, and particularly when the central elements of both participatory and consensus STS perspectives are taken into account. Yet as I have argued elsewhere in the context of Mexican science (Reyes-​Galindo 2017), and as other scholars have remarked specifically in the case of Brazil (Macnaghten et al. 2014), the fact that both of these STS frameworks correspond to critical theories addressing Global North problematics, with Global North political and cultural meanings, implies they must be matched with a close understanding of the relationships, hardships, but also possibilities for Latin American science to position itself as an institution that can not only provide scientific or technical advice for policy, but also act as a pathway for improving governance decisions regarding scientific issues and to increase democratic practices. In their discussion of the intellectual history of social studies of science in Latin America, Kreimer and Vessuri (2018) point out that political involvement and impact has been on scholars’ agendas since the earliest works in the 1960s.

Cadê a filosofia? I have drawn a panorama of how a socio-​historical understanding of the Brazilian COVID-​19 crisis, an example of non-​Anglophone “post-​truth” at work, unpacks “Brazilian post-​truth politics” as the evolution of a series of historical trajectories and institutional crises that peaked with the election of Bolsonaro. To summarize the previous section, this crisis depended on the intertwining of “populist” rhetoric, extreme conservative politics, the rise of new media and digital technologies that exploited common cognitive biases; but besides these “micro” elements, an understanding of wider sociocultural “macro” conditions is also required to make sense of post-​ truth in Brazil.

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Superficial considerations might suggest that nearly identical factors are at work in the rise of US and Brazilian post-​truth politics (populism, social media fake news propagation, a strongman leader). However, the vastly different political, economic, and cultural circumstances of “Trumpian post-​ truth” and “Brexit post-​truth” scenarios have already been argued by political analysts to be different enough to suggest nuanced analyses are required to properly understand post-​truth beyond American politics. In the British case, for example, the analysis includes economic factors that touch on complex connections to Continental Europe and the EU’s integration strategies. This includes vastly different immigration problematics compared to the US or Brazil (Inglehart and Norris 2016). The different relationships the American, British, and Brazilian states maintain with their national scientific institutions, to name just one critical comparative difference, strongly suggest that pinning down a single analytic strategy for positioning “science” in “the post-​truth era” appears to be too reductionist a task to be effective, conceptually as well as in promoting political change. In remarking the necessity to consider sociological and STS perspectives, I do not suggest that philosophically oriented analyses are either unnecessary or incompatible with my account, so long as such analyses are not divorced from empirical understandings. Take for example Gelfert’s (2018) analysis of “fake news”, which is thoroughly philosophical yet fully engages with a history of truth. After a careful examination of the possible meanings of the term, including historical episodes involving fraud, misrepresentation, and other instances of truth-​wrangling which are often put inside the same “fake news” bag, Gelfert (2017, 108) stabilizes a definition of fake news as “the deliberate presentation of (typically) false or misleading claims as news, where the claims are misleading by design.” A crucial part of the analysis lies in recognizing that, in order to be effective, fake news must be presented “as news,” so as to piggyback on the power of a recognizably powerful social institution, i.e., the “truth” in mainstream media. Fake news is typically not presented as, say, a revelation from holy scriptures, but rather is afforded the sheen of a powerful “objective” arbitrator of public discourse, the professional media. This is compatible with the STS view that the conditions for the proliferation of information or data as “knowledge” must be “constructed” via socio-​ historical and cultural processes, as Kalpoka (2019) similarly emphasizes on the background political and strategic groundwork that must be analyzed in order to fully understand how any piece of information becomes either “news” or “fake news.” McIntyre (2018) similarly engages with the historical conditions that mark a deteriorating US political system in which lobbying, filibustering, contrarianism, and the weakening of key political institutions predate the post-​truth era by decades. Capponi (2020), however, makes the interesting observation that, while Afro-​Brazilian religious minority leaders have used social networks to promote standard sanitary measures like social distancing by framing it within their religious views, Neo-​Pentecostal churches

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that are a strong component of Bolsonaro’s political base have refused to suspend public worship and asked members of the congregation not to fear the virus. Gelfert’s exercise has important connections to understanding the nuances of science–​policy relationships in contexts like that of Brazil. For example, it was reported that a principal reason for the dismissal of the last Brazilian health minister was his refusal to sign new guidelines supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine—​ a malarial drug with untested effectiveness against COVID-​19 first remarked upon on Twitter by Elon Musk and then touted by Trump as a front-​line preventive measure. Bolsonaro, who often rushes to mimic Trump’s antics, then placed hydroxychloroquine as a frontline drug inside Brazilian federal health policy (Goodman and Giles 2020). Importantly, far from outright denying science in this episode, Bolsonaro remarked on the drug’s effectiveness for treating malaria and thus its potential in treating COVID-​19. Despite mainstream health science showing widespread skepticism about any positive outcomes from hydroxychloroquine-​related research and even potentially dangerous effects on patients with severe respiratory failure, Brazilian research funds then began being diverted into scientific testing of the drug and army labs began mass production of hydroxychloroquine—​ funds that might have gone towards other public health or scientific measures (Rogers 2020). In its latest recommendations, the World Health Organization has advised that the use of chloroquine be halted, after preliminary studies strongly suggested potential harm for COVID patients, yet the drug continues to be made available by the Brazilian public health system. In fact, this episode might be a source of much interest for sociologists of science in the future. The Lancet study that first reported patient harm from the use of chloroquine was subject to harsh criticism from the scientific community and was eventually retracted. Chloroquine trials were then restarted, until comprehensive studies again demonstrated negative effects on COVID-​19 patients. When diagnosed with COVID-​19, Bolsonaro allegedly still chose to consume the drug. Schindler (2020) argues that this type of “post-​truth” strategy has little to do with the relativization of knowledge, and more with the forms of authoritarian regimes as they were shaped through the 20th century. Agnotology, a relatively novel stream of scholarship that purposefully mixes philosophical, STS, political, and socio-​historical research, has similarly identified this tactic of passing off “information,” “opinion,” or “bad science” as “knowledge” not simply as a case of “relativisation of knowledge”, but as the end point of intricate political, material, historical, and rhetorical processes in which building “fake news” is one of a variety of strategies for the creation of ignorance (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008; Croissant 2014). As in STS analyses of the construction of scientific “truth,” agnotology notes that understanding the different scenarios presented as means to socially construct ignorance become inseparable from empirical, sociological, or historical examination of the context of construction. Agnotology suggests that

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the creation of ignorance through the misrepresentation or misappropriation of scientific consensus on hydroxychloroquine by Bolsonaro is an entirely different process from, say, the creation of ignorance stemming from overtly political confrontation with scientific institutions by government (Oreskes and Conway 2010), or the censorship or suppression of public expertise critical of power (Galison 2008). Agnotological approaches have been proposed as potential resources for sensitizing the public towards the role that trust and collectively construed scientific knowledge should play in public debates, without having to frame science as an incontestable avenue to “truth.” Thus, agnotology can aid in promoting a civic epistemology that makes use of both sociological and epistemic strategies to identify the construction of dubious or “pathologically” constructed knowledge (Bedford and Cook 2013).

Conclusions It is important to note that Bedford and Cook’s agnotological approach does not advocate only looking at cases like those taken up by Oreskes and Conway in which the “truth” of science in the face of “manufactured dissent” is presented as obvious, but indeed to also consider cases where science itself may be deviating from the idealized norms scientists themselves peddle in their public discourse. This position in which a critical understanding of the importance of consensus must be matched by an understanding of dissent (as both sociological and epistemic concepts) would manage to escape Fuller’s (2018) typically provocative criticism of what he calls Oreskes and Conway’s “veritist” position, identified as a normative stance in which science ought to be trusted because it allegedly has reliable access to “the truth of the matter.” This same criticism has been levelled against Oreskes and Conway by Fernández Pinto (2015), who highlights in Oreskes and Conway’s work an idealized version of scientific practice that is ultimately incompatible with STS’s findings of how, in practice, science is an intrinsically and thoroughly messy epistemic affair. Fernández Pinto’s conclusion is that, in its focus on both traditional epistemological questions of “reliability,” “trust,” and STS’s concern with the construction of both consensus and dissent, agnotological work has the potential to reveal the tensions underlying the construction and governance of both science and ignorance that are crucial to discussions about science policy in today’s highly complex, very often uncertain, science–​ policy interface.

Note 1 McIntyre, for example, denounces David Bloor, a foundational figure of STS, as espousing a “relativist” skeptic position such as was taken up by the American far-​right as a tool for destabilizing science. Even an astute commentator such as Holman, who strongly champions closer collaborations between philosophy and

Post-truth and science  193 STS, is prone to extracting singular sentences from the work of Barnes, Bloor, Collins, and Latour to ascribe a brand of extreme relativism that would not be found in the quoted sentences, once contextualized.

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Post-truth and science  195 Mazzarella, W. (2019). The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement. Annual Review of Anthropology 48, 45–​60. McIntyre, L. (2018). Post-​Truth. MIT Press. Mika, C. T. H. & Matapo, J. (2018). The Complexity of Post-​ Truth in Research: An Indigenous Speculation. In Stenmark, M., Fuller, S. & Zackariasson, U., eds. Relativism and Post-​Truth in Contemporary Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 187–​197. Monteiro, M. (2020). Science is a War Zone: Some Comments on Brazil. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 3 (1), 4–​8. Napolitano, M. (2014). 1964: história do regime militar brasileiro. Editora Contexto. de Oliveira Andrade, R. (2019). Brazilian Scientists Strive to Turn Politicians into Allies. Nature, 23 May. Oreskes, N. & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Oudshoorn, N., & Pinch, T. (2005). How Users Matter: The Co-​construction of Users and Technology. MIT Press. Overell, R. & Nicholls, B., eds. (2019). Post-​Truth and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures. Springer Nature. Peters, M. A. (2015). The History and Practice of Lying in Public Life. Review of Contemporary Philosophy 14, 43–​56. Peters, M. A., Rider, S., Hyvönen, M. & Besley, T., eds. (2018). Post-​Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity and Higher Education. Springer. Proctor, R. N. & Proctor, R. (2011). Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. University of California Press. Proctor, R. N. & Schiebinger, L. (2008). Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford University Press. Reyes-​Galindo, L. (2017). Molecular Detector (Non) Technology in Mexico. Science, Technology, and Human Values 42 (1), 86–​115. Reyes-​Galindo, L. & Monteiro, M. (2018). Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice, Report from National Case Study: Brazil. 10.13140/​RG.2.2.36237.38888. Rogers, A. (2020). The Info War over Chloroquine. Wired, 1 May. www.wired.com/​ story/​the-​info-​war-​over-​chloroquine-​has-​slowed-​covid-​19-​science/​ Sassower, R. (2018). Postmodern Relativism as Enlightened Pluralism. In Stenmark, M., Fuller, S. & Zackariasson, U., eds. Relativism and Post-​Truth in Contemporary Society. Palgrave Macmillan, 35–​52. Schindler, S. (2020). The Task of Critique in Times of Post-​Truth Politics. Review of International Studies, 1–​19. Sismondo, S. (2017). Post-​Truth? Social Studies of Science 47 (1), 3–​6. Stenmark, M., Fuller, S. & Zackariasson, U. (2018). Relativism and Post-​Truth in Contemporary Society. Palgrave Macmillan. Stilgoe, J. & Guston, D. H. (2017). In Felt, U., Fouché, R., Miller, C. A. & Smith-​Doerr, L., eds. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press, 853–​880. Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood Misunderstanding: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science. Public Understanding of Science 1 (3), 281–​304. Wynne, B. (1996). Uncertainty and Environmental Learning: Reconceiving Science and Policy in the Preventive Paradigm. Global Environmental Change 2 (21), 111–​127.

Part IV

Situating the living world

Chapter 17

Environmental thinking in African philosophy A defence of biocentrism using the notion of nma ndu Jonathan O. Chimakonam and L. Uchenna Ogbonnaya

Introduction Some African environmental philosophers see human wellbeing as the rationale for advocacy for care and concern for the environment. This is obvious, for example, in Segun Ogungbemi’s “Ethics of Nature-​relatedness” (1994, 209), Edwin Etieyibo (2011) and Mark Ikeke’s (2011) “Ubuntu environmental ethics,” Ekwealo’s Ndu Mmili Ndu Azu (2012, 92). Omoogun (2009, 88) captures the essence of their position in the following words: We need not develop new non-​anthropocentric theories but rather work towards what they referred to as prudential or enlightened anthropocentrism. This theory holds that our moral duties to the environment are derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The anthropocentric environmental ethics cannot solve the ecological crises that our world is facing. Rather, it encourages the misuse of the bio-​diverse ecosystem. This is apparent in the increased use of sophisticated equipment and very advanced technology in exploiting the ecosystem in order to sustain the high human standard of living in the world, hence, resulting in rapid biodiversity loss. The above notwithstanding, there are some African philosophers/​scholars, who have put forward African environmental ethical theories that appear to be non-​anthropocentric. These scholars include Godfrey Tangwa (1996, 2004), Munamato Chemhuru and Dennis Masaka (2010), P. A. Ojomo (2011), Kelvin Behrens (2014), Workineh Kelbessa (2005, 2014, 2015), and Jonathan Chimakonam (2013). These scholars argue for an ecocentric1 or nature-​ centered environmental ethics based on the African cultural worldview. For instance, Tangwa made use of his Nso culture, while Kelbessa (2005, 2014, 2015) used the Oromo culture, and Chemhuru and Masaka (2010) alluded to the Shona culture to illustrate their call for this non-​anthropocentric environmental ethics. This contradicts the often-​held view that the African worldview is anthropocentric. Without downplaying the significance of the ecocentric

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dimension of environmental ethics espoused by the scholars above, in this chapter we will focus on a biocentric dimension of it. Here, we will call for an ecological balance through the insight drawn from the Igbo aphorism ihe niile di bu nma ndu. We argue that the beauty of life lies in the bio-​diverse nature of the ecosystem. We will offer a conceptual analysis of ihe niile di bu nma ndu. We will discuss the concept nmandu to show its anthropocentric leaning. After that, we will reconceptualize it as nma ndu to unfold a biocentric interpretation. We will employ our new conception in an aphorism ihe niile di bu nma ndu to address the issue at hand, which is the need for the equilibrium of the bio-​ diverse ecosystem.

Conceptualizing nma ndu The aphorism ihe niile di bu nma ndu, to the best of our knowledge, has not appeared in any other writings in African philosophy. However, we do not claim to be its originators, and some of the words in it have been defined and used as concepts by others. The expression is derived from the Igbo culture and language and combines six words. For a better understanding, the first three words will be grouped into a phrase and explained. The other two words will be explained separately. We will begin with the phrase ihe niile di, which roughly means “things that are.” It is the plural of ihe-​di, “something that is.” The phrase has been conceptualized and explained by Emmanuel Edeh (1985). Edeh derived ihe-​di from ihe and idi. He sees ihe (or ife) as “being,” noting that it can be used for all things including human beings, superhumans (these are humans or human-​like beings with improved qualities that surpass those naturally found in humans), animates, inanimates, as well as events, happenings, or occurrences (1985, 95). However, he contends that “if ife stands on its own it can be used to refer to both existent and non-​existent entities” (1985, 96). It is based on this that he suffixed it with ‘idi’ meaning “to exist.” The resulting word from this combination is ife-​di (ihe-​di), that is, “being.” But in the Igbo parlance, “being” and “reality” are not distinguishable, as Chimakonam has shown (2013, 74). According to Chimakonam, reality encapsulates being. This is to say that, while every being is a reality, not all realities are beings. What he means here is that reality encapsulates being, but there are some aspects of reality that cannot be categorized as being, such as some invisible things. For example, one does not say of invisible things that they exist without adding a long, if not confusing explanation. Our position in this chapter is that ihe-​di can also connote both being and reality, and as a result, there is no need to separate them. In a simple conception: reality is being, and being is reality. They are each “what is” (ihe-​di). It is in this light that ihe-​di is used for all realities, whether animate or inanimate, visible or invisible; hence, the concept ihe niile di—​“everything that is.” With this clarified, we turn to the concept nmandu.

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Some Igbo scholars have given diverse interpretations to the concept nmandu, which they all linked to the human being. Here, we seek to reconceptualize it by breaking it up into two words. According to Jonathan Chimakonam and Lucky Ogbonnaya (2015, 277–​279) there are, broadly speaking, four etymological articulations of the concept nmandu. The first is nma and ndu. The second is nma and dum. The third is nma and idi. The fourth is nmuo di ndu. Udobata Onunwa (2011, 47; 2012, 86) and Francis Njoku (2002, 59) articulate the first, which is an aesthetic interpretation. Onunwa opines that nmandu means the beauty, dignity, and essence (nma) of life (ndu). Njoku, concurring with this first interpretation, adds a second interpretation where he sees nmandu as the beauty (nma) of all or totality (dum) (2002, 174). What he is saying is that the human being is the beauty of all life or all realities. This is because, for the Igbo, the human is at the center of the interaction of values. If there is no human being, life is meaningless since the human is the totality of all that is and the center of the universe. Edeh articulates the third interpretation of nmandu, which is an ethical or moral interpretation of this concept. He states that nmadu (nma-​di) is the good (nma) that is (di), where di is the shortened form of idi meaning “to be” or “to exist.” Hence, for him, nma-​di means “good that is” (Edeh 1985, 100). This moral interpretation is given by Edeh because it is only humans that can discern what is good and the idea of the “good that is.” That is to say, no other being can exhibit this ability outside the human being. Despite saying this, he cautions that human goodness is derived from Chukwu (God)—​the ultimate good that is. The human being is not the source of goodness, but the visible manifestation of this good in the world. The fourth interpretation is that given by Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya (2015, 279). They bring a metaphysical dimension to the interpretation of nmandu by arguing that nmandu is derived from muo (spirit) di (that is) ndu (alive) making it muo di ndu (the spirit that is alive and can be touched). This conception of nmandu, for them, is the linking thread that brings all other conceptions of nmadu together The metaphysical conception of nmadu shows that the human being is the visible manifestation of the invisible. By implication, the human being is that reality that has both visible and invisible aspects. It is through its invisible aspect that it links with the invisible realities, while it connects with the visible realities through its visible part. This duality of human being shows that, without humans in the world, existence will be without beauty and essence. The goodness that is manifested in the world is because humans made it possible. Accordingly, human manifestation and being-​ness affect positively all that is in existence. Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya buttress their point further by saying that the existence of humanity, as the good that is, is the path to making life beautiful, good, and liveable as humans seek to maintain good relations with one another and take care of the environment in which they live. But could these be the only interpretations of nmandu?

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The answer is simply: no. It is possible to have other interpretations of this concept. When we take our minds back to the etymological understanding of nmandu given by Onunwa, where he noted that nmandu is derived from mma and ndu, it could be argued that nmandu depicts more than just human being. While it is held that nma is “beauty” or “good,” the conception of ndu as “life” has to be given more emphasis. Ndu is not just human life, it also includes “all forms of life.” It is about all that is alive or possesses life in any form. It is about all realities whose existence cannot be negated. It is the life found in animate realities in the world (uwa2). Everything, by this principle, has life (ihe-​di [ihe niile di] nwere ndu). This can also be expressed thus: ihe niile di ndu bu ndu (all that is alive is life). With this understanding, ndu (life) occupies a central place in the biosphere—​not the human person specifically as other views claim.3 Following the above argument, it would be wrong to say that the expression ihe niile di bu nmandu means that “everything there is, is human” or “all that is, makes human life beautiful.” It would also be wrong to say that the essence of all there is, is found in the essence of human life. The most appropriate interpretation is that “everything there is, is the essence of life in its entirety” which can be written as ihe niile di bu nma ndu. Here the word nmandu is written as two separate words, nma and ndu. In other words, the existence of all life is dependent on the existence of all that is in uwa. If other lifeforms in the biosphere do not exist, a given lifeform like that of the human will not realize its being. The reason is that all realities or lives depend on each other for their existence, self-​actualization and self-​realization. It is this understanding that we will elaborate in the next section as it relates to biological/​ecological balance.

Towards an African biocentric environmental philosophy: insight from ihe niile di bu nma ndu Environmental crises in Africa and the world are mostly caused by economic, social, political, and ontological factors (Francis 2016, 5). We shall focus more on the ontological cause of environmental crises. Ontologically, humans are seen by themselves as superior to other realities, which are meant to serve their needs and can even be misused. This has resulted in ecological changes and imbalance in the biosphere. Ozone layer depletion, global warming, deforestation, scarcity of potable water, are manifestations of negative ecological change. This has adverse effects on the ecosystem, as humans, animals, and plants are dying or experiencing various health problems due to infections and a lack of the basic environmental necessities for life’s sustenance. One possible response to this situation could be developed through a proper understanding and application of the Igbo aphorism ihe niile di bu nma ndu. But there are ways in which this aphorism could be misunderstood and misinterpreted. One of such ways is when it is misconstrued to mean

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“everything that is, is the beauty or essence of human or human life.” Another way that this aphorism can be misinterpreted is when it is read as “humans find their essence of life through other realities.” That is to say, when one imagines that every reality is meant to serve the interest of the human being even to their own detriment. The preceding interpretation about ihe niile di bu nma ndu is anthropocentric as it sets humans up as superior to all creatures and apart from the environment (Omoogun 2009, 48). This anthropocentric thinking makes humans ecological imperialists, which in turn warrants them exploiting and misusing other realities in the ecosystem, even to their extinction. It is pertinent to note that the anthropocentric conception of the world and reality accounts for the ecological imbalance in the biosphere. Anthropocentrism holds that humanity is at the center of the biosphere and that living organisms exist for human good and use. With this mindset, it is easy for some humans to pay little or no attention to the wellbeing of non-​human species in the biosphere. They mismanage and misuse these non-​ human species without caring about their existence and wellbeing, hence leading to the ecological imbalance in the biosphere. A good example of the resultant ecological imbalance is manifested in the extinction of some living organisms. This is likely to continue unless individuals who hold such a view are re-​educated to start thinking differently about the world, and to think about it from a biocentric perspective. For us, the Igbo aphorism ihe niile di bu nma ndu will help bring about ecological equilibrium. We can achieve this if the biocentric dimension of ihe nile di bu nma ndu is stressed, understood, imbibed, and applied in our relationship with other realities in the biosphere. What we are saying is that the restoration and sustenance of the biosphere are possible through a biocentric understanding of ihe niile di bu nma ndu. Here we interpret ihe niile di bu nma ndu as “everything there is, is the beauty and essence of the life.” This implies that all biological realities have life and long to perpetuate and sustain this life in the biosphere. If they are not allowed to continue to exist in the biosphere, the system naturally begins to react. Such reactions may manifest in the more frequent occurrence of volcanic eruptions, flood, drought, famine, global warming, climate change. However, if all lifeforms are allowed to express their existence without being misused by humans, scientists tell us that ecological balance will become possible. In this case, all lifeforms are given the opportunity to exist and contribute meaningfully to the existence of other lifeforms. Furthermore, the beauty of life is made visible when every reality realizes that its being is dependent on the existence of other realities outside itself. Here, every reality directly or indirectly accounts for the wellbeing of other realities and its needs are also taken care of by other realities. This entails mutual service of all realities. Innocent Asouzu (2004, 147–​148) calls this “mutual complementary relationship” as well as “mutual complementary service” (267). All realities are in mutual complementary relationship and service

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to each other when they help to affirm and actualize the life of one another. Therefore, the essence of a given reality is made possible through others that also discover their essence through their service to it. This is known as mutual indebtedness and dependability or dependence of realities (Asouzu 2004, 21, 46, 141, 186, 482). What this comes to is that every service is a path to the realization of the essence of a being or reality in the biosphere. The symbiotic relationship that exists among realities in a biological equilibrium sustains ndu (life) in the biosphere/​world. All realities are interrelated and interconnected such that their life is nothing outside their symbiotic and mutual healthy dependence on each other. In such a relationship, every reality feeds on and is being fed by other realities. For example, when humans and other non-​animals die, they become nutrient for plants to feed on. That is to say, they increase the fertility of the soil for plants’ sustenance and continuous existence. In the same vein, humans and other animals feed on plants for their own sustenance. Another example is found in the symbiotic relationship between animals and plants where animals exhale carbon dioxide, which is taken in by plants, while plants send out oxygen, which is in turn consumed by animals. Life is, indeed, dependent on life. No life exists in isolation. All lives exist together and in the consciousness of one another. This entails that lifeforms are relational. Emefie Ikenga-​Metuh (1987, 76) notes that “beings in the world are linked by a network of relationship. No being is an island, nor are beings a juxta-​position of independent forces each operating on its own.” All realities are in an intrinsic relational web that none can live outside of, in line with Henri Maurier’s (1984, 34–​35). “relational framework” for African philosophy. In this symbiotic relationship, every biological reality is a life-​ giving and life-​affirming being. This is due to the use of their vital influence or energy, in the sense expressed by Placide Tempels (1959): to make the life of each other worth living. The problem that comes with this ndu-​centric thinking is that it tends to displace human life from the center of the biosphere. Yes! This position is partly the focus of this chapter. Human life is not a superior lifeform higher in terms of relevance than other lifeforms in the world. Human life is ontologically equal to other lifeforms in the biosphere. All realities, whether humans or non-​humans, exhibit and possess life and their lives are equal in importance to other lifeforms. If it is accepted that every reality impacts others, then it does this through influencing and affirming the other’s ndu (life) and vice versa. This ndu is what they share in common and seek to protect and perpetuate in the biosphere. So, no ndu is less or more important. Every ndu is as important as the other. Therefore, they need each other to survive. It is on this premise that we argue that ndu exists in the community. For ndu to be or exist, it must belong. It must belong to the community of other ndu. This argument is inferred from Iroegbu’s uwa ontology. In his ontology, Iroegbu argues that to be (idi) is to belong and to belong is to be (Iroegbu 1995, 374). It is to belong to the

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community of beings (uwa—​the biosphere). Iroegbu’s idea can be read in this context as saying that to have life is to belong to the community of living things. Nothing has life outside of this community of lives or living thing, just as nothing exists outside of the community of beings—​uwa. Consequently, the mishap that could befall any being is for the life of such a being to be neglected or denied the right to exist in the biosphere. This is also a way of doing the biosphere a great disservice. Since life is found in uwa, the biosphere is itself life-​sustaining, and any being that does not belong to the ecosystem cannot sustain its existence. Thus, to have life is to contribute meaningfully to the fulfilment of the goal of uwa (the biosphere), which is life and the giver of life to those that “in-​xist.” To “in-​xist” is a coinage by Pantaleon Iroegbu (1995, 377), and means to stand out into reality or to belong to the realm of reality in uwa. With this, the biosphere finds its meaning, fully realized when all that is (ihe niile di) is given its rightful place and the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the sustenance of life in the biosphere and through a holistic biosphere. This is the beauty or essence of life (nma ndu). Life is beautiful and meaningful when life sustains life in the biosphere.

Conclusion The kind of thought that we have articulated in this chapter is one that stems from an African relational framework which is biocentric in outlook. We have argued, in line with this relational understanding of being, that the possessor of life (ndu) does not exist in isolation. Every being “in-​xists” with other beings for them to have life and continue to exist in uwa (the biosphere) in order to sustain their life. Our thought is that uwa (biosphere) is a web of life since life is found and sustained in it. Hence, if a reality does not belong to this uwa such a being does not have ndu. However, if a reality belongs to uwa such a reality has life which springs from uwa. In other words, to have life (ndu) is to belong to uwa where other lifeforms coexist. Another point that we have pursued is that to have a beautiful and meaningful life (nma ndu) is to participate in uwa and in/​with other lifeforms within the biosphere. What can be said here is that participation of beings in the biosphere leads to solidarity since all beings serve as missing links to each other in a mutually complementary manner. If there is no ecological balance, uwa (the biosphere) will experience problems. This, in turn, will lead to the destruction of life/​lives in the cosmos. However, to have life (ndu) is to belong. This is possible through the coexistence of all that has life (ihe niile di) in the biosphere (uwa). What this comes to is that to be (to have ndu) is to belong and this belonging is with regard to the biosphere—​the preserver and sustainer of life. The essence of the biosphere is for the community of lifeforms to perpetuate life in the biosphere (uwa), and the biosphere continues to exist in as much as there are lifeforms (beings) in

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it. The biosphere is life that sustains life through life. Thus, it is all the lives that are in the biosphere that make life in uwa beautiful and worth living. Therefore, ihe niile di bu nma ndu brings to bear the essence of ecological balance, which will, in turn, lead to environmental balance.

Notes 1 Although these scholars promote an African environmental ethics that is ecocentric—​ nature-​ centered environmental thinking, we advocate one that is biocentric—​life-​centered environmental thinking. Here, the ecosystem is the community or network of interacting living organisms and their environment. Our biocentric approach is concerned with the living organisms in an environment. 2 Although Uwa literally means “the cosmos” or “the world,” in this chapter it is interpreted as the “biosphere.” 3 Obed Anizoba (1986) and Udobata Onunwa (2011) are examples of scholars who have made the argument that the human life is at the center, while Uzukwu (1982), Anyanwu (1984) are some of those who uphold generic life like we do in the present work.

References Anizoba, O. E. (1986). The Dignity of Man in Igbo Traditional Belief. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Nigeria. Anyanwu, K. C. (1984). The Meaning of Ultimate Reality in Igbo Cultural Experience. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 7 (2), 84–​101. Asouzu, I. I. (2004). The Method and Principles of Complementary Reflection in and beyond African Philosophy. University of Calabar. Behrens, G. K. (2014). Toward an African Relational Environmentalism and Moral Considerability. Environmental Ethics 36 (1), 63–​82. Chemhuru, M. & Masaka, D. (2010). Taboos as Sources of Shona People’s Environmental Ethics. Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa 12 (7), 121–​133. Chimakonam, J. O. (2013). Integrative Humanism: Extensions and Clarifications. Journal of Integrative Humanism 3 (1), 74–​84. Chimakonam, J. O. & Ogbonnaya, L. U. (2015). A Conceptual and Contextual Meaning of “Mmadu” in the Igbo Reality Scheme: Further Contribution to URAM Igbo Studies. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 34 (3–​4), 268–​285. Edeh, E. (1985). Towards an Igbo Metaphysics. Loyola University. Ekwealo, J. (2012). Ndu Mmili Ndu Azu (Live-​And-​Let-​Live): African Environmental Ethics. Journal of African Environmental Ethics and Values 3, 90–​106. Etieyibo, E. E. (2011). Ethical Dimension of Ubuntu and its Relationship to Environmental Ethics. Journal of African Environmental Ethics and Values 1, 116–​130. Francis, D. I. (2016). Logical and Theoretical Foundation of African Environmental Ethics. Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies 9 (9), 3–​24. Ikeke, M. O. (2011). The Value of Ubuntu in Restoration and Sustainability of the Niger Delta. Journal of African Environmental Ethics and Values 1, 97–​115.

Environmental and African philosophy  207 Ikenga-​ Metuh, E. (1987). Comparative Studies of African Traditional Religions. IMICO Publishers. Iroegbu, P. (1995). Metaphysics: The Kpim of Philosophy. International Universities. Kelbessa, W. (2005). The Utility of Ethical Dialogue for Marginalised Voices in Africa. Addis Ababa University. Kelbessa, W. (2014). Can African Environmental Ethics Contribute to Environmental Policy in Africa? Environmental Ethics 36, 38–​45. Kelbessa, W. (2015). African Environmental Ethics, Indigenous Knowledge, and Environmental Challenges. Environmental Ethics 37 (4), 387–​410. Maurier, H. (1984). Do we Have an African Philosophy. In Wright, R. & Lanham, A., eds. African Philosophy: An Introduction. University Press of America. Njoku, F. (2002). Essays on African Philosophy, Thought and Theology. Clarentian Institute. Ogungbemi, S. (1994). An African Perspective on Environmental Crisis. In Pojman, L. P., ed. Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application. Jones & Barlett, 203–​209. Ojomo, P. A. (2011). Environmental Ethics: An African Understanding. Journal of Pan African Studies 4 (3), 101–​113. Omoogun, A. C. (2009). Ethics and Environment: Issues and Perspectives. Baye Communications. Onunwa, U. R. (2011). Humanistic Basis for African Traditional Religious Theology and Ethics: A Challenge to the Church in Nigeria. Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, 1 (1), 39‒61. Onunwa, U. R. (2012). A Handbook of African Religion and Cultures. Udi Global Resources. Tangwa, G. B. (1996). Bioethics: An African Perspective. Bioethics 10 (1), 183–​200. Tangwa, G. B. (2004). Some African Reflections on Biomedical and Environmental Ethics. In Wiredu, K., ed. A Companion to African Philosophy. Blackwell. Tempels, P. (1959). Bantu Philosophy. Presence Africain. Uzukwu, B. (1982). Igbo World and Ultimate Reality and Meaning. Ultimate Reality and Meaning 5 (3), 188–​209.

Chapter 18

Cultural evolution A case study in global epistemologies of science Azita Chellappoo

Introduction Culture is central to human ways of life: a vast array of cultural practices, behaviors, norms, and institutions underpin daily existence. Cultural norms structure human social life extensively: they influence who to pay respect to, who to avoid, who to obey, what kinds of lives are open to which kinds of people. Cultural traditions allow for the construction of complex institutions that can maintain large societies and provide important functions. The existence of these complex cultural systems that are built upon over time is arguably unique to the human species (Mesoudi 2011; Whiten and van Schaik 2007), with some authors arguing that it is this capacity for cumulative culture which has enabled humanity as a species to become so successful, spreading across the globe (Henrich 2015). The broad project of understanding culture gives rise to a host of questions: why and in what ways do cultures differ, and why are there persistent similarities between cultures? What are the reasons for cultural change across time? What explains patterns of cultural change and cultural stasis? Several disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, and economics, deal with these questions to varying extents and in a multitude of ways, using a range of frameworks and methodologies. Over the past few decades, a new approach to understanding culture has arisen: cultural evolution. Cultural evolution as a research program promises to revolutionize the study of culture, using the tools of evolutionary biology to synthesize previously disparate disciplines and generate novel insights about both particular cases and broad swathes of human history and current social organization. However, cultural evolution has faced pushback and controversy, often coming from cultural anthropologists in particular (Ingold 2007). The rise of cultural evolution presents an interesting challenge for philosophers of science. How should we understand and assess the “synthesizing” claims of cultural evolution? To what extent does the pursuit of cultural evolutionary explanations rely on commitments to particular epistemic values over others? How do cultural evolution approaches to indigenous cultures relate to indigenous understandings?

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In this chapter I first outline what the cultural evolution research program is and what its core commitments are. I then highlight two particular features of cultural evolution research that represent particular choices to privilege certain epistemic values over others, and may have social and political ramifications. I conclude with suggestions for ways forward.

What is cultural evolution? There is a long—​and often dark—​history of the application of evolutionary theory to human societies. This history includes social Darwinism, eugenics, scientific racism and models of unilinear evolution which placed Western societies at the pinnacle of evolutionary progression (e.g., Spencer 1860). Worries about the “degeneration” of the human race led Francis Galton to draw on principles of heredity to argue for policies of eugenics, and the “struggle for existence” articulated in Darwin’s natural selection fueled proponents of laissez-​faire capitalism and imperialism (Paul 2003). Although many of the darkest aspects of evolutionary understandings of human behavior have been jettisoned in recent years, on both political and scientific grounds, evolutionary approaches to culture continue to provoke controversy. One example is evolutionary psychology, which emphasizes the role of psychological adaptations constructed through genetic selection in understanding human behavior (e.g., Tooby and Cosmides 1992). Work within this tradition has been criticized on epistemic and moral grounds: both for its core assumptions, and for the way in which evolutionary psychology work appears to naturalize stereotypes. For example, evolutionary psychologists have advanced hypotheses that women have an evolved preference for high-​ status men, and men have an evolved preference for younger women (Buss 1989; Kenrick and Keefe 1992).1 Although more recent evolutionary psychology work has relaxed some of the stronger claims of early theorists (e.g., Dunbar and Barrett 2007, 5–​6), the discipline faces ongoing critique (Smith 2020). Cultural evolution shares the broad aim of using the tools of evolutionary theory to explain cultural phenomena. However, cultural evolution work differs importantly from evolutionary psychology, in that it emphasizes cultural, rather than genetic, transmission and inheritance. Early work within cultural evolution, such as Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach by Luigi Luca Cavalli-​Sforza and Marcus Feldman (1981) and Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (1985), set out to understand the population-​level processes that give rise to cultural change, through the application of mathematical models adapted primarily from population genetics and ecology. According to this “dual-​ inheritance” approach, human behavior is shaped by both genetic evolution and also by cultural evolution, and modeling population-​level processes of cultural transmission and inheritance can provide important insights into the spread and development of cultural traits (Richerson and Boyd 1978).

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Cultural evolution is a broad church, comprised of various schools which differ in their targets of explanation, theoretical commitments, and empirical methodologies.2 However, the research programs within cultural evolution do have key similarities; most notably, a commitment to “population thinking.” The hallmark of population thinking is the abstraction away from particular features of individuals, in order to represent patterns of population change. Individuals are typically represented as varying in a limited number of ways, and their interactions and decisions can be aggregated into population-​level patterns. This way of thinking about and modeling culture represents an important break from some alternative approaches, including ethnography. In contrast to a population thinking approach, ethnographers typically attempt to capture cultural phenomena in high levels of detail, attending closely to individual differences. Proponents of cultural evolution have argued that the abstraction inherent in population thinking, and necessary for mathematical modelling, will result in increased empirical and explanatory success in comparison to alternatives (Mesoudi et al. 2006). Adopting a population thinking approach could allow us to see emergent population-​level patterns, develop formal models that predict patterns of change, and construct generalizable principles. Cultural evolution researchers have made bold claims regarding the reach of cultural evolutionary frameworks. Mesoudi et al. (2006, 329) paint a picture of anthropology as a stagnating and unsuccessful discipline, which has been “much less demonstrably productive” than evolutionary biology. In contrast, adopting cultural evolution as the dominant paradigm for investigating culture would supposedly afford us leaps in understanding that parallel those made in biology after the adoption of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. These authors claim that a cultural evolutionary framework can synthesize disparate disciplines, unifying the study of culture and promising significant epistemic and practical benefits. Henrich (2015) attributes the success of the human species to cumulative cultural evolution, suggesting that it is central to explaining how groups spread around the world and developed complex adaptations to local conditions, and that it may be crucial in understanding institutional dynamics today. There have also been efforts to directly apply cultural evolutionary principles to particular domains: most notably, innovation and sustainability science. Henrich (2001) attempts to use cultural evolutionary models to explain trends in the adoption of new technologies.3 In the field of sustainability science, authors have applied cultural selection models4 to explanations of sustainable resource management, and claim that cultural selection approaches can usefully guide practical interventions (Waring et al. 2015). Some authors have gone so far as to assert that evolutionary principles should be at the center of redesigning worldviews, institutions, and technologies (Beddoe et al. 2009). Although some research is centered around Western populations, a significant proportion of cultural evolutionary work is carried out in non-​Western

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and indigenous societies. For example, Henrich (2015) uses the consumption of cassava in communities in South America as a key case of cultural selection. Some varieties of cassava contain dangerous levels of cyanide, which if eaten without detoxification, could result in chronic health problems, such as goiter and neurological issues. However, communities in South America which rely on cassava as an important part of their diet, such as the Tukanoans, have a multi-​step processing technique that occurs over several days and results in detoxified and safe-​to-​eat cassava. Henrich argues that any one individual would have difficulty working out this technique by themselves, and therefore individual learning fails to explain this adaptive behavior. His explanation of the spread of this adaptive behavior is based on social learning biases, including the unconscious tendency of people to imitate the behavior of more successful, prestigious, or healthier members of their community. Over time, this behavior spreads through a cultural selection process. Cultural evolution therefore promises to be a comprehensive understanding of culture, that could supplant alternative frameworks in explaining a range of phenomena and have widespread application. However, the promise of cultural evolution is predicated upon a particular understanding of what, amongst other things, constitutes a successful explanation of phenomena, and a particular identification of explanatory targets and explanatory goals, which has both epistemic and political consequences.

Cultural evolution as a particular epistemology Cultural evolution has been subject to pushback, primarily from cultural anthropologists who have not taken kindly to the characterization of their discipline as stagnating or demonstrably unproductive (Ingold 2007). Additionally, the reflexive critique that has been ongoing in parts of cultural anthropology, in terms of the relationship between researcher and individuals being studied, has so far been largely absent from cultural evolution work. Here I highlight two ways in which cultural evolution research relies on particular epistemic values and theoretical commitments, which may be in tension with alternative frameworks and modes of understanding culture, and may have troubling social or political implications. First, cultural evolution frameworks emphasize generalizability. Secondly, cultural evolution explanations tend to de-​emphasize or minimize human agency. Generalized models Creating cultural evolutionary models necessitates abstracting away from many of the specific details of any cultural phenomenon or group, in order to make it tractable for modeling purposes. Cultural selection models use purposefully “thin” descriptions of concepts or phenomena in order to generate descriptions of very generic processes, whereas ethnographies (for

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example) construct “thick” descriptions (Lewens 2015). This is cited as one of the reasons for the supposed great disparity between the productivity of evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology in a 2006 paper by Mesoudi et al.—​evolutionary biologists’ willingness to make simplifying assumptions, and to transform data into quantities that can be inputted into mathematical models has allowed them to draw generalizable conclusions. This is purported to bring significant explanatory gains. One such example is the concept of “assimilation.” Cultural “assimilation” is a complex, multifaceted process, that has no set definition, and varies depending on context. It is a process which runs along spatial, temporal, linguistic, social, and psychological dimensions, and has birthed a body of research that builds frameworks and theories attempting to capture aspects of it; Alba and Nee (1997) provide a partial overview. However, in cultural group selection work, for example, all the intricacies of this process are collapsed into one word—​assimilation—​which, for authors such as Richerson and Boyd (2005), simply means that data points previously categorized as members of Group 1 are now categorized as members of Group 2. This simplification allows for the construction of mathematical models which describe how processes of migration can lead to cumulative cultural “adaptation” (where more beneficial, successful, or “adaptive” cultural variants can successively spread through a population). The practice of creating “thin” descriptions of concepts, tendencies, and behaviors means making many choices, some of which will be value-​laden. Necessarily, this process involves discarding a large amount of information and detail about the phenomena in question. This therefore means making choices about which aspects of a phenomenon to retain and which to discard. When placed in our current social and historical context, these choices can have negative effects on marginalized groups. Historically, people of color have been denied the opportunity to be the authors of their own narratives (Ingold 2019). Cultural selection models by their nature create sketches of simplistic, bare-​bones causal pathways, where the authors of these models (who are in practically all cases not members of the community under study) make a series of decisions about which aspects of phenomena to emphasize, de-​emphasize and discard. Often, the authors of these models are on one extreme of the spectrum of power and privilege, and the communities under study are on the other end. This research is occurring in a context of the systematic disempowerment of certain marginalized groups (which include people of color, those in the global South, and members of indigenous populations). Those within the communities under study have privileged epistemic access to the content of their own concepts and interpretations of their own behaviors, and yet have historically been denied the means to utilize that privileged access in service of understanding. In proposing cultural evolutionary frameworks as the explanation for a wide range of cultural phenomena, we must ask the question of how to

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judge a successful explanation, and acknowledge that competing epistemic values may be at play. Cultural evolution explanations typically draw their explanatory power from generalizability and unification. This provides a contrast with (for example) historical explanations, which often function through accounting for a particular phenomenon in terms of a particular causal sequence, and may not appeal explicitly to laws or generalizations. Historical explanations often require high levels of detail in order to establish explanatory adequacy, drawing on many potentially disparate causal factors. On the other hand, cultural evolution explanations gain their explanatory power through appeal to a general model (for example, a selective process), identifying a given phenomenon as a token of a type. Why emphasize generalizability over other values, such as depth, detail, or accuracy? Additionally, as argued for above, the privileging of generalizability seems to involve non-​ epistemic value choices that are often not made explicit within cultural evolution research itself. Feminist standpoint theorists have emphasized the ways in which standpoint can affect avenues of inquiry, what phenomena are attended to, what are considered appropriate explanatory targets, what constitutes a successful explanation, and the epistemic and non-​epistemic values that guide research (Harding 1991; Wylie 2012). I suggest that the decision within cultural evolution to place heavy value on generalizability should be viewed as just that: a decision, which is socially situated and contingent. The capacity for cultural evolution to generate generalizable mathematical models, and subsume particular phenomena under classes of models, should not be uncontroversially accepted as a mark of a successful theory. Additionally, Dennis Foley (2003), while arguing for the necessity of indigenous research from the indigenous standpoint, emphasizes the need for indigenous research to be for the benefit of the community. The ways in which cultural evolution analyses of cultural change in indigenous and non-​Western communities have social and political impacts has not been sufficiently explored. Now I turn to one facet of cultural evolution work that has the potential to generate negative consequences for the individuals studied: the minimization of agency.

Minimizing agency Another key aspect of cultural evolution work that drives explanations of this kind is the de-​emphasizing of human agency. Population thinking approaches are often concerned with the outcomes of particular transmission dynamics. These may arise out of broad social learning biases, that bias who is learnt from or what is learnt,5 where the role of intention, deliberation, or agency is often left out. Additionally, work on cultural selection in particular highlights cases where explanations in terms of intention supposedly fail (as in the cassava example previously outlined).

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Tim Ingold (2007, 14), an anthropologist and fierce critic of cultural evolution, frames the research program thus: an affront to millions of intelligent human beings for whom traditions are real and important but who are not, on that account, trait-​bearing cultural clones whose only role in life is to express—​in their behaviour, artefacts and organisations—​information that has been transmitted to them from previous generations only to have their performances observed and recorded in their natural habitat, along with other forms of wildlife, by intruding scientists. Ingold’s complaint is gesturing at the processes of “othering” and exoticization. Stripping other human beings of agency allows for dehumanization, and the construction of an “us” and “them”: a studier and a population to be studied. One example of the way in which cultural evolution de-​ emphasizes human agency is Henrich and Henrich’s (2010) study on food-​taboos in Fiji. They characterize taboos surrounding the consumption of certain marine species (which can contain toxins causing food poisoning) by pregnant and breast-​feeding women as “culturally evolved adaptations.” For Henrich and Henrich, learners “acquire” the food taboos from low-​cost learning models (close female relatives), as well as “preferred models” (yalewa vuku, respected and knowledgeable women within the community). Broad social learning biases, which are typically taken to be genetically encoded and implicit (Henrich and Gil-​White 2001), structure who the women learn from, generating this adaptive behavior. In comparison, an agency-​focused explanation might involve a pregnant woman consulting various sources of information (depending on her judgement of their reliability), and deliberating as to the best actions to meet her goals (her health and the child’s). One such consequence of this minimizing process is the contribution to the construction of an “us” and “them”; in this example, “our” pregnant women who use their agency and decision-​making capacities to come to an informed decision about what is best for their children by taking on board the advice of family and experts, versus “their” pregnant women who are, in Ingold’s words, “trait-​bearing cultural clones” (2007, 14). This is often referred to as “othering,” a term originating from post-​ colonial theory, which refers to the process by which an “us” and a “them” are constructed (Spivak 1985). Lister (2015, 101) defines “othering” as a “process of differentiation and demarcation, by which the line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’—​between the more and the less powerful—​and through which social distance is established and maintained.” “Othering” paves the way for the dehumanization of the “other”: it plays a role in licensing acts of violence and oppression, or prescribing ethical boundaries. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, 55), in her book Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, spells out the ways in which the construction of the “other” in the

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service of colonialism has involved the minimization of agency: indigenous peoples were treated as objects of research, and “objects of research do not have a voice and do not contribute to research or science.” “Othering” is not only a tool for understanding past injustices, but is also an ongoing process which continues to feed into neocolonialist practices, into the way Western and white subjects view non-​Western migrants of color, and into a myriad of institutions, structures, and attitudes that prop up the racial hierarchy. This has material consequences for those who are “othered.” For example, Johnson et al. (2004) use ethnographic methods to demonstrate the ways in which “othering” of South Asian women in Canada contributes to marginalization of these women in ways that affect their healthcare access and health outcomes. Rich and Troudi (2006) suggest that experiences of “othering” from Arab students contributes to barriers to learning in a classroom setting, and Wright (2010) links the “othering” of Black students in Britain with lower educational attainment and higher probability of exclusion from school compared to white students. The violence brought about by “othering” is not only material but also epistemic. Epistemic violence is a term used in a broad sense by Spivak (1988), and refers to harms brought about by discourse. One aspect of epistemic violence is silencing marginalized groups, as well as the dismissal of local knowledge in order to privilege a subset of epistemic (typically Western) practices (Dotson 2011). When groups of people who have historically been denied agency are described in terms that once again strip them of their agency, this could have the potential to reinforce hierarchies of who is and is not afforded their full humanity, and who is and is not considered a “knower.”6 Therefore, we can see that the minimization of agency has the possibility to have negative impacts on the communities whose cultures cultural evolution work seeks to explain. Questions arise around the ways in which this minimization of agency is necessary for cultural evolutionary work, how it leads to explanatory gaps, and enters into the assessment of cultural evolution explanations themselves.

Ways forward How should we engage with, understand, and assess the rise of cultural evolution as a research program, given these issues? I suggest there are two possible responses: one more modest, the other more radical. First, and more modestly, perhaps cultural evolution could be usefully reformed and restricted in scope. Perhaps there really are cases where downplaying human agency and formulating generalized models can provide unique and helpful insights—​although we should be wary of the extent to which these can be used as an all-​encompassing framework for culture. Additionally, further integration with methodologies and knowledge from alternative approaches, including anthropology, sociology, and history, as

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well as indigenous perspectives and research, could result in a richer body of theory that addresses and mitigates some of the troubling political consequences. So far, cultural evolution researchers have largely ignored this possibility. Future work would be needed to assess whether such an integration would be successful. A more radical conclusion to reach would be that cultural evolutionary frameworks will always be in tension with indigenous and non-​ Western perspectives on culture, and this provides motivation for jettisoning cultural evolution in favor of frameworks with different modes of explanation that can also provide avenues for liberation. This may mean that cultural evolution goes the way of previous evolutionary approaches such as sociobiology, which was mired in both scientific and political controversy (Kitcher 1985). Cultural evolution provides an interesting case of how scientific research programs embody sets of socially contingent values, and how these values shape the standards for successful explanation in ways that have broader social and political ramifications. The appeal of evolutionary approaches to culture in general may in part stem from the unquestioning acceptance of particular sets of epistemic values: the desire for generalizable, unifying models of something as messy as culture and human behavior, supplanting particular and detailed explanations. Philosophers of science have a role to play in identifying the influence of these values, tracing the connections between choices of approach and particular standpoints, and ultimately shaping the trajectory of these fields.

Notes 1 Buller (2005) challenges the evidentiary basis of these claims. Additionally, troubling moral implications arise from the characterization of male preferences for younger women as “evolved” and “innate” (and then, by extension, unchangeable and natural). Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “The Double Standard of Aging” argues that the structures of power by which “for most women, aging means a humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification” result in a psychological burden upon women, encouraging the attempted retention of youthful beauty over the pursuit of wisdom, competence, and ambition. 2 The two main schools are the California and the Paris school. The Paris school is often concerned with the endurance of particular traditions (i.e., why certain cultural traits persist and are repeatedly transmitted, while a vast number are not). In contrast, the California school is often concerned with the appearance of “adaptive fit” of a cultural trait with the environment, particularly in the face of causal opacity (Sterelny 2017). 3 Lewens (2002) offers a critique of attempts to apply cultural evolution to innovation, arguing that they typically offer no additional insights that could not be gained from traditional models of markets or social forces. 4 Cultural selection is a form of cultural evolution, mostly championed by the California School. Cultural selection is broadly conceptualized as an analogue of natural selection, where cultural traits are selected for rather than genes.

Cultural evolution  217 5 Social learning biases that bias who is learnt from include conformist bias (a bias to copy the most frequent trait in the group), and prestige bias (a bias to copy the most prestigious individuals in the group). An example of a content bias might be a bias towards copying and passing on social information over abstract or non-​ social information. 6 Miranda Fricker (2007) provides an influential account of what it means to wrong someone as a knower, through the concept of epistemic injustice, expanded and developed by José Medina (2013) in The Epistemology of Resistance.

References Alba, R. & Nee, V. (1997). Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration. International Migration Review 31 (4), 826–​874. Beddoe, R., Costanza, R., Farley, J., Garza, E., Kent, J., Kubiszewski, I., Martinez, L., McCowen, T., Murphy, K., Myers, N. & Ogden, Z. (2009). Overcoming Systemic Roadblocks to Sustainability: The Evolutionary Redesign of Worldviews, Institutions, and Technologies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (8), 2483–​2489. Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. University of Chicago Press. Buller, D. (2005). Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press. Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1), 1–​49. Cavalli-​Sforza, L. L. & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton University Press. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing. Hypatia 26 (2), 236–​257. Dunbar, R. I. & Barrett, L. (2007). Evolutionary Psychology in the Round. In Dunbar, R.I. & Barrett, L., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Oxford University Press, 3–​9. Foley, D. (2003). Indigenous Epistemology and Indigenous Standpoint Theory. Social Alternatives 22 (1), 44–​52. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press. Harding, S. (1991). Whose Knowledge? Whose Science? Thinking from Women’s Lives. Cornell University Press. Henrich, J. (2001). Cultural Transmission and the Diffusion of Innovations: Adoption Dynamics Indicate that Biased Cultural Transmission is the Predominate Force in Behavioral Change. American Anthropologist 103 (4), 992–​1013. Henrich, J. (2015). The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press. Henrich, J. & Gil-​White, F. J. (2001). The Evolution of Prestige: Freely Conferred Deference as a Mechanism for Enhancing the Benefits of Cultural Transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior 22 (3), 165–​196. Henrich, J. & Henrich, N. (2010). The Evolution of Cultural Adaptations: Fijian Food Taboos Protect Against Dangerous Marine Toxins. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277 (1701), 3715–​3724.

218  Azita Chellappoo Ingold, T. (2007). The Trouble with “Evolutionary Biology”. Anthropology Today 23 (2), 13–​17. Ingold, T. (2019). Why we Disagree about Human Nature, Review of Why we Disagree about Human Nature, Hannon, E. and Lewens, T. (eds). Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Retrieved 1 January 2020. https://​ndpr.nd.edu/​news/​why-​we-​disagree-​ about-​human-​nature/​. Johnson, J. L., Bottorff, J. L., Browne, A. J., Grewal, S., Hilton, B. A. & Clarke, H. (2004). Othering and Being Othered in the Context of Health Care Services. Health Communication 16 (2), 255–​271. Kenrick, D. T. & Keefe, R. C. (1992). Age Preferences in Mates Reflect Sex Differences in Human Reproductive Strategies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1), 75–​91. Kitcher, P. (1985). Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature. MIT Press. Lewens, T. (2002). Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process: Darwinnovation! Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 33 (1), 195–​203. Lewens, T. (2015). Cultural Evolution: Conceptual Challenges. Oxford University Press. Lister, R. (2015). “To Count for Nothing”: Poverty beyond the Statistics. Journal of the British Academy 3, 139–​165. Medina, J. (2013). The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford University Press. Mesoudi, A. (2011). Variable Cultural Acquisition Costs Constrain Cumulative Cultural Evolution. PloS One 6 (3), e18239. Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A. & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4), 329–​347. Paul, D. B. (2003). Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics. In Radick, G. & Hodge, M. J. S., eds. The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. Cambridge University Press, 219–​245. Rich, S. & Troudi, S. (2006). Hard Times: Arab TESOL Students’ Experiences of Racialization and Othering in the United Kingdom. TESOL Quarterly 40 (3), 615–​627. Richerson, P. J. & Boyd, R. (1978). A Dual Inheritance Model of the Human Evolutionary Process I: Basic Postulates and a Simple Model. Journal of Social and Biological Structures 1 (2), 127–​154. Richerson, P. J. & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. University of Chicago Press. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. Smith, S. E. (2020). Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible? Biological Theory, 15(1), 39–​49. Sontag, S. (1975). The Double Standard of Aging. In Pearsall, M., ed. The Other within us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging. Routledge, 19–​24. Spencer, H. (1860). The Social Organism. Westminster Review 73 (143), 90–​121. Spivak, G. (1985). The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives. History and Theory 24 (3), 247–​272. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In Nelson, C., ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois Press, 271–​313.

Cultural evolution  219 Sterelny, K. (2017). Cultural Evolution in California and Paris. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 62, 42–​50. Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J., eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press, 19–​136. Tuhiwai, S. L. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. Waring, T. M., Kline Ann, M., Brooks, J. S., Goff, S. H., Gowdy, J., Janssen, M. A., Smaldino, P. E. & Jacquet, J. (2015). A Multilevel Evolutionary Framework for Sustainability Analysis. Ecology and Society 20 (2), 34–​48. Whiten, A. & Van Schaik, C. P. (2007). The Evolution of Animal “Cultures” and Social Intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362 (1480), 603–​620. Wright, C. (2010). Othering Difference: Framing Identities and Representation in Black Children’s Schooling in the British Context. Irish Educational Studies 29 (3), 305–​320. Wylie, A. (2012). Feminist Philosophy of Science: Standpoint Matters. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 86 (2), 47–​76.

Chapter 19

What is an appropriate philosophy of human science for 21st-​c entury indigenous psychologies? James H. Liu and Pita King

What is an appropriate philosophy of human science for 21st century indigenous psychologies? Indigenous peoples have always had complex ways of understanding themselves and the world they dwell within (Groot et al. 2019b; Mika, Chapter 10 of this volume; Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya, Chapter 17 of this volume): what we might imperfectly refer to as indigenous philosophies and psychologies. Within the “modern” discipline of psychology, where a positivist philosophy of science largely holds sway (see Teo 2018, ch. 5), indigenous psychologies (IP) have seen a resurgence. This recent trend presents IPs as a collection of traditions, connected in their dissatisfaction with the dominance of North American psychology (Allwood and Berry 2006). Differences in how the field developed and continues to develop; the extent of application and acceptance of IP; and the theoretical groundings of IP across these numerous indigenous traditions, are vastly heterogeneous. Some indigenous scholars have retained a positivist philosophy of science, in keeping with the empiricism of American mainstream psychology in their psychological research and practice. Others have worked to modify this dominant philosophy by incorporating indigenous cultural concepts to make the discipline more relevant to indigenous peoples. Some have looked beyond a positivist philosophy of science, privileging their own cultural modes of knowledge production, while still recognizing the usefulness of dominant epistemologies in producing specialized insights. Some indigenous scholars have rejected positivist philosophy of science altogether (consistent with the empiricism of Hume, Berkeley, and Locke), and advocated for producing knowledge in culturally germane ways. Such diversities in IP exist not only between different countries and cultures, but are also apparent within them. What is clear is that IP is a complex field of psychology that cannot be considered to be a homogeneous movement (see Farr 1991 on positivist histographies). What is less clear is what it means for IP to have “a” philosophy of science. To explore these complexities, we present Chinese and Māori (indigenous peoples of Aotearoa/​New Zealand) positionings within indigenous

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psychologies that reflect our (the authors’) personal engagements with our respective fields of IP, in an attempt to consider what an appropriate philosophy of human science for indigenous psychologies in the 21st century might look like. Like Koskinen and Ludwig (Chapter 1 of this volume), we see major advantages in adopting a dialogical approach to our joint efforts. Within Asia, indigenous psychologies arose in the 1970s with notable founding figures in Taiwan (Yang 1999), the Philippines (Enriquez 1992), and India (Sinha 1997). This was at about the same time as decolonizing political movements by indigenous peoples in Anglophone societies, like Aotearoa/​ New Zealand, Canada, and to a limited extent the USA, began building momentum. This mutuality of timing was probably not coincidental, as this decade was one in which Western hegemony visibly seemed to decline (e.g., the rise of OPEC, American defeat in the Vietnam War). Up until recently (see Li et al. 2019), there has been little intersection between the indigenous psychology movements in Asia and Aotearoa/​New Zealand. This chapter seeks to contribute to furthering the development of these intersections. Specifically, we examine convergent and contrasting understandings of a relational ethic of engagement, and explore how this might serve as productive philosophical meeting ground for indigenous psychologies.

Indigenous psychologies in Asia Indigenous psychologies in Asia began flourishing in the 1980s, up to the early 2000s, as marked by seminal publications (e.g., Enriquez 1992; Kim and Berry 1993; Sinha 1997; Yang 1999); Jahoda (2016) argues that the strength of this movement began fading after this initial burst of energy. While this latter view is overly pessimistic, the passing of Professor Kuo-​Shu Yang in 2018 probably marked the end of a golden era for Taiwanese indigenous psychology (Liu 2020). Similar trends of relative decline have been observed with the passing of other seminal founding figures like Virgilio Enriquez in the Philippines and Durganand Sinha in India. One reason for this is that the Asian founders of indigenous psychology were, for the most part, trained in American universities (see Li et al. 2019), with many highly concerned with the prestige of science as reified in the United States (see Guo and Ludwig, Chapter 4 of this volume; there was virtually no “anti-​science” discourse, as documented in Harris, Chapter 8). In a seminal definition, Kim and Berry (1993, 2), write “indigenous psychologies can be defined as the scientific study of human behaviour (or the mind) that is native, that is not transported from other regions, and that is designed for its people.” This may have led the leaders of Asian indigenous psychology (AIP) to reproduce the mainstream’s positioning of epistemology as the foundation of their newly formed movement. However, Jahoda (2016) pointed out that no AIP has thus far managed to produce a systematic body of autonomous

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psychological knowledge, separate from its Western/​ Anglophone roots. Efforts by AIP to produce indigenous methods and theories have met with some successes (see Ho et al. 2001; Pe-​Pua and Protacio-​Marcelino 2000; Yeh and Bedford, 2003), but an overall system has yet to emerge for any country or culture—​though see Hwang (2017) for a rejoinder to Jahoda (2016)’s critique. Reforming the center The avowed aspiration of the most sustained influencer among the founding fathers of AIP, K. S. Yang (2000), was to reconstruct global psychology through an inductive process where each cultural group was responsible for building its own IP, and then come together to build a more equitable global psychology (Sundarajan et al., 2020). This inductive approach was criticized as epistemologically unworkable by Yang’s close collaborator K. K. Hwang (2003). In accord with the post-​ positivist epistemology of Karl Popper, Hwang (2003) notes that scientific theories are not simply induced from empirical observations, but are deduced from these through critical rationality. Critical rationality is required for a scientist to resolve inconsistencies between empirical observations and theory, and to provide tentative solutions to problems found. The implications for IPs are that, in order to reform the center, they would have to develop systematic, comprehensive theories. Lacking such a coherent system, and working from the bottom-​up, Yang’s vision of “reforming the center” through inductive scientific methods never achieved much traction. Knowledge production in psychology (and other disciplines) can be characterized by people subscribing to methodological paradigms rather than people systematically testing theories to see what is true or false (Kuhn 1962). It’s more realistic to talk about neuroscience, social cognition, behaviorism, discourse analysis, or psycho-​dynamics as paradigms shaping the field, than to identify systematic tests of competing theories representative of these (Liu and Liu 1997). What appears to characterize psychology as a discipline is commitments to different paradigms, some of which are held together by a focus on methods (Liu 2011). This focus on methods and methodology is a product of Western civilization. It prevents IPs that have the goal of making scientific advances from becoming autonomously bounded bodies of knowledge, because these IPs must reference content through methods that connect them to a Western dominant center with English as its lingua franca (Yen, Chapter 2 of this volume). The signal accomplishment of AIP has been to develop not autonomous bodies of knowledge, but interconnected associations of people that dialogue and work together, who value insights coming from their own languages and cultures, and have developed micro-​theories and methods that inform a more engaged “glocal” psychology (Liu 2015). Occasionally, these have also influenced global psychology (Allwood and Berry 2006).

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Epistemology was not an important area for traditional Chinese philosophy (S. H. Liu 1998). In classical Confucianism, the most important philosophical concept is ren (仁), or “human-​heartedness,” the human endowment for feeling empathy and doing good that should be cultivated as a lifelong character-​ building project. In Chinese philosophy, ren connects the person to heaven, earth, and other people in a positive way. Heaven and humanity in union (天 人合一) is an ontological position for New Confucianism (Bresciani 2001). In the Confucian Analects, although ren is mentioned over a hundred times, it is never given a formal, analytical, definition. Rather, ren is illustrated as universal potential for benevolence that ought to be cultivated with diligence. It involves not only taking on different obligations to other people depending on role relationships, but also developing such a deep reservoir of principled action that, in the words of Confucius himself, “at seventy I followed my heart’s desire without transgressions.” Confucius put his faith in people, not systems: for him, “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.” Such a political philosophy may seem naïve (certainly it was not embraced by any of the princes of his day) and its fit with Marxist dialectical materialism (Guo and Ludwig, Chapter 4 of this volume) is an important question in China today. But it may be a useful antidote to over-​reliance on methodology that governs human sciences (like psychology) today. If we accept that IP formed on the margins of a global psychology centered in Western philosophy of science, and is constructed on the foundations of a largely Western body of research and theory, then the visions of Yang (2000) and Kim and Berry (1993) to build IPs as autonomous bodies of indigenous knowledge are unworkable. Psychological knowledge produced around the globe is deeply interconnected, via methodology, methods, and other disciplinary practices. More than these systems, psychological research is produced by the interconnectedness of human beings working in different niches, sharing enough knowledge to communicate across cultural boundaries, but also allowing IP to thrive within some niches. The greatest accomplishment of AIP may then not be any of its theories or published papers, fine as these might be. Through foundational scholars Kwok Leung, Yoshihisa Kashima, Uichol Kim, and Susumu Yamaguchi, and past-​Presidents from Taiwan Kuo-​shu Yang and K. K. Hwang, AIP contributed to making one of the largest associations of social psychology in the world today, the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP).1 As of the writing of this chapter, AASP has more than 1,000 members, with the largest single contingent coming from China, followed by Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea. The first author remembers the first conference, in 1995, hosted by Kwok Leung at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. At the first conference meal, the Japanese sat at one table, the Koreans at another, and a mixed crew of Chinese at other tables (Hong Kongers, overseas Chinese, Taiwanese). At the

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last conference meal, all sat at mixed tables, because people of these three ethnicities recognized that East Asians share deep cultural roots. These roots have turned out to be capable of anchoring the foundations of a longstanding and human-​hearted collective enterprise.2 AASP was an idea that found its time: an association of many people(s) with a cultural affinity for one another, and an interest in examining different facets of indigeneity, rather than having one epistemological orientation towards it.

Indigenous psychologies in Aotearoa/​N ew Zealand The development of IPs in Aotearoa/​New Zealand has taken a different path. For much of its development from the late 1960s/​early 1970s, indigenous, or Māori, psychologies were often done under the name of community psychology (Robertson and Masters-​ Awatere 2007; Rua et al. in press). Less attention was paid to epistemologically reforming the center of global psychology. Rather, in an effort to address the numerous societal issues resulting from British colonization in Aotearoa, indigenous and non-​ indigenous scholars worked collaboratively towards developing and maintaining a culturally grounded and socially engaged psychology that was useful to and embedded within Māori communities (Rua et al. in press). This is because the social issues Māori face, such as poverty, marginalization, homelessness, and un(der)employment to name a few (McIntosh and Mulholland 2011), are not going to be resolved via a breakthrough in epistemology (Rua et al. in press). Rather, such issues are bound up in complex historical, political, economic, and cultural factors that have entrenched inequalities within Aotearoa/​New Zealand’s institutions (Jackson 1992; Groot et al. 2011). To complicate things further, for Māori, issues of epistemology cannot be meaningfully separated from issues of ethics, metaphysics, and ontology, as these philosophical divisions are European in origin and do not reflect the interconnected and interdependent structure of Māori knowledge (King et al. 2017; Marsden 2003; Mika, Chapter 10 of this volume). IP in Aotearoa/​ New Zealand is therefore more concerned with theorizing outwards from community-​based research engagements, than abstract forms of philosophical contemplation. What Māori psychologies advocate for is a scholarly orientation towards praxis, so that Māori can see themselves within the discipline of psychology, and that this discipline is useful to Māori (Groot et al. 2019b; Waitoki and Levy 2016). To provide an example of this, one of my previous research projects documented how Māori men who were homeless maintained their cultural selves while living on the streets through participation in a local marae (cultural epi-​center) gardening project (King et al. 2015). A key insight that emerged from our ongoing engagements with this gardening project, the marae, and the people who dwell within these spaces was how these men were able to mitigate, to some extent, losing their sense of self to the streets (see Snow

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and Anderson 1993). Specifically, this involved taking part in the everyday sociocultural practices that revolved around gardening in this location such as planting, digging, eating together, telling jokes, and sharing stories. Such mundane yet culturally anchored activities helped these men to remember, re-​ enact, and reproduce elements of their cultural lifeworlds disrupted by homelessness. This praxis, although useful to Māori communities, is often beyond the scope of more positivist orientations towards psychology. In many ways, the development of Māori psychology within Aotearoa/​ New Zealand can be seen as an attempt to decenter the dominance of North American psychology, and an assertion of the importance of local peoples and their ways of being (Groot et al. 2019b). As scholars have pointed out, psychology cannot be regarded as consisting of a singular approach defined by positivist philosophy, and efforts to repluralize the global discipline are gaining momentum (Hodgetts et al. 2020; King and Hodgetts, 2017). Thus, rather than reform the center of psychology, which is grounded in a North American flavored philosophy of science, many indigenous peoples like Māori have simply “got on” with developing a psychology that makes sense to them and addresses the issues their communities face (Rua et al. in press). It is important to note here that efforts to repluralize, or decenter, mainstream psychology are not an outright rejection of such approaches. Rather, they constitute a challenge to the overuse and overreliance on methodological and theoretical tools that emerged from a particular reading of Western philosophy of science that privileges distant, neutral, value-​free, and universally applicable modes of knowledge production (Andreouli and Figgou 2019; Hodgetts et al. 2020; Liu and Liu 1997). There are many ways of understanding the world and, particularly for colonized peoples, the approach of the colonizer to producing knowledge is often not in our favor, so alternative, indigenous approaches are actively sought (Smith 1999, 2012). In addition to finding new ways of engaging with, understanding, and addressing the issues that impact Māori and the communities where they reside, Māori scholars in Aotearoa/​ New Zealand are also working to increase their capacity to engage in meaningful and productive dialogues and collaborations with other international indigenous scholars and their communities. One example is a recently edited book by Li et al. (2019) that attempts to bring cultural, cross-​cultural, and indigenous psychologies within the Asia-​Pacific regions into closer conversation with one another. Such edited collections provide space for people of diverse backgrounds to both showcase their own conceptions and understandings of psychology, and to see the similarities they share with other international scholars from the Asia-​ Pacific region. Another example is a recent book by Brazilian indigenous scholar Guimarães (2019), centered on dialogical multiplication and the principles of indigenous psychology. Similar to the developments in Aotearoa/​New Zealand, Professor Guimarães’s edited collection attempts to move beyond

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the construction of people as being somehow able to understand their social world independent of their own cultural grounding. This collection includes commentaries from New Zealand (Groot et al. 2019a) and Denmark (Jensen 2019) that move out into a conceptual landscape that outlines the relational and dialogical processes involved in working with people as inherently cultural beings. In sum, one of the most interesting discussions within IPs in Aotearoa/​New Zealand centers on dialoguing with other indigenous traditions. This is not to say that epistemology and philosophy of science are unimportant, but rather that the production of knowledge for indigenous peoples like Māori often starts with relationships, and that these relationships need to be central to the ways we conduct ourselves as scholars (Rua et al. 2017; King et al. 2017).

Closing thoughts Within this chapter, we have reflected on various ways different indigenous scholars have come into contact with the hegemonic discipline of psychology in an effort to make the global discipline more habitable for, and responsive to, indigenous populations. We close with a return to our titular question: what is an appropriate philosophy of science for indigenous psychologies? Different strokes for different folks: or, in a word: diversity. There can be no one philosophy of science for IPs. This is consistent with the pluriverse of Latin American scholars, as argued by Harding in Chapter 3. There are sophisticated indigenous psychologists (Hwang 2015) who argue in favor of a Western philosophy of science, consistent with critical realism (Bhaskar 1975). Indian psychology takes a spiritually oriented view of consciousness (Rao et al. 2008). The first author of this chapter, whose father was a Chinese philosopher, takes up Kant, and argues that each culture should consider what its practical postulates might be, and construct a moral and ethically grounded IP on that basis (Liu 2017). The second author, who grew up working class in Aotearoa/​New Zealand, follows a similarly localized approach (Groot et al. 2019b) in asserting that global psychology needs to be made of “public sphericules” that connect with one another, like atoms in a molecule, but also possess their own epistemologies, ethics, metaphysics, and ontologies (King and Hodgetts 2017). We thus assert overlapping, but subtly different limitations to knowledge. The different strategies and tactics scholars use within their specific contexts vary, due to historic, political, ethnic, religious, economic, and gendered circumstances. However, amidst these complexities, a relational ethic does exist that can serve as a meeting ground for civilizationally inflected dialogue. Both Māori and Chinese agree there is a right and a wrong way to treat people. They do not agree entirely on the specifics. But most people agree that at the core of any relational ethic is some form of the golden rule (Küng 1997). This is to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” in

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the ethos of Christianity, or 己所不欲,勿施於人 (do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself) in Confucianism. For Māori, this relational ethic can be understood through the concepts of whanaungatanga—​the importance of establishing and maintaining relationships: shared relational bonds (Rua et al. 2017)—​and manaakitanga—​unconditional caring for others (Rua et al. in press)—​both of which heavily emphasize reciprocity and meaningful engagement. In sum, we echo Levinas (Peperzak 1995) in calling for ethics as a complement to epistemology as a first philosophy for IP (Hopner and Liu in press; King and Hodgetts 2017). As outlined in the examples we presented, amazing things can come into being through relational serendipity: when people and places become aligned with one another and inter-​connected (Liu and Liu 1997), through being in the right place at the right time, and then through the hard work of maintaining collaborative and morally centered enterprises. The making of any major association of scholars, for example, is not easily described by causal chains—​rather the narrative is one of human agency (Hopner and Liu in press). If ethics are to be prioritized in developing IP, then relationships are central to the philosophy of IP. Reflecting on our experiences presented in this chapter, relational serendipity can be seen to operate through what Jung (1950) describes as synchronicity: an apparently effortless moment where people come together to allow collective aims to be realized. Multiplying these opportunities through increased dialogue among indigenous scholars, both nationally and internationally, is something that needs to be continually and actively fostered. Put simply, relational ethics, and the serendipity involved in forming enduring relationships to achieve collective aims are something we consider central for the philosophy of science and practice of IP.

Notes 1 For details about this organization, see https://​asiansocialpsych.org./​ 2 For an informal history of this organization, see https://​asiansocialpsych.org/​ conferences?src=nav.

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228  James H. Liu and Pita King Enriquez, V. G. (1992). From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: The Philippine Experience. University of the Philippines Press. Farr, R. M. (1991). The Long Past and the Short History of Social Psychology. European Journal of Social Psychology 21 (5), 371–​380. Groot, S., Hodgetts, D., Nikora, L. & Leggat-​Cook, C. (2011). A Māori Homeless Woman. Ethnography 12 (3), 375–​397. Groot, S., King, P., Nikora, L. W., Beckford, K. A. & Hodgetts, D. (2019a). Pōwhiri: Rituals of Encounter, Recognition and Engagement: A Commentary of “Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology”. In Guimarães, D., ed. Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology. Springer, 135–​149. Groot, S., Le Grice, J. & Nikora, L. (2019b). Indigenous Psychology in New Zealand. In Li, W., Hodgetts, D. & Foo, K., eds. Asia-​Pacific Perspective on Intercultural Psychology. Routledge, 198–​217. Guimarães, D. (2019). Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology. Springer. Ho, D. Y. F., Peng, S. Q., Lai, A. C., Chan, S. F. F. (2001). Indigenization and Beyond: Methodological Relationalism in the Study of Personality across Cultural Traditions. Journal of Personality 69 (6), 925–​953. Hodgetts, D., Drew, N., Sonn, C., Stolte, O. & Nikora, L. W. (2020). Social Psychology and Everyday Life. 2nd ed., Palgrave Macmillan. Hopner, V. & Liu, J.H. (in press). Relational Ethics and Epistemology: The Case for Complementary First Principles in Psychology. Theory and Psychology. Hwang, K. K. (2003). Critique of the Methodology of Empirical Research on Individual Modernity in Taiwan. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 6, 241–​262. Hwang, K. K. (2015). Culture-​Inclusive Theories of Self and Social Interaction: The Approach of Multiple Philosophical Paradigms. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45, 39–​62. Hwang, K. K. (2017). The Rise of Indigenous Psychologies: In Response to Jahoda’s Criticism. Culture and Psychology 23 (4), 551–​565. Jackson, M. (1992). The Treaty and the World: The Colonisation of Māori Philosophy. In G. Oddie & R. Perrett, eds. Justice, Ethics and New Zealand Society. Oxford University Press, 1–​10. Jahoda, G. (2016). On the Rise and Decline of “Indigenous Psychology”. Culture and Psychology 22 (2), 169–​181. Jensen, M. (2019). Developing Psychology from the Diversity of Living Conditions. In D Guimarães, ed. Dialogical Multiplication: Principles for an Indigenous Psychology. Springer, 135–​149. Jung, C. G. (1950). Foreword [to the Wilhelm/​Baynes translation]. The I Ching (or Book of Changes). Princeton University Press. Kim, U. & Berry, J. W. (1993). Indigenous Psychologies: Research and Experience in Cultural Context. SAGE. King, P. & Hodgetts, D. (2017). Gathering a Few Thoughts on “Neo-​Confucian Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy”. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 20 (2), 161–​165. doi:10.1111/​ajsp.12174. King, P., Hodgetts, D., Rua, M. & Morgan, M. (2017). Disrupting Being on an Industrial Scale: Towards a Theorization of Māori Ways-​of-​Being. Theory and Psychology 27 (6), 725–​740.

Philosophy for indigenous psychologies?  229 King, P., Hodgetts, D., Rua, M. & Te Whetu., T. (2015). Older Men Gardening on the Marae: Everyday Practices for Being Māori. AlterNative 11 (1), 14–​28. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. Küng, H. (1997). A Global Ethic for Global Politics and Economics. Oxford University Press. Li, W. W., Hodgetts, D. & Foo, K. H. (2019). Asian-​Pacific Perspectives on Intercultural Psychology. Routledge. Liu, J. H. (2011). Asian Epistemologies and Contemporary Social Psychological Research. In Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y., eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. 4th ed., SAGE, 213–​226. Liu, J. H. (2015). Globalizing Indigenous Psychology: An East Asian Form of Hierarchical Relationalism with Worldwide Implications. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 45 (1), 82–​94. Liu, J. H. (2017). Neo-​ Confucian Epistemology and Chinese Philosophy: For Actioning Psychology as a Human Science. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 20, 137–​149. Liu, J. H. (2020). A Commentary on Commentaries on the Prospects for a More Equitable Global Psychology. In Sundarajan, L., Yeh, K.H. & Hwang, K.K., eds. Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan, 177–​188. Liu, J. H. & Liu, S. H. (1997). Modernism, Postmodernism, and Neo-​Confucian Thinking: A Critical History of Paradigm Shifts and Values in Academic Psychology. New Ideas in Psychology 15 (2), 159–​177. Liu, S. H. (1998). Understanding Confucian Philosophy: Classical and Sung-​Ming. Greenwood. Marsden, M. (2003). The Woven Universe: Selected Writings of Rev. Māori Marsden. Estate of Rev. Māori Marsden. McIntosh, T. & Mulholland, M. (2011). Māori and Social Issues. Huia Publishers, 249–​262. Peperzak, A. T., ed. (1995). Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion. Psychology Press. Pe-​ Pua, R. & Protacio-​ Marcelino, E. (2000). Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino Psychology): A Legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez. Asian Journal of Social Psycology 3, 49–​71. Rao, K.R., Paranjpe, A.C. & Dalal, A. K. (2008). Handbook of Indian Psychology. Cambridge University Press India. Robertson, N. & Masters-​Awatere, B. (2007). Community Psychology in Aotearoa/​New Zealand: Me Tiro Whakamuri a Kia Hangai Whakamua. In Reich, S., Riemer, M., Prilleltensky, I. & Montero, M., eds. International Community Psychology: History and Theories. Springer Science and Business Media, 140–​163. Rua, M., Hodgetts, D. & Stolte, O. (2017). Māori Men: An Indigenous Psychological Perspective on the Interconnected Self. New Zealand Journal of Psychology 46 (3), 55–​63. Rua, M., Nikora, L., Groot, S., Masters-​ Awatere, B., King, P., Hodgetts, D., … Roberson, N. (in press). Decoloniality in Being Māori and Community psychologists: Advancing an Evolving and Culturally Situated Approach. University of Waikato.

230  James H. Liu and Pita King Sinha, D. (1997). Indigenizing Psychology. In Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Y. H. & Pandey, J., eds. Handbook of Cross-​Cultural Psychology. Allyn & Bacon, 130–​169. Smith, L. (1999/​2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed., Otago University Press. Snow, D. A. & Anderson, L. (1993). Down on their Luck: A Study of Homeless Street People. University of California Press. Sundarajan, L., Yeh, K.H. & Hwang, K.K., eds. (2020). Global Psychology from Indigenous Perspectives: Visions Inspired by K. S. Yang. Palgrave Macmillan. Teo, T. (2018). Outline of Theoretical Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan. Waitoki, W. W. & Levy, M., eds. (2016). Te Manu Kai I Te Mātauranga: Indigenous Psychology in Aotearoa/​New Zealand. New Zealand Psychological Society. Yang, K. S. (1999). Towards an Indigenous Chinese Psychology: A Selective Review of Methodological, Theoretical, and Empirical Accomplishments. Chinese Journal of Psychology 41, 181–​211. Yang, K. S. (2000). Monocultural and Cross-​Cultural Indigenous Approaches: The Royal Road to the Development of a Balanced Global Psychology. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 3, 241–​263. Yeh, K.H. & Bedford, O. (2003). A Test of the Dual Filial Piety Model. Asian Journal of Social Psychology 6, 215–​228.

Chapter 20

On local medical traditions Zinhle Mncube

Introduction African traditional medicine (ATM) continues to be a prominent subject in public discourse in South Africa. Studies suggest that up to 80% of Black South Africans consult traditional healers (commonly known as izangoma) (James et al. 2018). For many of these people, traditional healers are often their primary source of healthcare, before Western medical practitioners. Patients with chronic diseases like HIV/​AIDS are more likely to seek out ATM. In this chapter, I consider the rationale to decolonize medicine in South Africa as it applies to ATM. The question I ask is: is it plausible to interpret the rationale to decolonize medicine to mean that ATM is an epistemically equal medical perspective to Western mainstream medicine? I argue that the idea that ATM is epistemically equivalent to Western mainstream medicine is undergirded by a wholesale medical relativism that is implausible and counterintuitive in various ways. Far from supporting decolonization, I argue that this interpretation undercuts the motivation behind decolonization of tolerance and valuing of different medical traditions. For the sake of argument, I assume that the decolonization of medicine is a worthwhile enterprise. I consider the motivation to decolonize medicine from epistemic grounds, as opposed to ethical grounds (Broadbent 2019). I proceed as follows. I outline the practices of ATM practitioners. Then I explain how to make sense of the rationale to decolonize medicine as it applies to ATM. Finally I argue that the relativism that undergirds the second premise of the rationale is problematic.

The practice of ATM The purpose of this section is to describe the practice of ATM and what practitioners of ATM take themselves to be doing. The World Health Organization (WHO 2019) refers to traditional medicine as:

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the sum total of the knowledge, skill and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness. The ATM that I am concerned with is the kind of medicine described above that is indigenous to the Black African Southern Bantu-​speaking people of southern Africa. The Traditional Health Practitioners Act of 2007 is an attempt by the South African government to regulate and formalize traditional healing practices in the country. This Act recognizes four categories of traditional healing practitioners (or THPs)—​diviners (izangoma), herbalists (iinyanga), traditional birth attendants (ababelethisi), and traditional surgeons (iingcibi).1 According to this Act, only South African nationals over the age of 18 are legally permitted to practice ATM. On the ground, however, ATM is practiced by people of different nationalities and races. In this section, I explain the practice of the most popular type of THP in the country—​the sangoma.2 Understanding the worldview called “African spirituality” is central to understanding ATM. African spirituality is the belief in a God or gods and the reverence of immortal ancestors. Ancestors (amadlozi) are the entire lineage of an individual’s deceased blood relatives that spans generations. In African spirituality, ancestors are thought to influence the life, and thus health, of future generations. That is, ancestors are thought to cause illness and misfortune in individuals, and also to have the power to heal both of these afflictions (Thornton 2009). Believers in African spirituality hold that humans are at the same time spiritual, social, and biological beings. Thus, for them, the health of an individual amounts to a delicate balance of her spiritual, social, and physical well-​being. The belief is that the good health of an individual depends on their good behavior as well as their good relationship with their ancestors. Bad health results from the opposite—​bad behavior and a lack of a connection with one’s ancestors. According to this view, the health of one’s relationship with one’s ancestors is measured through, for example, the amount of communication (ukupahla) one has with one’s ancestors, and the frequency with which one honors one’s ancestors through ritual ceremonies (imisebenzi). What is the central role of the sangoma? Izangoma are consulted for a variety of issues ranging across physiological, social, spiritual, psychological, and moral problems. Izangoma provide medical, counseling, and divination services, amongst others. In addition to offering diagnosis and therapy of physiologically based illnesses like HIV/​ AIDS, cancer, infertility, mental disorders, and hypertension (Peltzer et al. 2001); izangoma also take themselves to treat the effects of evil spirits, marital disharmony, ancestral wrath, and loss of love, for example, as psychosomatically based illnesses (see Felhaber 1997). The reader may wonder about calling both HIV/​AIDS and

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marital disharmony, for example, “illnesses.” As Cumes (2013, 61) explains, “Sangomas do not distinguish between disease and ‘dis-​ease.’ The one will eventually lead to the other.” As such, to the sangoma, HIV/​AIDS and marital disharmony are both states of disease. In this chapter, I use the word “illness” to refer to a state of disease; I use the terms “illness” and “disease” equivalently. Izangoma believe that illness arises from four causes: ancestors; ritual impurity; witchcraft; and intrusive spirits (Cumes 2013, 62). The sangoma may use divination bones, trance-​channeling, dream interpretation, observation, and a client’s self-​diagnosed symptoms as diagnostic methods. Briefly, here is how a sangoma takes themself to diagnose illness through the methods of trance-​channeling and divination bones, respectively. In the first instance, a client will consult with a sangoma as a result of the client’s self-​assessed psychosocial, physiological, or spiritual illness. The diagnosis and explanation of illness is then clarified by the sangoma. If the sangoma uses trance-​ channeling as a diagnostic method, then in the consultation the sangoma will take themselves to be occupied or possessed by their own ancestors. In this trance-​like state, it is believed that the sangoma’s ancestors communicate through the sangoma as a medium to the client, to deliver personalized diagnostic information and guidance about the client’s illness (Cumes 2013, 59). If the sangoma uses the throwing of divination bones as a diagnostic method, then in the consultation, the sangoma may ask the patient to blow into a bag filled with various objects. This collection of objects (which may be dominos, dice, shells, and small animal bones, amongst others) is called “divination bones” (amatambo). Each object in the divination bones is thought to represent particular elements in a spiritual context—​one object may represent the client herself, another object some specific danger in the client’s life, for example. The sangoma will cast the divination bones onto a straw mat and proceed to “read” or interpret the bones according to the pattern in which they fall. The pattern in which the bones fall is thought to be controlled by the ancestors. It is thought that this pattern is an “information field” set up by the ancestors to guide the sangoma to an accurate interpretation of the client’s illness (Cumes 2013). The sangoma then uses their knowledge of illness to prescribe what they take to be the correct course of treatment for the client. For the sangoma, treatment is a matter of restoring balance to a client’s physiological, psychological, social, and spiritual well-​being. Treatment takes various forms. Treatment may take the form of counseling by the sangoma, the instruction to conduct a ritual ceremony, ​or more commonly, the instruction of the ritualized use of natural medicine. Natural medicine (or umuthi) is the single or combination mixture of mineral, plant, or animal-​based products. Muthi is prescribed by a sangoma not just for psychosocial, psychological, and pharmacological healing purposes, but also for protection purposes. The type of “protection” at play here is protection from illness and/​or misfortune. For example, a sangoma might suggest that a client needs muthi for protection

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from those who practice witchcraft, or for an expectant mother, protection for her unborn child. The Aloe ferox plant is an example of one plant used by izangoma to treat diabetes (Mothibe and Sibanda 2019, 14). Aloe ferox has been found to reduce hyperglycemia (a high blood sugar level) (Balogun et al. 2016). Depending on the illness, a sangoma administers muthi in some of the following ways. A sangoma may instruct a client to ingest and then purge a mixture of muthi and cold water; a sangoma may instruct a client to bathe in water mixed with muthi or to steam herself using a mixture of muthi and hot water; a sangoma may smear muthi into small incisions made on the client’s skin, or may instruct the client to wear muthi as a charm for protection. The sangoma sees herself as a highly trained professional with specialized knowledge and expertise (Thornton 2009). She sees her profession as a live one where knowledge is shared, and open to critique and change from the inside.

The rationale to decolonize medicine I have just explained one category of ATM, that is, what izangoma take themselves to do. My aim in this section is to clarify the rationale to decolonize medicine as it applies to ATM. In the following section, I challenge the relativist underpinnings of this rationale as problematic and counterproductive to the positioning of ATM in South Africa. To be sure, the rationale to decolonize medicine is just an application of the general call for epistemic decolonization to medicine. Similar calls for decolonization have been extended to the curriculum (Metz 2015), philosophy (Etieyibo 2016), and science (as Harris discusses in Chapter 8 of this volume), amongst other areas.3 One way to construct the imperative to decolonize medicine in South Africa is through the following four-​step dialectic: (P1) Colonialism has positioned Western mainstream medicine as the single, epistemically authoritative medical tradition. (P2) But this medical tradition is just one amongst many epistemically equal medical traditions. (C1) Colonialism has committed an epistemic injustice by positioning Western mainstream medicine as the authoritative medical tradition, to the exclusion of other medical traditions. (C2) At base, decolonizing medicine requires taking different medical traditions (like ATM) to be epistemically authoritative in equal measure. For ease of exposition, I refer to the abovementioned dialectic as the “rationale.” In order to clarify how we might make sense of this rationale when it comes to ATM, in what follows, I discuss the motivation behind each step of the rationale.

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The first step is that colonialism has arrogated one single perspective on medicine, Western mainstream medicine, to the status of epistemic authority on the field. One way to understand this step is to consider the positioning of ATM in South Africa in relation to Western mainstream medicine. We can explain some of the historical dominance of Western mainstream medicine in South Africa by recourse to the politics and social relations of the country. It is by colonial design that the term historically used to refer to the sangoma is “witchdoctor” (Hammon-​Tooke 1989). European colonists rejected the widespread use of ATM in the country (McFarlane 2015, 62): as a means of control of the native Africans, colonists framed ATM as dangerous and abhorrent witchcraft. Colonists banned the practice of ATM in the country and instead introduced Western medicine as the default form of medical practice. It was this ban on ATM, which continued with the Apartheid era Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1957, that in part resulted in native Africans becoming reliant on Western mainstream medicine (McFarlane 2015, 61). We see the downstream effects of the colonial framing of ATM today. ATM is frequently described in the South African mass media using motifs of superstition and witchcraft. ATM is juxtaposed to Western mainstream medicine as “unscientific,” “dangerous,” “unregulated,” and “supernatural” (Nyika 2007). The upshot of the first step of the rationale then is that the Western medical tradition counts as authoritative in South Africa and ATM does not. The second step of the rationale states that, even though Western mainstream medicine has been set up as epistemically authoritative, it is in fact just one of a variety of epistemically equal medical traditions. In order to make sense of this claim, we must have in mind the idea of evidence and justification for medical beliefs. This step in the rationale proposes that the knowledge claims of Western mainstream medicine are in fact equal to the knowledge claims of ATM. Suppose that, despite years of trying to conceive, Noni struggles to fall pregnant. A sangoma might attribute Noni’s infertility to ancestral wrath due to Noni living with her boyfriend outside of wedlock, for example. A Western medical practitioner might attribute Noni’s infertility to a severe case of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). In this scenario, many people might be inclined to believe the Western medical practitioner, for there is plenty of evidence from randomized control trials that shows that PCOS is a common cause of infertility in women (Melo et al. 2015). The second step of the rationale says that, of course, you would be inclined to favour the Western medical practitioner if your justification for medical beliefs is the gold standard of evidence-​ based medicine: double-​blinded, randomized control trials (RCTs). According to this step, the notion of evidence-​ based medicine is a Western one, so under a Western knowledge system the Western medical practitioner’s claim will pass muster, and the sangoma’s may not. ATM has

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its own justifications for medical beliefs. Under those standards, the sangoma’s explanation is justified, whereas the Western medical practitioner’s may not be justified. This step says that the knowledge claims in ATM ought to be taken as seriously as those in Western mainstream medicine because both types of claims are in a sense justified, and thus equally authoritative. The upshot of this second step in the rationale is that there is no objective way to adjudicate between the sangoma and the Western medical practitioner’s claims because notions of evidence, healing, and disease, for example, are culture-​ or tradition-​specific. The third step in the rationale says that excluding ATM as an authoritative medical tradition is an epistemic injustice. Fricker (2007, 149) describes epistemic injustice as a wrong done to one in their capacity as a knower. One type of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice: prejudice that gives less credibility to a given view because of its origin or orientation. An example of testimonial injustice is when a black woman’s testimony on her sexual harassment is not believed in court because of gender and racial prejudice. Applied to medicine, the third step of the rationale addresses the harm caused by the epistemic marginalization of ATM in South Africa as a result of colonialism. This step says that it is unfair to give less or no credibility to ATM as a system of medical knowledge because ATM originates from Africa, for example, or because ATM has a concept of disease causation that includes supernatural features. The fourth step of the rationale says that, to reverse this epistemic injustice, decolonizing medicine at minimum requires treating ATM as epistemically equal to Western mainstream medicine. Let me be clear on the approach to the decolonization of medicine suggested by the rationale, for there are at least three different models of decolonization (Ndofirepi and Gwavaranda 2019) to be described in the context of medicine. The first model of decolonization suggests that one keep Western mainstream medicine as the dominant epistemological framework in South Africa, and then add some ideas from ATM to this framework. There is evidence that some medical schools in South Africa are incorporating ATM knowledge into their curricula (Chitindingu et al. 2014). This is an example of an additive approach to the decolonization of medicine. The second model of decolonization demands the de-​Westernization of medicine in South Africa. It suggests a complete rejection of the research-​claims of Western mainstream medicine, suggesting that theory and method in medicine in South Africa be solely based on ATM. The third model of decolonization suggests a recentering of indigenous ATM from the periphery to the center of medical knowledge in South Africa. This model acknowledges that there are a number of genuinely legitimate medical traditions. Instead of dismissing any of these medical traditions, this model calls for a type of medical pluralism where ATM, as an indigenous African knowledge

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system, is the center of analysis. It is this last approach to decolonization that the rationale calls for. The motivation for the rationale then is the protection and respect of the value of different medical traditions. The rationale calls for the tolerance of multiple medical knowledge systems in South Africa. It calls for acknowledging that ATM offers a rich and meaningful understanding of illness and health—​and that undermining this starves us of a worthwhile contribution to understanding healing. How plausible is the rationale? The inferences from P1 to P2, and from C1 to C2, are plausible. If ATM is indeed epistemically equal to Western mainstream medicine, then it would be an epistemic injustice to exclude ATM as an authoritative medical tradition in South Africa. Moreover, if what colonialism did was to marginalize ATM, then it makes sense that redress might include taking seriously the knowledge claims of ATM. As for the truth of the premises, P1 is well supported by the literature on the history of colonialism in South Africa. Nonetheless, the phrasing of P1 may be controversial to some readers. To such a reader, P1 may make it seem like Western mainstream medicine is only epistemically authoritative in South Africa because of colonialism. Whereas to this reader, Western mainstream medicine is legitimately authoritative for “objective,” universally testable reasons—​it “works.” But this is just what the rationale calls into question: why do we hold the standards for the justification of medical beliefs that we do, and should we indiscriminately apply these standards to all medical traditions? This leaves us with P2. In what follows, I argue that P2 is the problematic part of the rationale. Specifically, I argue that what undergirds P2 is a wholesale medical relativism that is (a) implausible and (b) counterintuitive to the aims of the decolonization of medicine.

Problems with relativism The second step of the rationale is the claim that Western mainstream medicine is just one of many epistemically authoritative medical traditions. Consider again the sangoma’s claim that Noni suffers from ancestral wrath, and the Western medical practitioner’s claim that Noni suffers from PCOS. These perspectives on Noni’s infertility are incompatible. They are born out of two different medical epistemologies. The only way to treat the epistemic perspectives of ATM and Western mainstream medicine as equally authoritative in this instance—​the only way to get from P1 to C2 of the rationale—​ is to adopt wholesale medical relativism. Wholesale medical relativism is an extreme form of relativism about all medical knowledge that holds that the aptness of knowledge claims in medicine is not determined by any fact of the matter in the domain of medicine. Thus only if we adopt wholesale medicine

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relativism—​only if we hold that what counts as evidence for medical beliefs and what counts as disease causation, for example, is relative to a medical tradition—​can we take the claims of the sangoma and Western medical practitioner to have equal epistemic authority. I argue that at least when it comes to evidence for medical beliefs, wholesale medical relativism is implausible because there are practical consequences of medicine that are related to matters of universal concern (Broadbent 2019). Medicine has the practical consequences of life, death, and pain, for example. Moreover, even if a sangoma might explain an illness by recourse to ancestors, and a Western medical practitioner according to something physiological, both medical traditions have healing as their goal. The pain of PCOS, or trouble with fertility when one does want to have a child, is a matter of universal concern. It can’t be that any claim on the cause or possible treatment for Noni “goes.” Because medicine deals with practical consequences and matters of universal human concern, we have to measure the claims of the sangoma and the Western practitioner in relation to those concerns. Second, recall that the motivations for the rationale are tolerance and respect of multiple medical traditions, medical pluralism, and redress of the marginalization of ATM wrought by colonialism. I argue that, far from supporting these goals, the wholesale medical relativism behind P2 undercuts them. For this premise says: ATM is epistemically authoritative; it has its own standards of evidence. Western mainstream medicine is also epistemically authoritative; it has its own standards of evidence. But all this stance encourages is acknowledgment that there is this other medical tradition in South Africa. Wholesale medical relativism does not enforce actual respect or consideration of ATM, especially in cases where ATM and Western mainstream medicine conflict (Broadbent 2019). That is, because Western mainstream medicine continues to be dominant in South Africa, there is no contradiction between medical practitioners continuing to only take seriously the knowledge claims of Western mainstream medicine, whilst acknowledging the presence of ATM. This kind of practice is counter to any model of decolonizing medicine. Wholesale medical relativism also shuts down critique and dialogue of different medical traditions. There are genuine concerns about the toxicity of certain types of muthi (Mothibe and Sibanda 2019, 16). There are concerns about the rise of a small group of “quack” sangomas. Wholesale medical relativism shields possibly harmful practices in medical traditions from critique. This is also against the motivation for the rationale. For the rationale seeks deep consideration, critique, and centering of ATM. We cannot properly center ATM as a knowledge system without its practices being open to critique. The decolonizer—​a proponent of the rationale—​might grant my objections to P2, but push back on the notion of justification for medical beliefs. I have mentioned that the standard for evidence for medical beliefs in Western mainstream medicine is RCTs. The decolonizer may argue that the idea of

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evidence-​based medicine (EBM) that champions RCTs is a Western one that the knowledge claims of ATM simply should not be evaluated by. Suppose that one puts aside the notion of “Western” EBM and accepts RCTs as a valid way to evaluate medical beliefs in ATM: the decolonizer might add that it is impossible in practice and in principle to subject ATM to RCTs. As such, relativism about evidence for medical beliefs in ATM should stand. First, the decolonizer might argue that, in practice, the type of medical tradition that ATM is means that it is not liable to testing via RCTs. RCTs require a randomization process. RCTs require double-​blinding and confidentiality. RCTs are designed to measure the efficacy of a specific pharmacological treatment in a controlled environment. The decolonizer might argue that, when it comes to measuring efficacy in ATM, what matters is not just the pharmacological treatment—​the muthi that the sangoma administers. Some studies conducted on specific types of muthi have found this muthi to be no more effective than placebo (Cumes 2013, 60). Instead, she might argue, what matters in ATM is a holistic type of healing. The effectiveness of ATM may instead be found in how the sangoma counsels her client as a whole in the consultation, not in a specific ingredient in the muthi. Of the muthi itself, the decolonizer might add that there is the practical problem of the replicability of a sangoma’s results: different sangomas use the same plant for entirely different illnesses. Each mixture of muthi is specific to the individual sangoma in terms of what it used for and what it is composed of. In ATM, the strength of the muthi is thought to vary with the strength of the sangoma’s ancestors. Lastly, whereas the focus may be to isolate or eliminate placebo effects in Western mainstream medicine, izangoma make vital use of the placebo effect in their rituals, and in the integrative way in which they instruct clients to use muthi with intention (Cumes 2013). For these reasons, the decolonizer might argue, RCTs are inappropriate in practice for ATM. There are other types of evidence for ATM that may or not be “scientific.” Second, the decolonizer might argue that the method of assessing claims by RCT is tied to the concept of illness and disease causation in Western mainstream medicine. Thus, in principle, because ATM is based on a concept of illness and healing that is fundamentally at odds with Western mainstream medicine (it includes supernatural features), ATM should not be subject to testing via RCT. Consider also the “theoretical plausibility criterion.” This criterion says that, unless the biological mechanisms behind treatments can be established, it is justified that even positive results from clinical trials should be disregarded. As we know, explanations of illness or diagnosis in ATM aren’t necessarily a function of biological mechanisms. The decolonizer might add here that attempting to test ATM by RCTs may be another form of epistemic injustice. Testing by RCT does not consider ATM-​specific standards of evidence or justification, or the appropriateness of RCTs to evaluating ATM knowledge claims.

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I would say this to the decolonizer: ATM can be subject to RCTs. There are two types of RCT: explanatory and pragmatic (Hansen and Kappel 2010). The former tests the efficacy of a pharmacological treatment—​like a drug, an acupuncture needle, or muthi. But the latter tests the effectiveness of a treatment as a whole—​an entire homeopathic consultation, for example. So even if a medical tradition is holistic like ATM, pragmatic trials of it are possible in theory. I acknowledge the practical problems for RCTs of ATM, like financing and proper study design. My point is only that wholesale medical relativism cannot achieve the aims of decolonizing medicine because of the problems I mentioned above. The idea of the epistemic equivalence of medical traditions may also be problematic because it makes it seem as if the most important thing to ask about medical traditions is “do they work?” It “working” is how ATM comes to be viewed as non-​knowledge. It seems to me that the value of ATM, and any medical tradition, extends beyond its curative value. Not all Western mainstream medicine is curative, let alone evidence-​based. What decolonization calls us to is reimagining how we measure the value of a medical tradition. Tolerance may come in accepting that medical traditions have different sorts of epistemically useful value. To be sure, I have argued that P2 in the rationale, as it stands, is counterproductive as it leads to wholesale medical relativism. But my arguments should not be misinterpreted as the view that the whole idea of the decolonization of medicine is devolves into an incoherent relativism. As such, I leave the reader with this brief, positive suggestion on how we might interpret the decolonization of medicine in a possibly more coherent way. Here is P2 from the rationale again. (P2) But this medical tradition is just one amongst many epistemically equal medical traditions. Suppose that we were to substitute the very strong “epistemically equal” above with the more modest “practically fruitful.” Contra the legacy of colonialism, this move is a challenge to consider the ways in which ATM may be practically fruitful in ways that have yet to be explored. Remember that the motivation of the rationale is the tolerance, protection, and respect of the value of multiple medical knowledge systems in South Africa. This move might lead to the respect of the value of ATM in the following way. The idea that some muthi that has been subject to clinical trials has been found “to be no more effective than placebo” is often used to argue that ATM is not effective. But Cumes (2013, 60) provides an excellent analysis of how the use of muthi as placebo is in fact a “vital tool” for izangoma. Just the expectation from a physician or patient that their condition will improve (what is called “expectation effects”) can actually cause a patient’s condition to improve. When we consider that izangoma may harness placebo and the client’s expectation of

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getting better to improve people’s health, we are led to consider how and why ATM as a medical tradition may elicit practically fruitful beneficial effects. It is for us to explore how much further this move takes us to coherently decolonizing medicine.

Conclusion I have considered the rationale to decolonize medicine in relation to ATM. I have argued that the relativist underpinnings of this rationale are problematic and counter to the aims of decolonizing medicine. I suggest that decolonization also requires rethinking and expanding how we measure the value of medical traditions like ATM.

Notes 1 A note on language. I use the isiZulu language iteration of these THP types here. For consistency, I also only use the IsiZulu translation for various other terms in ubungoma (the general practices of izangoma). Izangoma is the plural for sangoma. 2 See Ngubane (1977) and Cumes (2013) for more detailed accounts of the practice of ATM. See Mothibe and Sibanda (2019) for an overview of ATM in South Africa. 3 My framing of this rationale is based on Mitova’s (2021) framing of the rationale to decolonize knowledge in South Africa. This imperative has some affinities to sentiments behind Science Must Fall, as explained by Harris in Chapter 8 of this volume.

References Balogun, F.O., Tshabalala, N.T. & Ashafa, A.O.T. (2016). Antidiabetic Medicinal Plants Used by the Basotho Tribe of Eastern Free State: A Review. Journal of Diabetes Research, 2016, 1–​13. Broadbent, A. (2019). Philosophy of Medicine. Oxford University Press. Chitindingu, E., George, G. & Gow, J. (2014). A Review of the Integration of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine into the Curriculum of South African Medical School. BMC Medical Education, 14–​40. Cumes, D. (2013). South African Traditional Healing: How it Works. Explore 9 (1), 58–​65. Etieyibo, E. (2016). Why ought the Philosophy Curriculum in Universities in Africa be Africanised? South African Journal of Philosophy 35 (4), 404–​417. Felhaber, T. (1997). South African Traditional Healers’ Primary Health Care Handbook. Kagiso Publishers. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press. Hammond-​Tooke, D. (1989). Rituals and Medicine. Paper Books. Hansen, K. & Kappel, K. (2010). The Proper Role of Evidence in Complementary/​ Alternative Medicine. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 35, 7–​18.

242  Zinhle Mncube James, P. B., Wardle, J., Steel, A. & Adams, J. (2018). Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use in Sub-​Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review. BMJ Global Health 3, e000895. MacFarlane, C. (2015). South Africa: The Rise of Traditional Medicine. Insight on Africa 7 (1), 60–​70. Melo, S. A., Ferriani, R. A. & Navarro, P. A. (2015). Treatment of Infertility in Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome: Approach to Clinical Practice. Clinics (Sao Paulo) 70 (11), 765–​769. Metz, T. (2015). Africanising Institutional Culture: What is Possible and Plausible. In Tabensky, P. & Matthews, S., eds. Being at Home: Race, Institutional Culture, and Transformation at South African Higher Education Institutions. University of KwaZulu-​Natal Press, 242–​272. Mitova, V. (2021). How to Decolonise Knowledge without Too Much Relativism. In Khumalo, S., ed. The South African Epistemic Decolonial Turn: A Global Perspective. HSRC Press. Mothibe, M. E. & Sibanda, M. (2019). African Traditional Medicine: South African Perspective. In Mordeniz, C., ed. Traditional and Complementary Medicine. IntechOpen, 10.5772/​intechopen.83790. Ndofirepi, A. P. & Gwavaranda, E. T. (2019). Epistemic (In)justice in African Universities: A Perspective of the Politics of Knowledge. Educational Review 71 (5), 581–​594. Ngubane, H. (1977). Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: An Ethnography of Health and Disease in Nyuswa-​Zulu Thought and Practice. Academic Press. Nyika, A. (2007) Ethical and Regulatory Issues Surrounding African Traditional Medicine in the Context of HIV/​AIDS. Developing World Bioethics 1, 25–​34. Peltzer, K., Khoza, L. B., Lekhuleni, M. E., Madu, S. N., Cherian, V. I. & Cherian, L. (2001). Concepts and Treatment of Hypertension by Traditional and Faith Healers in the Northern Province, South Africa. Health SA Gesond 6 (3), 59–​67. Thornton, R. (2009). The Transmission of Knowledge in South African Traditional Healing. Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 79 (1), 17–​34. WHO (2019). WHO Global Report on Traditional and Complementary Medicine. Fact sheet no. 134: Traditional Medicine. World Health Organization.

Chapter 21

Revisiting the question of race and biology in the South African social sciences Phila Mfundo Msimang

Introduction This chapter explores the relationship between the social sciences and biology with respect to race. I begin by giving an overview of the disparate origins of racial classification and the population history of South Africa, noting the peculiarity of their roots. I move from there to sketch how knowledge from the social sciences can improve the quality of hypotheses about population history and, conversely, how the biological sciences can be informative to the social sciences. I end by discussing the relationship between race, biology, and social scientific questions in the context of the land debate in South Africa.

Race and population in South Africa The population groups that comprise South Africa converged in the region over thousands of years and include individuals with recent ancestry from much of the “Old World.” A number of successive waves of migration into the region are often emphasized as significant to the population structure of present-​day South Africa. This story begins with the Khoekhoen and the Sān peoples (often referred to together as the Khoesān peoples) who established themselves across the western half of Southern Africa tens of thousands of years ago. They were followed by Bantu groups in the Bantu Migration coming down from central Africa, reaching Southern and mostly eastern South Africa by about two thousand years ago (Montinaro and Capelli, 2018). This was much later followed by various European migrations from about four hundred years ago. The European settlers of this period were colonialists who later brought with them peoples from across the East as slaves and indentured laborers to fulfill their labor needs as they were, at the time, struggling to coerce indigenous peoples into wage labor and slavery. For five decades from 1860, for instance, Durban received a large contingent of Indian peoples who were brought to South Africa as indentured laborers. The first group of indentured laborers was followed by “passenger Indians”

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who came at their own expense to establish themselves as a merchant class in the Natal colony (Desai and Vahed 2010). Colonialism in the Cape Colony resulted in Africans being brought by ship from other regions, Malays, and peoples of other East Asian descent being taken as slaves in what would later become the Western Cape of South Africa (Adhikari 1992). Another significant contribution to the shape of present South African population structure is underway through the high levels of migration from neighboring countries and through economic and political refugees from around the world. Whereas the population history of South Africa is a story spanning thousands of years, our racial history is only a few hundred years old. Racial classification as we know it today with its four groups –​Black, White, Indian, and Coloured –​is less than a century old. This classificatory scheme traces its roots in the Population Registration Act of 1950. Of course, racial classification in South Africa does not begin in 1950 or in 1948 when the Afrikaner-​ nationalist National Party won power and instituted its policy of Apartheid. It is considerably older than that and can be found in racist legislation and discrimination throughout colonial South Africa. Racial classification in South Africa is modern in the sense that its terms and concepts only come into existence in the modern period, and the employment of race as a systematic way to order society does not happen before 1652. That year an expedition of the Dutch East India Company landed ashore Table Bay. It was led by Jan van Riebeeck, a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator, who was tasked with establishing a permanent refreshment station in the Cape. Europeans were known to South Africa before this time with some immigrating and integrating into indigenous communities as castaways not wanting to return to Europe (de Veredicis 2016). The qualitative difference of the 1652 arrival of Europeans in the Cape is that it signaled the beginning of the premium settler colonial project in South Africa. Relationships between social groups and biological population groups Who we are talking about when talking about any population group is not always clear without further elaboration. When we identify a group by a social label, we cannot be sure who it is that we have in that group in biological terms. When we identify a group by a biological label, we cannot be sure who we are talking about in social terms—​be it one social group or many. And these relationships are ever-​changing. That is not to say that it is impossible to find out who is in what group and how the categories used relate to one another. However, determining one does not tell us what the other is or what the relations between the classifications being used are. The only way we can know both, and how they relate, is through investigation (e.g., Montinaro and Capelli, 2018). We cannot just assume that our classificatory terms are appropriate or related in specific ways for the purposes of analysis or categorization

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as these classifications and their relationships with one another constitute a puzzle (Eggert 2016). Taken-​for-​granted categories such as “Black” and “African” are a case in point. Some scholars employ these and other demographic categories as identifying some kind of biologically or socially homogeneous group(s), such as in some discussions employing racial and ethnic classifications. But these terms denote groups of diverse social and genetic backgrounds even when talking about groups within the borders of South Africa (Montinaro and Capelli, 2018). Keita (2019) astutely points out that when “Africa” is referred to in research, it is often thought of as “sub-​Saharan Africa” which excludes North and East Africa. This is despite genetic and archaeological evidence showing that these parts of Africa have not been biologically and sociohistorically isolated from the rest of the continent, despite whatever linguistic and biological differences they may have with other Africans. The separation of these regions is an old trope from racialist scholarship attempting to make the genealogy, achievements, and cultures of North and East Africa a world apart from sub-​Saharan Africa. It is from this old anthropology that the US derives the classificatory practice of categorizing Middle Easterners and North Africans (MENA groups) as part of the White or “Caucasian” race (a practice currently under debate). Whereas sub-​Saharan Africa was to be seen as “the real Black Africa” where groups such as the “true Negro” and “Bantu” reside, North and East Africans were to be considered of a different racial stock (e.g., Chatelain 1894; Seligman 1930). The terms “Bantu” and “Negro” are still used today, often in ambiguous ways that equivocate between being labels for purported biological or social groups, reminiscent of theories where they were conflated and Black Africa was seen as separate from “civilized” North and East Africa (cf. Eggert 2016). The Hamitic hypothesis, for instance, claimed that North and East Africans are descendents of Caucasians. This was meant to explain the distinctiveness of their languages, cultures, technologies, and civilizations as separate from the rest of Africa (Sanders 1969). Contemporary evidence about the social and biological histories of North and East African peoples undermine these views (Keita 2019). The creation and development of the Hamitic hypothesis of not seeing Egyptians as Africans, for example, was arguably driven by racism and the yearning to justify colonialism and slavery rather than a rational assessment of the available evidence (cf. Volney 1787, in Sanders 1969, 525). In South Africa, it has often been the case that not all Africans are thought of as Black despite the view of there being a “Black Africa.” The racial classification “Black” is most often reserved for peoples of “Bantu descent” and not, for example, Khoesān peoples. Khoesān peoples are, of course, unquestionably Africans in that they are indigenous to Africa in both biological and social senses. Yet they were not generally classified as Black in South Africa

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except within some anti-​colonial and anti-​racist political orientations (Jacobs 2007). This is still the subject of serious political debate (Ellison and de Wet 2020). What the debate shows is that there is a disjunction between the idea of “Black Africa” and the self-​conception, or attributed identity, of some Africans. The Khoesān peoples, along with various biologically admixed populations (not that there are any pure populations, just various degrees of admixture from some reference point), are said to have developed a Coloured identity since about the 1880s (Adhikari 1992). The Coloured community of South Africa is a conglomerate of different peoples with significantly different ancestral backgrounds which include Khoesān peoples, other Africans, Malays, Europeans, East Asians, and other populations that found their way to South Africa. We find that the classification “Coloured” has been used formally in censuses since the Union of South Africa although the attributed classification and its various census sub-​divisions changed from time to time until its fixation in the Population Registration Act of 1950 (Christopher 2011). Beyond the shared identity built through community and common experience of White supremacy and slavery in the Cape Colony (see Adhikari 1992), the amalgamation of ancestrally and culturally diverse groups formally into “Coloureds” during late South African colonialism and Apartheid was motivated by the administrative machinations of the state rather than by any care to make racial groups reflect any underlying relations—​social or biological. It is sometimes for this reason that the label Coloured is problematized, challenged, or rejected. A cursory assessment of the shifting demographic constitution of the various classifications that came to comprise this “racial group” in the 20th century, and its diversity of genetic and social backgrounds that incorporate practically all of the peoples to settle in South Africa, is indicative of the arbitrary (but not random) nature of this classification (Ellison and de Wet 2020). The classification “Coloured,” sometimes problematically thought of as (part of) the “Brown race,” is one with a varied and contentious history but one which ultimately served the function of being a miscellaneous racial category that ranked somewhere below Whites but above Blacks in South Africa’s Apartheid racial hierarchy (Ellison and de Wet 2020). In “post-​Apartheid” South Africa, some Coloured peoples have forged identities around political projects somewhat independently of, and sometimes against, the recognition of their diverse biological and social heritage, with some rejecting the classification Coloured for political reasons (e.g., Morris 1997). The lesson to be learnt from the arbitrary and politically motivated shifts of racial classification of peoples in South Africa is that racial classificatory schemes are shaped by the politics of the day and are distinct from biological classifications. Nevertheless, these classificatory schemes are grounded in various variables, social and biological, that interact with one another. Common is the tendency for racial classificatory practices to draw on physical characteristics like skin colour or phenotype more generally to demarcate

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groups. Although including such biological traits as defeasible markers for race, race and biology come apart despite attempts to correlate them (or find correlations between them) for various purposes. Biological populations are not the social groups we may associate them with, and biological populations do not delineate social groups (namely, races). Understanding classificatory practices does not necessarily make the job of appropriately employing classifications any easier, but it can at least sharpen the questions we ask to improve our uses of terminology and test if such classifications are at all fitting to the purposes they are being put to. This may inhibit the loose and often over-​ambiguous use of various ethnic, ancestral, and racial classifications (sometimes confused in the literature as synonymous) and lead to more precise and scientifically useful uses of these categories (see Volmink et al. 2020 and Popejoy et al. 2020). The appropriateness of specific terms may depend on whether a study is taking a social or a biological perspective on particular groups, or if a study is looking at both simultaneously. The point is that what population or social group classifications are delineating cannot be left assumed and the aid of social and political theory informed by history becomes invaluable in properly coordinating the use of social classifications in these contexts. Taking this kind of approach enriches and makes more informative the data of the biological and social sciences to each other, not least by minimizing ambiguity, confusion, and the chances of talking past each other. Towards a symbiotic critical social science about race and genetics There is much work to be done in the social sciences and humanities in South Africa, and in Africa or the world more generally, on clarifying the relationship between race and population genetics. The language of race and biological population is common in the literature, but how these concepts relate to one another is often left an open question (Volmink et al. 2020). Population geneticists often operationalize their use of terms in ways specific to their studies that can be inconsistent with each other (see Popejoy et al. 2020) and do not reflect deeper conceptual issues that may be linked to their uses of terms (Volmink et al. 2020). These uses can trigger associations outside of their intended meaning. In this regard, social scientists including philosophers should be able to bring appropriate forms of critique and socio-​ historical insight into the use of such terms and concepts alongside how they could be used and interpreted in different settings. Why, in the first place, should the social sciences have anything to do with genetics? It is because genetics has a lot to tell us about where we come from and because social histories are often indispensable for making sense of genetic data. The stories that we can reconstruct from the data of population genetics aren’t a narrative of socio-​political history. Rather, they relate the biological interconnectedness of extant and past population groups. It

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tells us of the ancestral backgrounds of those individuals and groups. But it cannot always do this on its own or on the basis of biological data alone. A coordinated effort of compiling empirical evidence from archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and history is often needed to interpret biological data in the most plausible ways possible. Thinking about the meaning of a biological trait common in separate populations may make this point clearer. Take a hypothetical case where indigenous South African populations have biological traits most commonly found in European or Asian populations. This could be because all of these populations are descendents of an older Eurasian population from which they have inherited the traits in question, or the shared traits could be an indication of recent population admixture, or the shared traits may be a coincidence of convergent evolution, and so on. What would make one hypothesis explaining the dispersal of those traits far more plausible than another are the lines of evidence from the social sciences available to natural scientists about recent migratory patterns and recent global relations for which there may be an extensive historical record. Without these other lines of evidence, one can only imagine the number of spurious speculative hypotheses that could be proffered for the explanation of biological traits or data more generally. There have been, in fact, a number of antiquated anthropological theories with such spurious claims about the origins of various African groups and their traits. Exemplary in this regard is the Hamitic hypothesis, an ideological descendent of the Hamitic myth, that claimed the ostensibly Caucasian origins of Africans in North and East Africa. Their purported Caucasian ancestry was hypothesized to be indicated by their physiological traits and cultural civilization that they were meant to have owed to Caucasian ancestors (e.g., Seligman 1913). African groups of high social status across the continent during colonization were considered to be superior to other Africans because of their purportedly Caucasian heritage (Seligman 1930; cf. Sanders 1969), a theme of the Hamitic myth that later played out in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Eltringham 2006). In South Africa, colonial anthropologists thought Khoesān peoples had “Mongoloid” or Asian ancestry due to their skin colour and their “frequent possession of an internal epicanthic fold”—​a view undermined by early blood-​group investigations (Weiner and Zoutendyk 1959). The idea that Coloured people belong to the Brown race also stems from these Hamitic misconceptions of their ancestry being from the East. Although these examples might be on the extremes of speculative and spurious hypothesizing, they are not trivial in influence even today. They are illustrative of how accurate histories can intervene in interpretations of biological data, as the original hypotheses are implausible given any historical knowledge. More generally, these kinds of cases are illustrative of how the social sciences can be an invaluable resource for building plausible population histories under conditions of limited information (see Keita 2019).

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The relationship between the social sciences and the biological sciences is one that should ideally be informative both ways. I have illustrated how the social sciences can be informative to hypotheses about biological relations in the biological sciences, but it is equally the case that biology can be informative to the social sciences. On a pragmatic level, the biological study of social groups has numerous benefits for things we find important. The work done by physical anthropologists who measure traits of the human body and how those traits vary among different groups allows us to match human remains to missing persons’ reports and identify remains of interest to us (Garvin and Langley 2019). The study of biological anthropology more generally can give support to or cast doubt on particular historical claims about a group’s origins and genealogical composition (e.g., de Veredicis 2016). It is still assumed by some writers that the ability of physical anthropologists, particularly forensic anthropologists, to identify people by racial group proves that race is biologically real. What the ability to identify races actually shows is that forensic anthropologists are good at uncovering and matching an individual’s set of traits with what a person with that set of traits would be called by the community in question (Sauer 1992). The same set of traits can be labelled differently in different social contexts—​in different communities—​ so that a person who would count as one race in one region counts as another race in another region (Msimang 2020). The use of racial classifications as labels for sets of traits in forensic anthropology is a good example of why racial classifications are not biological despite the traits used to create the classifications being ostensibly biological (Hochman forthcoming). Those same traits, nevertheless, allow physical anthropologists to tell, with great accuracy, the ancestral background of a person in respect to the geographical place(s) of origin of their recent ancestors (Ouesly et al. 2009). Despite biology being of intrinsic interest to us in our desire to understand human evolutionary genetics, its investigation informs many of our practical social concerns. It can be important to us for health-​related reasons, such as in revealing relationships between individuals, populations, and disease. Sometimes genetics becomes important to us for reasons linked to how we have chosen to construct our identities (although this is never a necessary consequence of genetics). This could be in cases of determining paternity or in cases of transracial adoption where a child wants to know who their biological parents are to infer the place and ethnic group they may have come from. Or, in the case of social groups, the claim to particular biological ancestry can be leveraged in public discourse to bolster claims of legitimacy, such as in debates about land rights or having title to territory. The question of title to territory, of land rights, is an unresolved problem in South Africa that emerges out of its colonial history of the dispossession and subjugation of indigenous groups (inclusive of the enslaved brought on ships). The political strategy of employing population history as a tool to support claims of “natural rights” to land has had the effect of elevating the

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question “Where did group X come from?” or “who are the original peoples of this land?” to some importance. It is on such issues that a critical and well-​ informed social science becomes imperative if it is not already integrated into the science communication of the research being leveraged in these political debates. An example I note in bioanthropological research at the turn of South African democracy is that social groups such as the Griqua have recast themselves as “hyper-​aboriginal” groups by putting emphasis on particular aspects of their ancestral roots (e.g., Khoekhoen ancestry) rather than others (namely, Bantu or European ancestry) for reasons connected to political projects about claims to land and self-​determination (Morris 1997). The purpose of this selective emphasis is to claim more indigeneity than, say, Bantu groups through notions of motivated descent and hyper-​indigeneity. This debate continues in different iterations today such as in the “First Nations” debate centered around Coloured and Khoesān identity (Erasmus 2017, 113; cf. Msimang 2020). The function of these narratives is to separate these groups from other Africans as a separate race among various “races of Africa.” These narratives have re-​emerged in the recent call for the secession of the Western Cape by Coloured people (some reject the “Coloured” label in favor of taking on a Khoesān or Griqua identity), along with White people (particularly, Afrikaners) to form their own independent state. One culmination of the revival of these narratives of the separateness of Coloured peoples from Black peoples, or their separateness from the various indigenous groups in South Africa linked to ideas of autochthony that are curiously related to the Hamitic hypothesis mentioned earlier, can be found in a court case in which a judgment against a group wanting to secede was delivered (see Homo Sapiens 2019). Notable in this case is that the first applicant appears as “Homo Sapiens, Negro, Etiopian [sic] Semite, Israelite People of South Africa.” In their case, they claimed to see “other indigenous peoples in South Africa … as ‘Nguni settlers’ [the Nguni are a Bantu group of Southern Africa] and lumped them together with European colonialists as intruders” (Homo Sapiens 2019). This construal of identity in the choice of self-​ identification of the applicants draws directly from the Hamitic hypothesis and reproduces myths developed in colonial anthropology about what races there are, which peoples belong where by virtue of their race, and how these supposed races of Africa relate to one another. For instance, the idea of the Semitic peoples in Africa in this race lore posits that Semites, a Caucasian race, are descendents of Ham’s brother Sem (from where the term Semite is derived). This would separate them from the Bantu who are seen as part of the true Blacks of Africa by descent from Ham’s cursed lineage, unlike East Africans (e.g., Ethiopians) and North Africans (e.g., Egyptians or “biblical Israelites”) who are purportedly also of a Caucasian racial stock (see Chatelain 1894 and Seligman 1930 for such views). Various configurations of races in the different iterations of

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the Hamitic hypothesis or​myth can produce similar hierarchies which serve the function of justifying White supremacy and the differential valuing of peoples within it (Sanders 1969). On the everyday level, the use of the term Gam—​Afrikaans for Ham—​as a pejorative within the Coloured community speaks to remnants of Hamitic myths in South African racial discourse (Adhikari 1992; Wicomb 1998, 100). The playing out of these myths, drawing from colonial anthropology with its racist tropes, has been the cause of serious concern and has exposed a tension between various views from social and natural scientists on how to deal with these incarnations of racialist anthropology in the South African conversation (e.g., Erasmus 2017, 105–​132; cf. Bardien-​Kruger and Müller-​ Nedebock 2020). This tension, with roots in colonial anthropology, is often maintained through uncritical claims and naïve assumptions about the relationship of race with biological ancestry in the context of political debates. But, as I argued earlier, race does not tell you the specifics of any person’s biological ancestry. Furthermore, biological ancestry is insufficient for socio-​ political identification or determination particularly as a member of a race. Yet race as an index of biological ancestry is being used in political discourse to drive the debate about indigeneity and the right to land despite these not having a necessary connection. How, then, can biology be informative in this context? What biology in the form of bioanthropological genetics can tell us, for example, is the story of our biological heritage, ancestry, and our underlying genealogical relationships as individuals and population groups. The genetic information uncovered in conjunction with empirical evidence from other disciplines like archaeology can be used to estimate a population’s age, place(s) of origin, and approximate date of settlement of particular regions. In that sense, genetics in the form of bioanthropology can help us figure out which people(s) are ancestral to one or more place. But it does not—​it cannot—​tell us what social status this determination gives any person(s). More explicitly, what socio-​cultural or legal status persons are to be granted on the basis of their ancestry cannot be determined by biological evidence. These relationships, and the decisions we make about them, are political (Msimang 2020).

Closing remarks The birth of the modern sciences in South Africa, both social and biological, coincided with racist colonialist projects. Given their origins, these sciences were often leveraged for nefarious purposes. This has been the social and historical impetus for critical approaches to questions of race and science, particularly anthropology, in South Africa. I have put forward some scientific imperatives for critical approaches to the social and biological sciences in respect to race. I have argued that a critical social science improves the quality of hypotheses about our social and biological origins. In this, I sketched how

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the relationship between the social and the biological sciences can be symbiotic when looking at issues pertaining to race and have highlighted some problems with attempts to link race and biology directly particularly in political contexts.

References Adhikari, M. (1992). The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity. South African Historical Journal, 27 (1), 95–​112. Bardien-​Kruger, S. and Müller-​Nedebock, A. (2020). The Role of Genetics in Racial Categorisation of Humans. In Jansen, J., and Walters, C., eds. Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society. SunMedia, 21–​39. Chatelain, H. (1894). African Races. Journal of American Folklore 7 (27), 289–​302. Christopher, A. J. (2011). The Union of South Africa Censuses 1911–​1960: An Incomplete Record. Historia 56 (2), 1–​18. Desai, A. and Vahed, G. (2010). Inside Indian Indenture: A South African Story, 1860–​ 1914. HSRC Press. de Veredicis, D. (2016). Tracing the Ancestors of Mpondo Clans along the Wild Coast of the Eastern Cape. University of Pretoria, unpublished Master’s thesis. http://​ wiredspace.wits.ac.za/​handle/​10539/​22542 (Last accessed 4 March 2020). Eggert, M. K. H. (2016). Geneticizing Bantu: Historical insight or historical trilemma? Medieval Worlds 4, 79–​90. Ellison, G. T. H. and de Wet, T. (2020). The Classification of South Africa’s Mixed-​ Heritage Peoples 1910–​2011: A Century of Conflation, Contradiction, Containment, and Contention. In Rocha, Z. and Aspinall, P., eds. The Palgrave International Handbook of Mixed Racial and Ethnic Classification. Palgrave Macmillan. Eltringham, N. (2006). “Invaders Who have Stolen the Country”: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide. Social Identities 12 (4), 425–​446. Erasmus, Z. (2017). The Gene. In Erasmus, Z., Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa. Wits University Press, 105–​132. Garvin, H. M. and Langley, N. R. (2019). Case Studies in Forensic Anthropology: Bonified Skeletons. 1st Ed. CRC Press. Hochman, A. (forthcoming). Racial Classification without Race: Edwards’ Fallacy. In Lorusso, L. and Winther, R. G., eds. Remapping Race. Routledge. Homo Sapiens, Negro, Etiopian Semite, Israelite People of South Africa and Another v President of South Africa and Others (19098/​2018) [2019] ZAWCHC 173 (6 December 2019). www.saflii.org/​za/​cases/​ZAWCHC/​2019/​173 (Last accessed 6 March 2020). Jacobs, S. (2007). Review of Adhikari, Mohamed, “Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community”. H-​SAfrica, H-​Net Reviews. www.h-​net.org/​reviews/​showrev.php?id=13125 (Last accessed 16 June 2020). Keita, S. O. Y. (2019). Reflections on Conceptualizing Africa for Biological Studies with a Historical Component: A Small Essay. In Ibrahim, M. E. and Rotimi, C. N., eds. The Genetics of African Populations in Health and Disease. Cambridge University Press, 1–​25.

Revisiting race and biology  253 Montinaro, F. and Capelli, C. (2018). The Evolutionary History of Southern Africa. Current Opinion in Genetics and Development 53, 157–​164. Morris, A. G. (1997). The Griqua and the Khoikhoi: Biology, Ethnicity and the Construction of Identity. Kronos 24, 106–​118. Msimang, P. M. (2020). Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa. Transformation: Critical Perspectives on South Africa, 104. Ousley, S., Jantz, R. & Freid, D. (2009). Understanding Race and Human Variation: Why Forensic Anthropologists are Good at Identifying Race. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, 68–​76. Popejoy, A. B., Crooks, K. R., Fullerton, S. M., Hindorff, L. A., Hooker, G. W., Koenig, B. A., Pino, N., Ramos, E. M., Ritter, D. I., Wand, H., Wright, M. W., Yudell, M., Zou, J. Y., Plon, S. E., Bustamante, C. D., Ormond, K. E. and the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Ancestry and Diversity Working Group (2020). Clinical Genetics Lacks Standard Definitions and Protocols for the Collection and Use of Diversity Measures. American Journal of Human Genetics 107, 1–​11. Sanders, E. R. (1969). The Hamitic Hypothesis: Its Origin and Functions In Time Perspective. Journal of African History 10, 521–​532. Sauer, N. J. (1992). Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races don’t Exist, Why are Forensic Anthropologists So Good at Identifying Them? Social Science and Medicine 34 (2), 107–​111. Seligman, C. G. (1913). Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-​Egyptian Sudan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 43, 593–​705. Seligman, C. G. (1930). Races of Africa. Oxford University Press. Volmink, J., Hendricks, L., Mazibuko, L., Swartz, L. (2020). Race and Health: Dilemmas of the South African Health Researcher. In Jansen, J. and Walters, C., eds. Fault Lines: A Primer on Race, Science and Society. SunMedia, 119–​132. Weiner, J. S. and Zoutendyk, A. (1959). Blood-​ Group Investigation on Central Kalahari Bushmen. Nature 183 (4664), 843–​844. Wicomb, Z. (1998). Shame and Identity: The Case of the Coloured in South Africa. In Attridge, D. and Jolly, R., eds. Writing South Africa. Cambridge University Press, 91–​107.

Part V

Reimagining abstract and physical worlds

Chapter 22

Philosophical cartography Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther

Introduction In When Maps Become the World (Winther 2020a) I showed how: (i) mapping is a strategy—​ubiquitous across the sciences—​for representing, imagining, and controlling space; (ii) mapping and the map analogy (“a scientific theory is a map of the world”) deserve—​and have received—​sustained philosophical attention; and (iii) the cartographic impulse to map and interact with our worlds spatially lies deep in human cognition, and in our history, across all cultures. In this contribution, I focus especially on (ii) and (iii), among the various aims I had in my 2020 book. Different philosophical cultures have drawn on the map analogy: analytic philosophy, continental European philosophy, and pragmatic philosophy. In order to further the charge of this edited volume, and highlight some of my other work, I also discuss case studies of the cartographic impulse across the globe.

Analytic philosophy Analytic philosophers emphasize clarity and identify conceptual assumptions in everyday language. In this methodological practice, they tend to analogize any propositional attitude (i.e., beliefs, desires, and intentions) to a map. For instance, the philosopher Frank P. Ramsey (1990, 146) defined “belief ” as a “map of neighbouring space by which we steer,” The philosopher Gilbert Ryle moved beyond mental content as analogical referent, instead generalizing in a different way: he sees the philosopher’s practices and goals as analogous to the cartographer’s (Ryle 1949, 7). In one essay, he analogizes the relationship between a philosopher and a competent speaker of a language to that between a mapmaker and a village inhabitant (Ryle 1971, 440–​445): the second of each pair engages in concrete pursuits, while the former studies the activity abstractly. For Ryle, the philosopher is a mapper of language. Other analytic philosophers also employ map analogies, for varied purposes (Armstrong 1968; Godfrey-​Smith 1996; Ismael 1999, 2007; Millikan 1984; Sellars 1981; Stich 1990).

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While challenging to categorize, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy has influenced analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s preface to Philosophical Investigations describes philosophical reflection as incomplete mapping: The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination.—​And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-​cross in every direction over a wide field of thought.—​The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys.1 His Yellow Book begins with the assertion that in philosophy “we lack a synoptic view,” the same challenge that travelers face in exploring “the geography of a country for which we [have] no map, or else a map of isolated bits” (Wittgenstein 2001, 43).

Continental European philosophy Continental European philosophy analogizes language, knowledge, and social practices to maps, investigating the misleading and seductive nature of representation. As in René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (La trahison des images, 1929), showing a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe”) under it, critical continental philosophers play with paradoxes equating maps (or theories or stories or social practices) with the world. How are the drawings and thoughts of anthropological reflections on courtship practices in a given culture like the world they represent, and how are they not like that very territory they aim to represent? Should we worry about all the ways a representation fails to (fully?) capture the objects, processes, and features it promises to depict and explain? For Alfred Korzybski (and, later, Gregory Bateson2), we must not confuse abstract and concrete, theory and world, or map and territory. For Jean Baudrillard (1994, 1) there is no exit out of this conflation. For him, the entire social thought system is an immense and variegated map that becomes—​ or is—​the world. His Simulacra and Simulation opens with a basic lesson, motivated by a brief cartographic reflection by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Contemporary mass-​market globalized society constructs reality, as we increasingly witness with social media and “fake news”—​where online avatars and media-​spun biased stories take on a reality that not even reality can compete against.

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Pragmatic philosophy American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey deployed the map analogy—​and what I call map thinking3—​to explore the power and limitations of conceptual thinking, and the importance of experiencing. In a fictional dialogue, Peirce (1992, 62) has a land surveyor berated for not creating “a true representation of the land.” The surveyor responds: “It cannot … represent every blade of grass; but it does not represent that there is not a blade of grass where there is. To abstract from a circumstance is not to deny it.” As with maps and mapmaking, so with syllogisms and the identification of premises, conclusions, and logical relations. Syllogisms can be critiqued as “a purely mechanical process.” But they are “not intended to represent the mind, as to its life or deadness, but only as to the relation of its different judgments concerning the same thing.” Differently put, like a map, syllogisms represent some aspects of “mental action,” but clearly not all (Peirce 1869/​1992, 62–​63). William James takes a more skeptical approach. Admittedly, he argues that concepts are abstractions or representations that “steer us practically every day, and provide an immense map of relations among the elements of things.”4 But he also believes that single concepts may be seductive and misleading, when and where the entire “map remains superficial through the abstractness, and false through the discreteness of its elements.” According to James—​and in contrast to his close associate Peirce—​abstraction does suggest the negation of what is left out: “conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the ful[l]‌ness of the reality to be known” (McDermott 1977, 245). Dewey highlights the complementary relationship between map and explorer: “The map is not a substitute for a personal experience. The map does not take the place of an actual journey … But the map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result” (Dewey 1976, 284). The map guides; the explorer experiences.

Cartography Interestingly, the influential cartographers Arthur Robinson and Barbara Petchenik recognize the depth and omnipresence of the map analogy in philosophy: “Most cartographers are probably not aware of the basic role that students in other fields ascribe to maps as a kind of a priori analogy for a variety of basic concepts.” A map “represents some other space,” and “the spatial aspects of all existence are fundamental” (Robinson and Petchenik 1976, 13–​14). “Students” here include philosophers such as Alfred Korzybski,

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Michael Polanyi, Ernst Cassirer, Thomas Kuhn, and Stephen Toulmin. Robinson and Petchenik investigate each in turn. Sadly, I share these cartographers’ concern that often the philosophical literature fails to reflect on what a map actually is or is good for. This is one reason why I wrote When Maps Become the World. For now, I turn to two brief case studies of the mapping impulse across the globe: ancient China and the Marshall Islands, and draw some philosophical lessons from these cases.

Ancient China Map thinking helps us understand power and ethics. In Winther (2014b, 2020a, and 2020b), I developed the idea of a world navel: “Empires measure and understand the entire world with respect to themselves. Space and time emanate from the empire’s centre or world navel. Power and meaning radiate from these cartographic centres” (Winther 2020b, 148). As one example, consider Figure 22.1, the Ming dynasty map Da Ming Hun Yi Tu (Amalgamated map of the Great Ming empire). This map places China in its center. China has been world naveled. The map spatially distorts—​ by current Western cartographic norms—​ other regions such as the Arabian Peninsula, Africa, and Japan. Scholars believe this map originates in the late 14th century CE, during the reign of the Hongwu emperor, who founded the Ming dynasty. As also described in When Maps Become the World, a world navel map such as Da Ming Hun Yi Tu ontologizes, universalizes, and narrows a single, power-​laden vision and paradigm of China (see also Winther 2014b, 2020b). Hongwu’s son, his successor as emperor, commanded and instructed the construction of the Forbidden City. Embedded in Beijing, the Forbidden City was understood to be the literal center of the universe, capital of Middle Kingdom (Yu 1984; Ebrey 2010).

Marshall Islands The Armij Aelon Kein piloted their way around their islands in the Pacific by feeling the multi-​directional swells and currents on which their canoes danced. Expert navigators had learned their craft from their fathers, leading caravans of canoes throughout the 30 or so atolls of Aelon̄ Kein Ad. These navigators memorized stick chart maps (see Figure 22.2) that represented swell and wave fronts with wooden sticks or the midribs of coconut fronds, and islands with shells (Finney 1998). The Jolet Jen Anij (“gifts from God”), or the Marshall Islands, are a collection of atolls arranged in an irregular grid of roughly two rows of 30 or so coral isles running in a southeasterly direction.5 Especially from July to October, when the islanders preferred to sail to avoid the strong northeastern trade winds, the gentle winds are southerly and variable. Whenever surface swells hit a small isle and its underwater slope, some of the wave energy reflects

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Figure 22.1 “Surrounding landmasses are distorted to fit around China in Da Ming Hun Yi Tu (Amalgamated map of the Great Ming empire). China is here a world navel.” Source:  Winther (2020a, 93).

back in a counterswell. When two isles are close together, the swells refract around both of them, thereby interfering with one another, synthesizing them into new, complex patterns. It is this pattern of waves that Marshallese mariners sensed and interpreted. In 1962, Raymond de Brum, a trading boat captain who had learned classic Marshallese way-​finding techniques from his father, explained to a reporter: “We older Marshallese people navigate our boats both by feel and by sight, but I think it is knowing the feel of the vessel that is the most important. The skipper who understands the motion or feel of the boat can sail in the dark as well as in the daytime” (Finney 1998, 479). After World War II interisland canoe travel basically disappeared, and navigators were rarely trained. Older Armij Aelon Kein (“people of these islands”) mastered a way-​ finding skill that is mostly lost today, though there are efforts to resuscitate this skill.

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Figure 22.2 “Square rebbelib used by the Marshallese to navigate the Pacific Ocean by canoe off the coast of the Marshall Islands. Indicates sailing directions for atolls and islands in both the Ratak (eastern) and Ralik (western) chains of the Marshall Islands. Seashells depict the atoll and island locations. Atoll and island names are typed on strips of paper which are glued onto the wooden sticks. Each straight stick represents regular currents or waves around the low-​lying atolls while the curved sticks depict ocean swells.” Source: Reprinted with permission from Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Marshall Islands stick chart, Rebbelib type. [Majuro, Marshall Islands: s.n., 192–​?] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/g9461p.ct003132/​.

Other peoples such as the Vikings could also map and find their way at sea by reading the water (Gooley 2016). Across cultures, way-​finders and explorers developed techniques in which they could sense the waters; deploy representational maps from memory; and get small fleets from point A to point B. (Yes, the Vikings did make it to the today-​named Americas.) In understanding and narrating such maritime stories, we see how representations and knowledge of the oceans are both empirically objective and culturally constructed. Together with seafaring practices and local technologies, very different maps than the ones we are accustomed to successfully lead Armij Aelon Kein (Marshallese) mariners to their destinations, over beautiful yet sometimes treacherous South Pacific seas. Thus we see another lesson from map thinking: in the tireless philosophy of science debates among empiricists, constructivists, and realists, all identify some part of the truth. None is utterly correct; each is partially right.6

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Conclusion Map thinking massages the imagination. It permits us to see similarities regarding representation, abstraction practices, and ethics and power from philosophy to the sciences (further details can be found in When Maps Become the World). In this brief chapter, we have explored how analogizing beliefs, concepts, knowledge, and social practices to maps and the cartographic impulse is prevalent and powerful across three fields of philosophy: analytic philosophy, European philosophy, and pragmatic philosophy. By exploring an Ancient Chinese map and the mapmaking practices of the Armij Aelon Kein, I have merely hinted at the ubiquity of mapping as knowledge-​making across cultures. But interesting and important conceptual and philosophical lessons follow from continuing to map-​think the cartographies of global epistemologies.

Notes 1 Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, 3rd ed. The preface is from 1945. For fuller discussion of Wittgenstein and maps, see Wagner (2011). 2 Bateson explicitly builds on what he takes to be Korzybski’s “original statement”: “the map is not the territory,” from the 1970 Korzybski Memorial Lecture, which appears as “Form, Substance, and Difference” in Bateson (1972, 454–​471). Korzybski (1933, 750): “A map is not the territory.” 3 “Map thinking refers to philosophical reflection concerning what standard geographic maps are and how they are made and used” (Winther 2020a, 4). 4 James (1977), quoted in McDermott (1977, 243). For further analysis of concepts such as “an immense map of relations,” see Winther (2014a). 5 See www.pacificrisa.org/​places/​republic-​of-​the-​marshall-​islands/​, which also provides a brief yet clear introduction to the Marshall Islands. 6 See ­chapter 9 “Map Thinking Science and Philosophy” of Winther 2020a.

References Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A Materialist Theory of the Mind. Routledge. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. University of Chicago Press. Baudrillard, J, (1994) [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. Tr. Sheila F Glaser. University of Michigan Press. Dewey, J. (1976). The Child and the Curriculum. In Boydston, J. A., ed. The Middle Works, 1899–​1924, vol. 2. 1902–​1903. Southern Illinois University Press, 271–​291. Ebrey, P. B. (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Finney, B. (1998). The Pacific Basin: An Introduction. In Woodward D. & Malcolm Lewis, G., eds. The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, vol. 2, book 3. University of Chicago Press, 443–​491.

264  Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther Godfrey-​Smith, P. (1996). Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature. Cambridge University Press. Gooley, T. (2016). How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea. The Experiment. Ismael, J. (1999). Science and the Phenomenal. Philosophy of Science 66 (3), 351–​369. Ismael, J. (2007). The Situated Self. Oxford University Press. James, W. (1911) [1977]. Percept and Concept—​The Abuse of Concepts. In McDermott, J., ed. The Writings of William James. University of Chicago Press, 243–​252. Korzybski, A. (1933). A Non-​Aristotelian System and its Necessity for Rigour in Mathematics and Physics. In Korzybski, A. ed. Science and Sanity. Institute of General Semantics, 747–​761. McDermott, J. J., ed. (1977). The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. University of Chicago Press. Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. MIT Press. Peirce, C. S. (1869/​1992). Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic. In Houser, N. and Kloesel, C. J. W., eds. The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, 56–​82. Indiana University Press. Originally published in Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2 (1869), 193–​208. Ramsey, F. P. (1990). General Propositions and Causality. In Mellor, D. H., ed. F. P. Ramsey: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge University Press, 145–​163. Robinson, A. H. & Petchenik, B. B. (1976). The Nature of Maps: Essays toward Understanding Maps and Mapping. University of Chicago Press. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. University of Chicago Press. Ryle, G. (1971). Abstractions. In Ryle, G. ed. Collected Papers, vol. 2. Collected Essays, 1929–​1968. Hutchinson, 435–​145. Sellars, W. (1981). Mental Events. Philosophical Studies 39 (4), 325–​345. Stich, S. (1990). The Fragmentation of Reason. MIT Press. Wagner, D. (2011). Glimpses of Unsurveyable Maps. In Heinrich, R., Nemeth, E., Pichler, W. & Wagner, D., eds. Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts. Ontos Verlag, vol. 2, 365–​376. Winther, R. G. (2014a). James and Dewey on Abstraction. The Pluralist 9 (2), 1–​28. Winther, R. G. (2014b). World Navels. Cartouche of the Canadian Cartographic Association 89, 15–​21. Winther, R. G. (2020a). When Maps Become the World. University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu/​ucp/​books/​book/​chicago/​W/​bo45713064.html Winther, R. G. (2020b). Cutting the Cord: A Corrective for World Navels in Cartography and Science. Cartographic Journal 57 (2), 147–​159. Wittgenstein, L. (1922) [1921]. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus. Tr. Frank P. Ramsey and Charles Kay Ogden. Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner. Wittgenstein, L. (2001) [1979]. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932–​1935: From the Notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald. Ed. Alice Ambrose. Prometheus. Wittgenstein, L. (2009) [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte. Rev. ed. (4th ed.) by Hacker and Schulte. Wiley-​Blackwell. Yu, Z., ed. (1984). Palaces of the Forbidden City. Tr. Ng Mau-​sang, Chan Sinwai, and Puwen Lee. Consultant ed., Graham Hutt. Viking.

Chapter 23

Modeling the apparent spread of science Some insights from the history of science in Japan Kenji Ito Introduction The kind of knowledge production that we generally call “science” is everywhere in the contemporary world. This knowledge production, which used to be local practices in Europe, has become very dominant in many other parts of the globe. Following the expression “weedy culture” by the historian of science Robert Kohler (2002a, 9–​10), I call this aspect of science “weediness.” By “weediness,” I stress the apparent “placelessness” of science and its ability to overwhelm other vegetations, rather than its tendency to disperse (Kohler 2002b, 2012). How has this way of producing knowledge, called “science,” that was seemingly local to Europe, become so ubiquitous around the globe? This chapter discusses the question of science’s “weediness” from the perspective of the history of science in Japan. Some clarifications and modifications of this question are necessary. The first concerns the category of science. Since the so-​called practical turn in science studies, science has come to be considered as “practice and culture,” as in the title of Andrew Pickering’s (1992) edited volume, rather than a system of ideas or a set of methods to produce knowledge. Following this lead, this chapter considers science as a kind of socially organized and culturally conditioned human activity that produces knowledge. What belongs to this kind of knowledge production is a matter of historical emergence, and it requires genealogical studies to investigate its boundaries, which should be considered as shifting through both epistemic considerations and power relations. Second, Europe might not be the single origin of science. The notion of a 17th-​century scientific revolution has lost favor among historians of science (Biagioli 1998; Shapin 1996). As Raj (2017) suggests, “The Scientific Revolution” should be considered as a rhetoric that implants a certain historiographical perspective. It makes more sense to understand science, in its modern conception, as starting in the 19th century (Cunningham and Williams 1993), as was the view of the Japanese historian of science Hirosige Tetu (Hirosige 1973).1 Or perhaps the apparent European (and later North American) dominance of science was just a temporary phenomenon.

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Considering that many of the inventions important to early modern Europe originated in China, the place of Europe in the global history of knowledge production might be similar to that given to the Islamic world in the traditional history of science; namely, a passage point of long-​term developments, although original contributions were made (Sabra 1987). Either way, while it is increasingly difficult to identify a singular European origin of science, why science appears to have spread from Europe remains a real question. Third, the multiplicity of science is not just about its origin. Science has been changing and remains disunified (Galison and Stump 1996). We can never know the entirety of science because no human being can grasp the whole field of scientific disciplines. Moreover, philosophers have never reached a consensus about the boundary between science and non-​science, and sociologists consider the boundary to be socially maintained (Gieryn 1983, 1999; Laudan 1983). Historians have shown how pseudo-​science is often indistinguishable from science (Gordin 2015). Hence, the history of science is not about the history of a stable entity; science has been the object of the field’s investigation, and not part of its definition (Chambers and Gillespie 2000). A substantial part of the literature on the history of science concerns how science has been disunified and changed fundamentally. Indeed, the diffusion of science seems largely dependent on what kinds of knowledge production we choose to include under the name science.2 The disunity of science also depends on the granularity of analysis, as does its ubiquity. Even so-​called industrialized countries contain many groups and individuals who have little to do with science. What is the right degree of minuteness in studying science? When we talk about science as practice, whose practice are we referring to? It is too coarse to talk about the “West” versus the “non-​West” but too minute to discuss the scientific practices of one individual? Whatever group we use as a unit of analysis, there is always heterogeneity, and yet, at the same time, there must be an aspect that presents that group as a unit. These considerations suggest that we should regard science as a constantly developing social institution defined by its changing role and functions in society rather than by its intrinsic nature or historical origin. Doing so allows us to acknowledge the paradoxes of science. Indeed, in spite of its heterogeneity, science often functions as if it were a stable and unified entity. While it is assumed to be the most authoritative source of knowledge in many industrialized countries, it has a virtual identity. What makes this vaguely defined set of knowledge production practices acquire a self-​identity and a privileged status in many parts of the world? And how did it apparently spread from Europe?

Diffusionist models I start by dismissing what I call the Simple Diffusion Model (SDM). SDM claims that science started in one place (generally in Europe) and spread

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because it produced true, or at least valid, knowledge. SDM assumes a center-​ and-​periphery framework, a single point of origin, and the stable identity of science discussed above; hence, it is untenable. I mention SDM because it reflects commonsensical views. In particular, SDM has a strong affinity to the traditional conception of the history of ideas, in which ideas are conceived by an individual and spread to others. The Three-​Stage-​Model (TSM) proposed by George Basalla (1967) might be considered a variant of SDM, though it is much richer. TSM assumes three stages in the spread of science from Europe to non-​European countries. The first phase involves European travelers gathering knowledge in a non-​ European country, the second is that of “colonial science,” in which scientific activities in the region in question are dependent on Europe, and the third is the stage of independence (Basalla 1967). Although TSM shares some shortcomings with SDM, it opens up new and important perspectives. Instead of the diffusion of scientific knowledge and ideas, Basalla (1967) focuses on “scientific cultures” (pp. 613, 614, 616, 618, 620) by which he means collections of social institutions that produce scientific knowledge. More importantly, TSM serves as a key frame of reference for those who study the history of science in the non-​Western world. Just as Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) opened a new horizon for the history of science through the criticism it provoked, critiques of TSM disagreed with it in various, fruitful ways (Adas 2006; Anderson 2018; MacLeod 1987, 2000; Petitjean 1992; Raina 1999; Raj 2007, 2013; Schaffer et al. 2009). An important aspect of TSM is its attention to colonialism. The literature on science and colonialism that has appeared since Basalla’s work is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Chapter 3 and 8 in this volume), but European expansion evidently provides a powerful explanation for the weediness of science. However, TSM remains ambiguous about the exact role of colonialism. This shortcoming is clear in its treatment of Japan. In TSM, “colonial science” refers not to science in colonies but to science in a non-​Western country that has some dependence on the “scientific culture” of Europe. Basalla (1967, 615–​616) claims that because Japan depended on “Western scientific cultures” as much as conventional European colonies did, it had a “colonial science,” which took an unusually long period to reach its climax in the Meiji Restoration.3 Thus, in spite of its name, TSM’s “colonial science” is simply a corollary of the diffusionist assumption.

Circulation of knowledge and other non-​ diffusionist models Historians of non-​Western sciences have proposed alternatives to TSM and other diffusionist models, giving more agency at different levels to the supposedly receiving ends of “Western science.” Today, no sensible study of science in the world outside Europe and North America would ignore the

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significance of the kind of indigenous knowledge production discussed throughout this volume (Harding, Chapter 3; Mika, Chapter 10; Lacey, Chapter 13; Chimakonam and Uchenna Ogbonnaya, Chapter 17; Liu and King, Chapter 19; Mncube, Chapter 20; Winther, Chapter 21; Tanaka, Chapter 24; Sirker, Chapter 25). Scientific or not, knowledge that appeared to come from Europe was not simply transmitted but also appropriated and adapted with various conflicts (Günergun and Raina 2011; Sabra 1987; Harris, Chapter 8). These studies imply that, while Western science appeared dominant, it was not really “Western” anymore; they also suggest that the very ability of science to hybridize with local knowledge production is probably a reason for its weediness. Similarly, recent studies of the history of science in Japan have shed light on pre-​existing social conditions and indigenous practices of knowledge production. The knowledge production of seemingly European-​style science and technology in Japan after the 19th century was often a syncretism of European and Japanese practices. A key focus of these studies has been the process of hybridization, of which the concept of the “great translation” proposed by Tessa Morris-​Suzuki (1995) is a classic example. According to Morris-​Suzuki (1995), Japan’s highly developed indigenous practices of knowledge formation in certain areas, such as agriculture and craft, not only prepared Japan for the introduction of European knowledge but were translated into the language of Western science, giving Japan a great industrial advantage. A more ambitious framework for discussing scientific practices in the non-​ Western world is the circulation of knowledge model (CKM). James Secord (2004) hints toward such a model, but Kapil Raj is its most articulate proponent. By examining how indigenous groups reacted to and appropriated knowledge from Europe, Raj (2007, 2013) highlights how they participated in the formation of scientific knowledge. While SDM stipulates that knowledge flows only from the center to the peripheries, in CKM, knowledge travels in many directions, mutating during its circular process. CKM thus considers the circulation of knowledge itself as an integral part of knowledge formation. As these studies evince, the concept of the circulation of knowledge provides an appropriate and fertile framework for the local and global history of knowledge (Östling et al., 2020, 2018b). For the purpose of this chapter, CKM is useful for understanding the apparent diffusion of science. A partial description of knowledge circulation might appear as a unidirectional flow of knowledge from the center to the peripheries.

The roles of context and locality: the resonance model If science is considered as practices of knowledge production, it is not something one can carry around or send as a package. Either in circulation or in a unidirectional flow, what moves is not science itself but its human or material embodiments, such as written texts, scientific materials, experimental devices,

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and human actors with skill-​like knowledge. Compared to adherents of SDM, proponents of CKM and other non-​diffusionist historians of science generally pay more attention to scientific practices. Still, we need a framework to conceptualize the apparent movement of knowledge in terms of knowledge-​ producing practices in different places. If we consider science as practices of producing knowledge, the apparent mobility of science can be understood through its ability to replicate its practices in different locations (Shapin and Schaffer 1985). Knowledge appears to travel when knowledge-​producing practices in different places are somehow interconnected. For this to happen, there must be both certain social and material conditions, in particular power relations, that allow interconnected practices to occur and certain interactions between the places in question that make these resulting practices of knowledge production share (or forced to share) a common, or partially common, framework, such as a “trading zone” or a “battle zone” (see below). These interactions can take place at various levels, either within the realm of knowledge production or in other parts of society and culture. If there is a time lag between these practices of knowledge production in different places, a certain knowledge production appears to have “travelled” from one place to the other. In an analogy to the physical phenomenon of resonance, I call this the resonance model (RM) (Ito 2002, 2005). In RM, neither practices of knowledge production nor the social and material conditions in which these practices take place need to be identical between the places under consideration. Different places produce different knowledge with different knowledge production techniques in different contexts, and yet these diverse practices of knowledge production can be coordinated in ways that become relevant to each other through interactions between the places in which they occur. The task of historians, therefore, is to study the social and material conditions and the interactions that make this scientific parallelism possible. For example, in the case of quantum physics in Japan, what matters is not when quantum mechanical theories were introduced into Japan but how knowledge production in this field of study became a sustainable practice there. I argue that the process of preparing social and material conditions for this sustainable practice started well before the advent of quantum mechanics. For instance, the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research, or RIKEN—​the most important place for the knowledge production of quantum mechanics in Japan—​was established in 1917, providing researchers with the material conditions to explore physics. The training of physicists in Japan started even earlier. Cultural environments for theoretical physics in Japan became dramatically fertile after Albert Einstein’s visit to Japan in late 1922. In addition to these social and material conditions, various interactions triggered the beginning of research activities in quantum physics. Textbooks and journals constituted part of the medium for such interactions, but human

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actors also played crucial roles. Nishina Yoshio, in particular, was important not only because of his collaborative work with Oskar Klein on the relativistic theory of the Compton scattering, but also because of his roles in triggering and making sustainable scientific practices in Japan that produced knowledge relevant to quantum physics (Ito 2002, 2005). RM is compatible with both SDM and CKM. The early practices of quantum physics in Japan involved a unidirectional flow of knowledge, but it only appears so if we see it in a specific timeframe. Moreover, RM can highlight the active roles of local actors. As RM assumes that the identity of knowledge production practices is maintained through interactions rather than being immutable mobile, it acknowledges that knowledge can change in transit. However, RM does not say much about science in particular; it is a general model for the apparent spread of any kind of practice. Nor does it explain how interactions can affect the coordination of scientific practices in different places. Hence, in itself, it does not explain the weediness of science. To do so, we need to look more closely at the interactions between different places.

The battle-​zone model and the ability to shape contexts How do certain new practices of knowledge production prevail over others in a place as a result of interactions with the outside? In the example of quantum physics in Japan, most of the necessary social and material conditions were already in Japan. However, Nishina made an effort to shape such conditions that would benefit research activities in his field of study when he built a research network and sought social support for research on his topics. He was able to do so partly due to the transformative power of new knowledge production. Through collaborative scientific practices, Nishina shaped the atmosphere of his group, encouraging further research activities in the field (Ito 2002). If the pre-​existing conditions are not as favorable as they were in the case of quantum physics in Japan, science’s ability to transform environments into something more suitable to them than to competing practices of knowledge production becomes even more crucial. This transformative power of science seems to be the key to its weediness. The case of Japan might shed light on this power as well. In the mid-​19th century, a sea change in the infrastructures used for knowledge production took place in Japan, such as the employment of European and American teachers and the establishment of Western-​style schools and research stations. This period, around what is known as the Meiji Restoration, has various facets, but this change occurred not just because of the epistemic values of the newly introduced practices of knowledge production, generally called “Western sciences,” but because some geopolitical conditions, such the possibilities of colonization, started to favor this kind of knowledge production. Inspired by Peter Galison’s (1997, 2010) use of “trading zone,” I propose the “battle-​zone model” (BZM) to theorize this situation Although Nagasaki,

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the only port open to overseas trade during the Edo era, was literally a trading zone, Japan also encountered European science and technology in more competitive and hostile spaces. Battle zones of military, economic, and scientific competition provided arenas in which various kinds of knowledge production were compared, evaluated, and understood, as is clearly manifested in mid-​ 19th-​century military clashes between certain Japanese fiefs and European powers. As in Galison’s notion of trading zones, mutual communication and understanding in these battle zones was partial but sufficient to highlight the value of this novel knowledge. Mary L. Pratt (2007, 7) also emphasizes the “highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” in her concept of “contact zones.” However, with BZM, I am mainly interested in understanding how science self-​perpetuates by shaping and coercing battle zones in which scientific knowledge provides an advantage. In these battle zones, the rules of engagements had already been determined by European countries, and therefore those who were forced to participate had no choice but to adopt science in some way. This aspect of “science” to create conditions favorable to it seems to explain, at least partially, its weediness (Ito 2015).

Conclusion Knowledge production emerges in various ways in different places. When these places interact, particular practices of knowledge production may be coordinated so that one unified science is observed in many places. This is the weediness of science. How interactions between diverse places affect practices of knowledge production depends on the individual cases and requires further empirical study. However, at least two aspects of such interactions are the competition between different practices of knowledge production and the ability of science to create cultural and material conditions favorable to these practices. Or rather, the practices of knowledge production with this ability are what we, ex post facto, call “science.”

Notes 1 I write Japanese personal names in the traditional order (the family name first, the given name second), except when they appear as authors of European language writings. 2 There are recent studies that aim to establish the history of knowledge as distinguished from the history of science. See Östling et al. (2018b). 3 For other reactions to Basalla’s view on Japan, see Low (1989); Raina (1999).

References Adas, M. (2006). Testing Paradigms with Comparative Perspectives: British India and Patterns of Scientific and Technology Transfer in the Age of European Global

272  Kenji Ito Hegemony. In Yengoyan, A. A., ed. Modes of Comparison: Theory and Practice. University of Michigan Press, 285–​318. Anderson, W. (2018). Remembering the Spread of Western Science. Historical Records of Australian Science 29 (2), 73–​81. Basalla, G. (1967). The Spread of Western Science: A Three-​Stage Model Describes the Introduction of Modern Science into Any Non-​European Nation. Science 156 (3775), 611–​622. Biagioli, M. (1998). The Scientific Revolution is Undead. Configurations 6 (2), 141–​148. Chambers, D. W. & Gillespie, R. (2000). Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge. Osiris 15, 221–​240. Cunningham, A. & Williams, P. (1993). De-​Centring the “Big Picture”: The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science. British Journal for the History of Science 26 (4), 407–​432. Galison, P. L. (1997). Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. University of Chicago Press. Galison, P. L. (2010). Trading with the Enemy. In Gorman, M. E., ed. Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise: Creating New Kinds of Collaboration. MIT Press, 25–​52. Galison, P. L. & Stump, D. J., eds. (1996). The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford University Press. Gieryn, T. F. (1983). Boundary-​Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-​ Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review 48 (6), 781–​795. Gieryn, T. F. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. University of Chicago Press. Gordin, M. D. (2015). Myth 27. That a Clear Line of Demarcation Has Separated Science from Pseudoscience. In Numbers, R. L. & Kampourakis, K., eds. Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science. Harvard University Press, 219–​226. Günergun, F. & Raina, D., eds. (2011). Science between Europe and Asia: Historical Studies on the Transmission, Adoption and Adaptation of Knowledge. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 275. Springer. Hirosige, T. (1973). Kagaku no shakaishi: Kindai Nihon no kagaku taisei (Social History of Science: Scientific Regime of Modern Japan). Chūōkōronsha. Ito, K. (2002). Making Sense of ryoshiron (Quantum Theory): Introduction of Quantum Mechanics into Japan, 1920–​1940. Harvard University. Ito, K. (2005). The Geist in the Institute: Production of Quantum Theorists in Prewar Japan. In Kaiser, D., ed. Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. MIT Press, 151–​184. Ito, K. (2015). La science “occidentale” sous la restauration Meiji: Mimétisme ou appropriation intelligente? In Raj, K. & Sibum, O., eds. Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, vol. 2. Modernité et globaqlisation. Seuil, 346–​465. Kohler, R. E. (2002a). Landscapes and Labscapes: Exploring the Lab-​Field Border in Biology. University of Chicago Press. Kohler, R. E. (2002b). Place and Practice in Field Biology. History of Science 40 (128/​ 2), 189–​210. Kohler, R. E. (2012). Practice and Place in Twentieth-​Century Field Biology: A Comment. Journal of the History of Biology 45 (4), 579–​586. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

Modeling the apparent spread of science  273 Laudan, L. (1983). The Demise of the Demarcation Problem. In Cohen, R. S. & Laudan, L., eds. Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum. D. Reidel, 111–​127. Low, M. F. (1989). The Butterfly and the Frigate: Social Studies of Science in Japan. Social Studies of Science 19 (2), 313–​342. MacLeod, R. (1987). On Visiting the “Moving Metropolis”: Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science. In Reingold, N. & Rothenberg, M., eds. Scientific Colonialism: A Cross-​Cultural Comparison. Smithsonian Institution Press, 217–​249. MacLeod, R. (2000). Introduction: Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise. Osiris 15, 1–​13. Morris-​Suzuki, T. (1995). The Great Translation: Traditional and Modern Science in Japan’s Industrialisation. Historia Scientiarum 5 (2), 103–​116. Östling, J., Larsson Heidenblad, D. & Nilsson Hammar, A., eds. (2020). Forms of Knowledge: Developing the History of Knowledge. Nordic Academic Press. Östling, J., Larsson Heidenblad, D., Sandmo, E., Nilsson Hammar, A. & Nordberg, K. H. (2018a). The History of Knowledge and the Circulation of Knowledge: An Introduction. In Östling et al., eds. Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations in the History of Knowledge. Nordic Academic Press, 9–​33. Östling, J., Sandmo, E., Larsson Heidenblad, D., Nilsson Hammar, A., & Nordberg, K. H., eds. (2018b). Circulation of Knowledge: Explorations in the History of Knowledge. Nordic Academic Press. Petitjean, P. (1992). Sciences et empires: Un thème prometteur, des enjeux cruciaux. In Petitjean, P., Jamie, C. & Moulin, A. M., eds. Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion. Springer, 3–​12. Pickering, A., ed. (1992). Science as Practice and Culture. University of Chicago Press. Pratt, M. L. (2007). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. 2nd ed., Routledge. Raina, D. (1999). From West to Non-​West? Basalla’s Three-​Stage Model Revisited. Science as Culture 8 (4), 497–​516. Raj, K. (2007). Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–​1900. Palgrave Macmillan. Raj, K. (2013). Beyond Postcolonialism … and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of science. Isis 104 (2), 337–​347. Raj, K. (2017). Thinking without the Scientific Revolution: Global Interactions and the Construction of Knowledge. Journal of Early Modern History 21 (5), 1–​14. Sabra, A. I. (1987). The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement. History of Science 25 (3), 223–​243. Schaffer, S., Roberts, L., Raj, K. & Delbourgo, J., eds. (2009). The Brokered World: Go-​ Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–​1820. Watson Publishing International. Secord, J. A. (2004). Knowledge in Transit. Isis 95 (4), 654–​672. Shapin, S. (1996). The Scientific Revolution. University of Chicago Press. Shapin, S. & Schaffer, S. (1985). Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton University Press.

Chapter 24

Buddhist logic from a global perspective Koji Tanaka

Buddhist logic Buddhist philosophers have examined techniques and methodologies of debate and argumentation. They have investigated the logical principles that underlie rational argumentation and reasoning. These investigations started in India and engaged philosophers in China, Japan, Korea, and Tibet. Many competing theories of logic and its relation to reasoning and rationality have been developed and studied by traditional and contemporary Buddhist scholars.1 In the contemporary literature on logic and the philosophy of logic, however, this rich Buddhist material on logic is hardly discussed or even known. This article presents some of that material in a manner that is accessible to contemporary logicians and philosophers of logic and sets agendas for global philosophy of logic. There is a large amount of material that can be presented as part of the development of logic in Buddhist philosophical traditions. In order to provide a focus, I will be mostly concerned with the study of anumāna (often translated as ‘inference’) by two of the major Indian Buddhist logicians Dignāgā (480–​540 ce) and Dharmakīrti (6th or 7th century ce—​dates unknown) and the tradition of philosophy, sometimes called pramāṇavāda, that sprang up based on their philosophy. “Buddhist logicians” in this article refer mainly to Dignāgā, Dharmakīrti, and those who follow their development of logic. First, I will summarize the main topic that most Buddhist logicians are concerned with. In particular, I will introduce the notion of anumāna (inference) and present some of its characteristics. Buddhist logicians disagree about the importance of anumāna and what its characteristics are. However, there are some common characteristics that most of them attribute or presuppose and I will present them in a summary form. Second, I will make a remark about the methodology for engaging with Buddhist logic. I will show that, given the difference in writing style and language as well as the different questions that grabbed Buddhist logicians from contemporary philosophers/​ logicians, merely regurgitating the material in the way that it is presented is

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problematic if we are to take Buddhist logic as capable of contributing to the contemporary debates. We need to extract or abstract some ideas from the material in order to present it to a wider audience so that genuine two-​way conversations become possible. Third, I will set the agendas for future research on Buddhist logic that can contribute to the global philosophy of logic.

Anumaˉna (inference) Logic in the Indian Buddhist tradition developed as part of epistemology. Buddhist logicians typically consider knowledge as a state of awareness that is warranted (pramā). They hold that what we are warranted to be aware of (i.e., what we know) depends on how we come to be aware of it (i.e., how we come to know it). For Buddhist logicians (against some of the non-​Buddhist Indian philosophers), pratyakṣa (perception) and anumāna (inference) are the only ways to come to a state of awareness that can be said to be warranted. Pratyakṣa (perception) is an immediate contact with particulars. It is said to be free of conception and it is described causally. Conception is considered to involve universals. When we conceive a cow, for instance, we are said to be aware of the existence of a conceptual object “cow” which is a result of conceiving of a certain object as a cow. A perceptual state is an awareness state of a thing itself and it is a state of awareness that is causally brought about by the encounter with that particular thing. On the other hand, anumāna (inference) is considered to involve conception. For instance, when we are aware of smoke on the mountain as a result of conceiving of the thing that wafts around as smoke, we may infer that there is fire on that mountain. When we become aware of the presence of fire on the mountain in this way and it is true that there is fire there, smoke is said to serve a valid reason and knowledge about the presence of fire is said to be brought about by inference.2 For the process of inferential reasoning to be productive of knowledge (or “valid” as it is often described), inferential reasons (hetu) must satisfy three characteristics (trairūpya). First, pakṣadharmatā: the reason must qualify the subject (pakṣa). In our example about fire and smoke on a mountain, it is the mountain that is the subject and smoke (reason) must be present on that mountain. Second, anvayavyāpti: the reason must be present in at least one similar case (sapakṣa).3 For instance, smoke must be present in a kitchen with a wood-​burning stove. Third, vyatirekavyāpti: the reason must be absent from all dissimilar instances (vipakṣa). For instance, smoke must not be present in a misty lake.4 For Buddhist logicians, knowledge entails truth, but they don’t count the state of awareness that happens to get things right as knowledge. They take the cognitive process we undergo in acquiring knowledge to be a crucial aspect of that knowledge. The three characteristics of inferential reason (trairūpya) serve as the marks of the “validity” of inferential cognitive process. But (some) Buddhist logicians don’t distinguish a state of awareness that counts

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as knowledge from the cognitive process that brings about that awareness. Thus by “knowledge” Buddhist logicians have in mind cognitive events rather than states. Their focus in talking about anumāna (inference) is, thus, knowing inferentially, a particular kind of cognitive event that entails truth. Significance of this point in the backdrop of various contemporary positions has been appreciated by a small number of scholars in the context of epistemology.5 However, there is no study of Buddhist logic that emphasizes the above point and makes use of it in the context of logic.6 In this chapter, I will articulate some of the ways contemporary logicians/​philosophers can make use of the material on Buddhist logic. However, doing so requires sensitivity to the methodology of engaging with Buddhist material. So, in the next section, I will raise methodological issues to then examine what contemporary logicians/​philosophers can make of Buddhist logic.

Methodology We can be fine-​ grained about the levels of engagement with Buddhist material. In this chapter, however, I will limit myself to three levels of engagement. (I will also limit my consideration to be applicable only to scholastic or philosophical texts which make up a small proportion of material available in Buddhist tradition.) Once I present these three levels, I will then examine what to make of the Buddhist logic material. At the first level, primary material needs to be presented. In the case of Buddhist material, this is not an easy matter. The material is written in various Buddhist languages, in particular the canonical languages: Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, (Buddhist) Chinese, and (Buddhist) Japanese. It is no easy task to master the language(s) let alone to understand the content of the material written in these languages. The difficulty is not only to do with languages. Sometimes, works that are referenced are now lost. At other times, the work we have access to is a copy of the original but contains mistakes. So presenting raw material is not an easy task. Second, once we have raw, primary material, we can provide an analysis or analyses of the material. Engaging with Buddhist material at this level involves interpretations. An analysis can be provided in order to highlight some ideas contained in the material. In doing so, however, we are bringing in the interest and concepts that we have, as those who would like to make sense of the material. Given that the material that is of interest is considered to be philosophical, an analysis is quite often provided in terms of the concepts and terminologies used by philosophers of the past and the present. Thus, how to understand Buddhist material at this level often depends on how to understand philosophical concepts and terms. The first level of engagement is the level at which the scholars of Buddhism—​ Buddhologists—​operate. They are trained in the relevant language(s) in order to understand primary material in the original language(s).7 But they almost

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always annotate their translations by providing analyses of the material as a way of explaining how to understand it. In recent years, philosophers (those who work or are trained in philosophy departments) have started to engage with the Buddhist material at this second level. With their firmer grasp of the concepts and terminologies used by philosophers, they have provided sophisticated analyses of Buddhist material.8 While the involvement of philosophers has enriched the activity of analyzing Buddhist material, it is not clear that there have been many fruitful dialogues and exchanges between philosophers and Buddhologists (including those who are trained in philosophy). The problem is two-​fold. First, while there may not (or may) be progress in philosophy,9 discussions in philosophy do move on. Buddhologists are not necessarily aware of this and, thus, not aware of the latest discussions in philosophy.10 Second, philosophers not familiar with Buddhist material have not largely been able to grasp Buddhist material. The problem is not necessarily the unwillingness of philosophers at large but the way in which Buddhist material is presented to philosophers.11 Philosophical concepts have been applied to the analyses of Buddhist material in the hope that the contents can be grasped by philosophers. However, this is essentially a mapping exercise. It shows that Buddhist ideas and arguments can be understood in terms of a certain constellation of concepts used by philosophers.12 This may be an important exercise for showing that ideas and arguments similar to the ones found in (“Western”) philosophy literature can also be found in Buddhist material. That may be an interesting historical fact. Yet that, in itself, does not show what philosophers can do with those ideas. If anything, what has been shown through this mapping exercise is that Buddhist ideas are redundant for (contemporary) philosophers. Thus for there to be fruitful dialogues and exchanges between philosophers and Buddhologists, Buddhist ideas need to be presented in a way that can have an uptake by philosophers. The third level of engagement with Buddhist materials is then to somewhat abstract Buddhist ideas and arguments and recontextualize them in relation to contemporary literature. At this level, we are, strictly speaking, not analyzing what is in the texts. We are no longer in the territory of excavating the history of ideas and we are essentially leaving the texts behind. Rather, we are considering what we can do with the material in our own contexts. For Buddhist material to be taken up as philosophical resources outside of the history of philosophy, this is what needs to happen. If there is any hope of two-​way dialogues between (contemporary) philosophers and Buddhologists, Buddhist material must be presented in a way that can contribute to the current debates in philosophy.

Buddhist logic from a global perspective What could be done if we were to engage in two-​way dialogues? As I will show in this section, we can challenge some of the widely accepted philosophical

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ideas about the nature of logic from Buddhist perspectives. These challenges may be radical but fruitful in the context of understanding the nature of logic. Psychologism Psychologism is the view that logic describes, and thus is dependent on, our reasoning processes. It is largely a rejected view in contemporary literature on the philosophy of logic. It has been argued that, if logic were descriptive in this way, it would be hard to conceive of its normative significance. That is, if logic is concerned with reasoning, understood as a cognitive process, it may tell us what inferences we, in fact, perform but it cannot tell us what inferences we ought to make. Since logic specifies the norms our reasoning practice must meet, it cannot be descriptive of reasoning processes. Thus, it has been argued, logic must be independent of those processes.13 This anti-​ psychologistic stance is hardly contested these days.14 For Buddhist logicians, however, the primary focus in their logical investigations is cognitive processes that constitute knowledge-​producing events. Debates about what principles we should accept are conducted in that context. This comes out clearly in the debate between Bhāvivaka (500–​578 ce) and Candrakīrti (7th century ce—​dates unknown) as appears in Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā I.15 They debate about whether there are any consequences we ought to accept once we accept certain premises. Candrakīrti, with his deflationary program, denies that there are any such consequences because there is nothing that we ought to do. Bhāvivaka disagrees and argues that there are normative constraints that must be present in our reasoning practice if we can claim that we are rational.16 Details of the debate do not concern us here. One thing to highlight is that, in the process of arguing for his position, Bhāvivaka tries to show that contraposition must be accepted as “valid.” He argues for this not by demonstrating the structure of truth (like Frege) but by investigating what inferences we do perform and accept. He thus advocates a form of psychologism. A Priori Once we question anti-​ psychologism, another important issue becomes salient. That is the a priori nature of logic. There are several ways in which logic is thought to be a priori. First, logic is thought to be a priori in the sense that our experiences do not invalidate logical principles. This notion of apriority has been challenged in the context of quantum mechanics where the behavior of some particles does not seem to obey the principles of classical logic.17 However, many of these challengers have come to the view that logic is ultimately a priori.18 And it is hard to see anyone who would argue that an observation of someone or even a large number of people reasoning invalidly should trigger a rejection or revision of logical principles.

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Second, logic is sometimes thought to be a priori in the sense that logical principles are not derivable from any particular cognition involved in reasoning. This is the view that Kant argued for. He assumed that logical rules are those “without which no use of the understanding would be possible at all” (Jäsche Logic, 12).19 For him, this means that logical rules are the conditions for the possibility of understanding as such: without logical rules, understanding in general is impossible. Kant infers from this that logical rules are necessary rules for the understanding. In particular, they do not depend on any particular cognition. That is, they do not depend on the contingency of experience. Thus, for Kant, logical principles are canon but not organon of understanding. Third, logic is sometimes thought to be a priori in the sense that logical principles must be in place for the development and testing of theories, whether empirical or otherwise, to take place. Resnik (1997) argues that logical principles function as the mechanism to generate and manipulate empirical data but they are insulated from any empirical refutation and confirmation.20 Frege thought of logic to be a priori in a similar manner. For him, logical principles are the standard in terms of which judgments about the validity of one’s reasoning can be made.21 For logical principles to be such a standard, however, they would have to be in place before they can be applicable to the evaluation of reasoning. So logical principles must be a priori for them to set the standard for reasoning. Buddhist logicians can be understood as rejecting all three forms of a priori. As we saw before, they do not distinguish a state of awareness that counts as knowledge from the cognitive process that brings about that state. For them, when one can be said to have knowledge, they are thereby justified. Justification is not an extra ingredient that must be added for a state of awareness to count as knowledge.22 So there is nothing that could be in place before it is applied to the evaluation of the inferential process that brings it about. Hence, Buddhist logicians can be understood as rejecting the third form of a priori. But this also means that there is nothing that can be articulated without analyzing particular knowledge events. So they also reject the second form of a priori. Finally, if there is nothing outside of the inferential process against which inferential processes can be evaluated, “validity” is something that is embedded in people’s inferential knowing. If so, rejection or revision of logical principles can be triggered only by the observation of the processes of inferential knowing events. Hence, Buddhist logicians can also be understood as rejecting the first form of a priori. Thus, they can be seen as rejecting all three forms of a priori as applied to logic. Normative externalism Once anti-​psychologism and the a priori nature of logic are challenged, a few other issues become salient. For the rest of the chapter, I will discuss two such issues: normative externalism and non-​systematicity.

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First normative externalism: logic is often thought to be normative in the sense that it provides norms for thought or reasoning.23 This common view has been challenged by Harman (1986). He argues that logic as a science of entailment is a separate subject matter from reasoning. In order to meet Harman’s challenge, MacFarlane (2004) proposes bridge principles that connect facts about logical validity with norms for reasoning so that logic can be shown to be normative. He argues that, if a bridge principle can be formulated, logic can be shown to be normative. A bridge principle has the following form: If P1, …, Pn ⊨ Q then Φ(P1, …, Pn, Q),

“where the antecedent states a ‘fact’ about logical consequence and the consequent takes the form of a normative claim featuring the agent’s attitudes towards the propositions in question” (Steinberger 2016, 389).24 Thus, a bridge principle bridges “the logical concept of entailment and the epistemological concepts of inference and belief ” (Steinberger 2016, 390). Steingerber (2016) shows that no plausible bridge principle can be formulated,25 though I won’t rehearse his reasons for the impossibility of formulating bridge principles. I note, however, that Buddhist logicians, at least the earlier ones such as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, would not account for the normative status of logical principles underling argumentation and reasoning by connecting logical facts with norms for reasoning. The form of bridge principles suggests that, for an account of entailment to be normative, it must be internalized in one’s epistemic attitudes that play a normative role in inferential practice. Thus, a bridge principle is predicated on the idea that accepting an account of entailment is to live up to the standard that it sets for our inferential practice. Following Weatherson (2019), I call this internalization of entailment in inferences normative internalism. I think it is fair to say that normative internalism is commonly accepted or presupposed in literature on logic and its related fields. In contrast, some (though not all) Buddhist logicians, in particular Dharmakīrti, hold that it is the external world that sets the standard for our inferences. They are, thus, normative externalists—​to again use terminology by Weatherson (2019). For them, however, the external world is not something that can be internalized in our epistemic life. Buddhist logicians (and Buddhists generally) are skeptical about our “inner life” which is seen as a construction with the use of conceptualization given that they think of conceptualization as involving universals which are thought not to occupy reality. They hold that it would have to be the external world to which we must be responsive in theorizing about how we ought to reason.26 Our inner life is far from something that can set a standard for our inferential practices or any of our conduct; in fact, it is to be corrected. Thus, Buddhist logicians can be understood as rejecting normative internalism and advocating normative externalism.

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Non-​s ystematicity One thing we notice when we start studying Buddhist logic is the absence of mathematics. Logic in Buddhist (and, generally, Indian) traditions did not develop alongside mathematics. What exactly mathematics does to logic is perhaps a moot question. One thing to note is that it makes logic somewhat systematic. Given the lack of mathematics, examining Buddhist logic gives us an opportunity to consider how systematic logic should or should not be. Consider the deflationary program of Candrakīrti. For him, all there is in search of truth are the beliefs and opinions of people on the street. By extension, all there is in search of validity are people’s beliefs and opinions. Then it is possible to think that a logical form and its instances could come apart. It is possible that people judge the validity (or invalidity) of a logical form differently from the validity (or invalidity) of its instances. If someone wishes to show that some logical form is invalid, they cannot simply provide a counter-​ example. They would need to demonstrate that people on the street do not judge that logical form as valid. In this way, it is possible to develop a view of logic that does not treat logical forms systematically.27

Conclusion If we examine Buddhist logic not from an internal perspective (internal to Buddhist tradition) but from a broader, somewhat global, perspective, what can be found? We can find resources that can be used to challenge views of the nature of logic according to which logic is anti-​psychologistic, a priori, internally normative, and/​or systematic. Careful study of the reasons offered by Buddhist logicians against these views help to shed critical light on the orthodox presuppositions about the nature of logic. Given that logic is largely conceived of as anti-​psychologistic, a priori, internally normative, and systematic in contemporary literature, the result of this investigation is significant. If the views of Buddhist logicians can be shown to be reasonable, it will seriously challenge the contemporary orthodoxy; if these views are shown to lack coherence, it will provide resources for considering why logic must be understood according to the contemporary orthodoxy. Results of investigating Buddhist logic from a global perspective are, thus, significant.

Notes 1 For a history of logic in India including Buddhist logic, see Matilal (1999). For a history of logic and its related issues in Tibet, see Dreyfus (1997). A history of Buddhist logic in China, Japan, and Korea has yet to be written as far as I know. 2 Two of the main primary texts are Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya and Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika. English translations (at least of the relevant passages) can be found in Hattori (1968) and Tillemans (2000) respectively.

282  Koji Tanaka 3 This is the formulation of Dignāga. Dharmakīrti modifies this characteristic as: the reason must be present in at least one similar case and only in similar cases. See Potter (1969). 4 The secondary literature on these three characteristics is extensive. See, for instance, Franco (1990), Katsura (1983, 1984), Oetke (1994a, 1994b), Patil (2009, 2010), Tanaka (2013), Tillemans (1999) as well as several papers in Katsura and Steinkellner (2004). 5 See, for instance, Matilal (1986) and Ganeri (2018) in the context of not just Buddhist but broader Indian philosophical traditions and Stoltz (2007) in the context of Tibetan Buddhist tradition. 6 The only exception I am aware of is Siderits (2003) who argues against the existence of the study of logic as a subject matter distinct from epistemology in Buddhist (and broader Indian) traditions. 7 Buddhologists are not necessarily steeped into the religious aspects of Buddhism. Their interest may be to unravel the thought behind the scholastic or philosophical texts just like some medieval scholars might work on the philosophy of Boethius or Duns Scotus or even Aquinas without being overtly religious in doing so. 8 See, for instance, Carpenter (2014), Cowherds (2011), Siderits (2007), and Westerhoff (2018). 9 For a pessimistic view, see Chalmers (2015). For an optimistic view, see Stoljar (2017). 10 Numerous examples can be given to show this. Given the limited space available, I refrain from mentioning them. 11 I don’t deny the claim made by Van Norden (2017) that the vast majority of philosophers haven’t shown any willingness to engage with “non-​ Western” including Buddhist material. However, I reject any suggestion that the problem here is only the unwillingness of philosophers. 12 For a similar discussion in the context of the sociology of sciences, see Law and Lin (2017). Thanks to Luis Reyes-​Galindo for the reference. 13 Frege (1893), Husserl (1900). 14 See, however, Gabbay and Woods (2008), Pelletier and Elio (2005), Pelletier et al. (2008), and Rott (2008) who have questioned anti-​psychologism. 15 A translation can be found in MacDonald (2015). 16 For this analysis of the debate, see Tillemans (2016). The context of the debate is prasaṅga which is a variation of reductio rather than trairūpya, however. 17 See Bueno and Colyvan (2004), Putnam (1979), Quine (1951). 18 See Shapiro (2000) in the case of Quine, Putnam (1994) in the case of Putnam. Bueno and Colyvan (2004) may be the only ones who hold quantum mechanics to be a counter-​example to the a priori nature of logic. 19 A translation can be found in Young (1992). 20 Resnik’s view echoes the neo-​Kantian view of Friedman (1997, 2000, 2001) who argues that there must be a priori principles that make the development and testing of empirical theories possible. 21 See MacFarlane (2002). 22 See Stoltz (2007) who brings out this aspect of Buddhist logic from a Tibetan perspective. 23 See, for instance, Kant’s Jäsche Logic.

Buddhist logic from a global perspective  283 24 MacFarlane (2004, 6) formulates it slightly differently. According to him, a bridge principle has the following form: If A, B ⊨ C then (normative claim about believing A, B, and C). MacFarlane’s formulation does not guarantee that it is logical facts that are connected with norms for reasoning as A and B do not necessarily express logical facts. I have, thus, used Steinberger’s formulation. 25 MacFarlane seems to have also abandoned the project of showing the normative status of logic via bridge principles. 26 I take it that this is one aspect of Dharmakīrti’s notion of svabhāvapratibandha (natural relation). For a discussion of svabhāvapratibandha, see, for instance, Dunne (2004). 27 See Tanaka (2019).

References Bueno, O. & Colyvan, M. (2004). Logical Non-​Apriorism and the Law of Non-​ Contradiction. In Priest, G., Beall, J. C. & Armour-​Garb, B., eds. The Law of Non-​ Contradiction: New Philosophical Essays. Oxford University Press, 156–​175. Carpenter, A. (2014). Indian Buddhist Philosophy. Routledge. Chalmers, D. (2015). Why isn’t there More Progress in Philosophy? Philosophy 90, 3–​31. Cowherds (2011) Moonshadows: Conventional Truth in Buddhist Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Dreyfus, G. B. J. (1997). Recognizing Reality. State University of New York Press. Dunne, J. (2004). Foundations of Dharmakīrti’s Philosophy. Wisdom Publications. Franco, E. (1990). Valid Reason, True Sign. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 34, 189–​208. Frege, G. (1893). Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. 1, H. Pohle, English tr. M. Beaney. In Beaney, M. ed. The Frege Reader. Blackwell Publishers, 1997, 194–​223. Friedman, M. (1997). Philosophical Naturalism. Proceeding and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71, 7–​21. Friedman, M. (2000). Transcendental Philosophy and A Priori Knowledge: A Neo-​ Kantian Perspective. In Boghossian, P. & Peacocke, C., eds. New Essays on the A Priori. Clarendon Press, 367–​383. Friedman, M. (2001). Dynamics of Reason. CLSI Publications. Gabbay, D. & Woods, J. (2008). Resource-​Origin of Nonmonotonicity. Studia Logica 88, 85–​112. Ganeri, J. (2018). Epistemology from a Sanskritic Point of View. In Stich, S., Mizumoto, M. & McCready, C., eds. Epistemology for the Rest of the World. Oxford University Press, 12–​21. Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. MIT Press. Hattori, M. (1968). Dignāga, on Perception. Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. (1900). Logische Untersuchungen. M. Niemeyer; Logical Investigations. Tr. J. N. Findlay. Routledge, 2001. Katsura, S. (1983). Dignāga on Trairūpya. Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies 32, 15–​21. Katsura, S. (1984). Dharmakīrti’s Theory of Truth. Journal of Indian Philosophy 12, 215–​235.

284  Koji Tanaka Katsura, S. & Steinkellner, E., eds. (2004) The Role of the Example (Dṛṣṭānta) in Classical Indian Logic. Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien. Universität Wien. Law, J. & Lin, W. Y. (2017). Provincializing STS: Postcoloniality, Symmetry, and Method. East Asian Science, Technology and Society 11, 211–​227. MacDonald, A. (2015). In Clear Words: The Prasannapadā Chapter One. Verlag der Österreischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. MacFarlane, J. (2002). Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism. Philosophical Review 111, 25–​65. MacFarlane, J. (2004). In What Sense (if any) is Logic Normative for Thought? Paper presented at the Central Division, APA. Matilal, B. K. (1986). Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford University Press. Matilal, B. K. (1999). The Character of Logic in India. Ed. J. Ganeri & H. Tiwari. Oxford University Press. Oetke, C. (1994a). Studies on the Doctrine of Trairūpya. Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien. Universität Wien. Oetke, C. (1994b). Praśastapāda’s Views on the “Antinomic Reason” and their Consequences for a Theory of Default Reasoning. Asiatische Studien/​ Études asiatiques 48, 845–​66. Patil, P. (2009). Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India. Columbia University Press. Patil, P. (2010). History, Philology, and the Philosophical Study of Sanskrit Texts. Journal of Indian Philosophy 38, 163–​202. Pelletier, F. J. & Elio, R. (2005). The Case for Psychologism in Default and Inheritance Reasoning. Synthese 146, 7–​35. Pelletier, F. J., Elio, R. & Hanson, P. (2008). Is Logic All in our Heads? From Naturalism to Psychologism. Studia Logica 88, 3–​66. Potter, K. (1969). Dignāga and the Development of Indian Logic. In Chi, R.S. Y., ed. Buddhist Formal Logic. Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, xliii–​xlviii. Putnam, H. (1979). The Logic of Quantum Mechanic. In Putnam, H. ed. Mathematics, Matter and Method: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 174–​197. Putnam, H. (1994). Michael Redhead on Quantum Logic. In Clark, P. & Hale, B., eds. Reading Putnam. Blackwell, 265–​280. Quine, W. V. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Philosophical Review 60, 20–​43. Resnik, M. (1997). Mathematics as a Science of Patterns. Clarendon Press. Rott, H. (2008). A New Psychologism in Logic? Reflections from the Point of View of Belief Revision. Studia Logica 88, 113–​136. Shapiro, S. (2000). The Status of Logic. In Boghossian, P. & Peacocke, C., eds. New Essays on the A Priori. Oxford University Press, 333–​366. Siderits, M. (2003). Deductive, Inductive, Both or Neither? Journal of Indian Philosophy 31, 303–​321. Siderits, M. (2007). Buddhism as Philosophy. Ashgate. Steinberger, F. (2016). Explosion and the Normativity of Logic. Mind 125, 385–​419. Stoljar, D. (2017). Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism. Oxford University Press.

Buddhist logic from a global perspective  285 Stoltz, J. (2007). Gettier and Factivity in Indo-​Tibetan Epistemology. Philosophical Quarterly 57, 394–​415. Tanaka, K. (2013). Buddhist Philosophy of Logic. In Emmanuel, S., ed. Blackwell Companion to Buddhist Philosophy. Wiley-​Blackwell, 320–​330. Tanaka, K. (2019). Priest’s Anti-​Exceptionalism, Candrakīrti and Paraconsistency. In Başkent, C. & Ferguson, T., eds. Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency. Springer, 127–​138. Tillemans, T. (1999). Scripture, Logic, Language. Wisdom Publications. Tillemans, T. (2000). Dharmakīrti’s Pramāṇavārttika. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Tillemans, T. (2016). How do Mādhyamikas Think? Wisdom Publications. Van Norden, B. (2017). Taking Back Philosophy. Columbia University Press. Weatherson, B. (2019). Normative Externalism. Oxford University Press. Westerhoff, J. (2018). The Golden Age of Indian Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Young, J. M. (1992). Lectures on Logic. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 25

Perspectives on the Indian mathematical tradition Smita Sirker

Brief historical sketch of Indian mathematics Any examination of ancient and medieval Indian mathematical advancements does not present us with a uniform, undisputed account of the various achievements attributed to some outstanding mathematicians of those times. Mathematical tradition in India is said to date back to the Vedic period, when mathematics consisted of geometric techniques needed for the construction of vedis (altars) and agnis (fire places) for yajñas (performance of fire rituals). Rich mathematical developments are found in the Jaina tradition, primarily motivated by its elaborate cosmography in which mathematics played an integral part. Another dominant mathematical tradition has its source in astronomy, known as the Siddhānta tradition which developed and flourished over seven centuries starting with Āryabhaṭa I (476–​550 ce), who is regarded as the founder of scientific astronomy. The development of mathematics in ancient and medieval India is divided into four periods (Bag 1979, 3; Joseph 2011): (i) Vedic (c.1500 bce to 200 bce), (ii) Post-​Vedic (c.200 bce to 400 ce), (iii) Early Medieval (c.400 to 1200 ce), and (iv) Late Medieval (c.1200 to 1800 ce). Each period had its share of progress, with varying degrees of mathematical contributions. The literature of Vedic civilization, collectively known as Sūtra literature, went through four phases of development (Bag 1979, 3): (i) the Saṃhitās were lyrical collections of hymns, prayers, incantations, and sacrificial formulas (Four Saṃhitās—​ Ṛg-​Veda (“Praise-​Knowledge”), Sāma-​Veda (“Chant-​Knowledge”), Yajur-​ Veda (“Sacrifice-​ Knowledge”), and Atharva-​Veda (“Knowledge of the Atharvan-​priest”)); (ii) the Brāhmaṇas were theological and ritual treatises; (iii) the Āraṇyakas were metaphysical appendices of the Brāhmaṇas; and Upaniṣads were philosophical texts concerning Absolute Reality/​One; and (iv) the Vedāṅgas1 were classified into six branches of knowledge: (a) śikhṣā (phonetics); (b) kalpa (rules for rituals and ceremonials); (c) vyākaraṇa (grammar); (d) nirukta (etymology); (e) chanda (science of meters); and (f) jyotiṣa (astronomy). Two Vedāṅgas, kalpa and jyotiṣa, are the important

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sources of mathematics from the Vedic period, written in the form of sūtras—​ which are like short rules, “a peculiar style of composition characterised by utmost brevity and rigid systematization to preserve the cultural heritages of the Brāhmaṇas in a manageable form” (Bag 1979, 4). On the contributions of Kalpasūtra, Jospeh (2011, 324) remarks that this ritual literature “includes Śrautasūtra, which gave directions for constructing sacrificial fires at different times of the year.” It dealt with the measurement and construction of sacrificial altars, and came to be known as the Śulbasūtras. Most of Vedic geometry originates from these sūtras. Not many original contributions are traced during the Post-​Vedic period, though several works of mathematics and astronomy were composed on the basis of the earlier Vedic period. Both Jaina and Hindu works are found during this period. Umāsvātī, a renowned Jaina metaphysician and mathematician from the famous Kusumpura school of mathematics, wrote Tatvārthādhigama Sūtra Bhāṣya, where we find the approximation of √10, of π, and substantial contributions to the geometry of circles. The Early Medieval period was marked by revival and maximum activity of Indian mathematics, which witnessed works on systematization. During this phase of development, astronomy separated from mathematics as jyotiṣa; geometry that was part of a separate group of sciences (Kalpasūtra) became an integral part of gaṇita, which eventually included arithmetic, algebra, and geometry; and trigonometry came within the scope of jyotiṣa. Amongst the Jaina and Buddhist schools, gaṇita was known as saṃkhyāna (the science of numbers). The Bakshālī manuscript (roughly c.400 ce), written in Sāradā script, contained rules with illustrative examples and solutions for many arithmetical, algebraic, and geometrical (including mensuration) problems. Some renowned scholars of this period were Āryabhaṭa I (Āryasiddhānta (laghu); Āryasiddhānta (mahā)), Varāhamihira (Pañcasiddhāntikā), Bhāskara I (Āryabhaṭīyabhāṣya; Mahābhāskarīya), Brahmagupta (Brāhmasphuṭasiddhānta, Khaṇḍakhādyaka), Mahāvīra (Gaṇitasārasaṃgraha), Āryabhaṭa II (Mahābhāskarīya), Bhāskara II (Līlāvatī, Bījagaṇita, Siddhāntaśiromaṇi) amongst many others. During the Late Medieval period, several commentaries were written with some new developments. Bhāskara II’s work became extremely popular and many commentaries were written on Līlāvatī, Bījagaṇita, and Siddhāntaśiromaṇi. The great forerunner of the Kerala school was Mādhava of Saṅgamagrāma, renowned for his expertise on the celestial sphere. Nīlakaṇṭha Somasutvan, another prominent scholar, wrote a well-​known commentary on Āryabhaṭīya. Indian mathematics is replete with original works and scholarly commentaries over several centuries and this limited historical sketch barely touches on few mathematical achievements. This essay now turns to the notion of “proof ” in Indian mathematics, showing why this notion cannot be compared to the Greco-​European notion of proof.

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The concept of “proof ” in Indian mathematics (and Indian logic) The debate surrounding the question of whether Indian mathematics (and Indian logic) had any system of rigorous proof similar to the Western concept of proof and systematization raised two related concerns—​whether classical Indian mathematics was completely devoid of any method of proof; or whether it merely lacked the specifically Greco-​European notion of rigorous logical proof. Some historians of mathematics (Boyer 1949; Kline 1972; Weil 1984) held the former view—​that despite certain mathematical achievements, Indian mathematics lacked logical rigor, as reflected in the following observation by Kline (1972, 190): the Hindus were interested in and contributed to the arithmetical and computational activities of mathematics rather than to the deductive patterns. … There is much good procedure and technical facility, but no evidence that they considered proof at all. They had rules, but apparently no logical scruples. According to Boyer (1949, 61), the term gaṇita, which literally means “science of calculation,” seems to characterize the preference of Indian mathematicians, who were attracted by the “arithmetical and computational aspects rather than the geometrical and rational features of the subject.” His reading of Indian mathematics suggested that mathematicians of that classical age were more interested in the “tricks” that were possible with numbers, and their interconnections, rather than the “thoughts the mind can produce,” such that “neither Euclidean geometry nor Aristotelian logic made a strong impression upon them.” This depiction of classical Indian mathematics attributed mathematical achievements to merely technical prowess, devoid of any systematization and need of proof, implying a lack of abstract thought and formal (ideal objective) findings in mathematics. Before accepting this blanket characterization of Indian mathematics, we must underline a subtle yet crucial idea; namely, that mathematical proofs need not be of a singular kind (as a universal given), as the very “notion” of proof, and its method, can differ across diverse mathematical practices and be based on various metaphysical and epistemological motivations.2 One finds this, for example, in the development of Aristotelian logic, which arose from a certain set of epistemological and metaphysical tenets. The latter led to an independent conception of logic that was concerned with the science of reasoning in an abstract way, hyphenating validity and soundness. In Aristotelian logic (the logic of categorical propositions), the concern was formal validity, where the relationship between premise and conclusion is an abstract logical relation, thereby separating “formal truth” from “material truth.”

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Similarly, one can argue that Indian logic is also deeply rooted in its philosophical doctrines. As Matilal remarks (1998, 2), “Logic as the study of the form of correct arguments and inference-​patterns, developed in India from the methodology of philosophical debate.” Consequently, its mode(s) of proof, stemming from its own organic context of emergence and growth, naturally differed from that in the West. For instance, Nyāya logic—​being a logic of cognitions (jñāna), not of propositions—​has no concept of formal validity as distinguished from material truth. However, we claim that this is not necessarily a weakness or drawback of Indian systems of thought, but rather, given the diverse philosophical motivations underlying the development of logical systems, we would reasonably expect to find diverse methodological strategies: and this is just what we find. We argue that the kind of critique of Indian mathematics (and logic) outlined above takes the Greco-​European notion of proof (taken here as the Western notion of proof) as the only acceptable mode of proof; and therefore, harbors a deep-​seated expectation (if not also an implicit demand) that every other system, to gain credibility as a discipline, must also manifest the spirit and requirements of this kind of proof. We show, following the writings of Bhattacharyya and others, why the Western notion of proof (the formal axiomatic, logico-​deductive method) was not reflected in Indian thought (in Indian logic, developed within Indian philosophical systems; and Indian mathematics) for reasons that can be traced to the epistemological concerns underlying Indian philosophy and its logic(s). However, this does not necessarily imply that Indian mathematical and logical reasoning was any less “rigorous,” since we are claiming that there is no singular notion of “proof ” and hence, no singular criterion of “rigor.” It must be clarified that the so-​called lack of formal character in Indian mathematics and logic does not take away the possibility that Indian logic(s), for example, do subscribe to a minimal notion of formal treatment (prohibiting random ways to draw inferences), like deciding on the number of constituents (avayava/​steps) in an inference (whether the inference should be a five-​step argument in the cognitive causal chain, as in Nyāya logic; or a three-​step argument, as in Buddhist logic; see Tanaka’s contribution in this volume); or what properties must an adequate hetu (the probans, the sign or the ground of inference) possess in any case of inference.3 Western modern logic, though initiated by Aristotle, now believes that the “formal” character—​where validity is determined by the meaning of logical constants and the positions they occupy in the premises and conclusion of an argument—​is primarily dependent on the structure/​form of the propositions rather than its content. Indian logic, without having recourse to this kind of formal treatment (form of an argument) focuses on the content and the causal sequence of the steps (content sequence) in an argument. The blinkered, fractured vision of Indian mathematics which evaluates it in terms of the Greco-​European tradition of proof is perhaps due, in part,

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to two broad historical factors: (i) inadequate depth of study of the original texts along with their commentaries, as observed by Srinivas (2005); and (ii) as shown by philosophers like Bhattacharyya, the absence of an understanding of the connection between methods of proof in Indian mathematics and Indian philosophy (specifically, Indian logic which as a sub-​discipline of Indian philosophy developed methods and principles of valid argumentation and acted as a medium of inferential knowledge). The critique of Indian mathematics stems from an inadequate emphasis on the original works of Indian mathematicians. As Srinivas (2005, 214) remarks, “A major reason for our lack of comprehension, not merely of the Indian notion of proof, but also of the entire methodology of Indian mathematics, is the scant attention paid to the source-​works so far.” The constricted and often misleading perspective is severely contested by other scholars (Colebrooke 1817; Whish 1834; Srinivas 2005; Bhattacharyya 1987). Colebrooke observes that Hindu mathematicians proved mathematical propositions both algebraically/​rāśigata and geometrically/​kṣetragata, which Bhāskarācārya II (c.1114–​1200 ce)4 mentions in Bījagaṇita, his work on algebra, where “he gives modes of proof of a remarkable method for the solution of indeterminate problems, which involve a factum of two unknown quantities” (Colebrooke 1817, xvii), Bhāskarācārya II’s other work Līlāvatī is on arithmetic, containing useful propositions in geometry and arithmetic. Srinivas points to the meager number of texts published out of a corpus of more than 100,000 manuscripts on Jyotiḥśāstra. The published texts can hardly capture the entire methodological tradition of mathematical discourse. He further claims that much of the methodological discussions found in the commentaries are overlooked by modern scholarship, narrowly focusing only on the original texts. Bhāskarācārya I, Bhāskarācārya II, Parameśvara, and others wrote major treatises of their own works and on the works of earlier scholars. In these commentaries, Srinivas argues, we find “detailed upapatti-​s (demonstrations) of the results and procedures discussed in the original texts, as also a discussion of the various methodological and philosophical issues” (Srinivas 2005, 215); and hence even within the limited published source-​ works one can trace an impressive corpus of upapatti-​s containing detailed demonstrations. For instance, Kṛṣṇa Daivajña in his commentary Bījapallava on Bījagaṇita of Bhāskāracārya II writes (Srinivas 2005, 218–​219): How can we state without proof (upapatti) that twice the product of two quantities when added or subtracted from the sum of their squares is equal to the square of the sum or difference of those quantities? That it is seen to be so in a few instances is indeed of no consequence. … Hence, the fact that a result is seen to be true in some cases is of no consequence, as it is possible that one would come across contrary instances (vyabhicāra) also. Hence it is necessary that one would have to provide a proof (yukti) for the rule …

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It is clear that validity of mathematical principles/​ assertions remains unwarranted by mere observation of confirmatory cases, for one contrary instance could entirely negate a mathematical claim. Thus, one needs yukti (justification) for the rule and upapatti-​s primarily play the role of explanation and validation. Mathematicians indeed went beyond mere instantiations of a mathematical rule/​claim to demonstrate why the rule/​ claim holds. The reason for absence of “proofs” in texts of arithmetic is implicit in Bhāskarācārya II’s account of the difference between arithmetic/​gaṇita and algebra/​bījagaṇita. Both branches deal with symbols, but in arithmetic the values of the symbols are vyakta (known and definitely determinate), whereas in algebra they are avyakta (unknown and indefinite). Bhāskarācārya II says that “Mathematicians have declared algebra to be computation attended with demonstration: else there would be no distinction between arithmetic and algebra.” (Datta and Singh 1938, part II, 3). Thus, it seems that the principles used in arithmetic are demonstrated in algebra; and these demonstrations are more aptly termed as “rationale” by Datta and Singh, perhaps to preserve the distinctness between upapatti (“proof ”/​“demonstration” in the Indian sense) and the Western notion of proof. The yukti, as detailed demonstrations (upapatti-​s) function as the “rationale” that vindicates the principles of arithmetic. Srinivas gives instances of upapatti-​s (in the avyakta method and the geometrical method) of different mathematical results, such as Gaṇeśa’s two upapatti-​s for the rule concerning the square of the hypotenuse of a right-​ angled triangle and Nīlakaṇṭha’s proof for the sum of an infinite geometric series.5 Bhattacharyya (1987, 194–​195) contends that the upapatti-​s found “in Hindu algebra are radically different in nature from proofs of Western mathematics.” He says that these demonstrations can be regarded as proofs in the Western sense only if the premises from which demonstrations are given “are themselves proved or accepted as axioms.” However, he argues that in Indian mathematics we do not find any list of self-​evident propositions considered as basic premises following which other truths of mathematics can be derived, and this results in an absence of systematization of either geometry or algebra. He shows that Euclid’s axiomatization of geometry was influenced by the Aristotelian concept of science as a systematic study of a few axioms taken as self-​evident truths. Thus, any system will be constituted of truths of two kinds: ones which do not need proof (exhaustively enumerated self-​evident axioms) and ones which require proof. To show why in Indian mathematics we do not have any list of self-​evident propositions, Bhattacharyya (1987, 196) looks into the epistemological doctrines that led to the development of Indian logic without a formal system. Indian philosophy had no formal system of logic because “there is no Indian philosophy which holds that some truths do not require proof while others do.” Either the systems accept svataḥprāmāṇyavāda, the doctrine that all

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(true) knowledge is self-​evidently true; or they accept parataḥprāmāṇyavāda, the doctrine that all (true) knowledge requires proof.6 No system accepts a mix of these two doctrines where some truths are a priori while some are not. “Hence science in the Aristotelian sense has remained unknown in India.” Bhattacharyya clarifies that, though there is no direct link between Indian mathematics and Indian philosophy, the absence of systematization in mathematics can be seen in the light of the motivations and reasons that played a role in the non-​systematization of logic within Indian philosophy. He shows why the “necessity” of the Western notion of proof may not have bothered Indian minds both in mathematics and philosophy, as these disciplines strongly hinged on certain metaphysical and epistemological commitments that were contrary to the Western ones. To comprehend the methodological approach and the processes of validation in Indian mathematics, one must philosophically engage with the underlying discourse on epistemological issues and the development of logic in the classical systems of Indian philosophy. Bhattacharyya (1987, 195) remarks that in India there is a strong resemblance in the applied methods of proof in mathematics and logic. Perhaps this “resemblance,” despite the relatively independent development of mathematics and philosophy, is due to the empirical fact that, within the intellectual milieu of that period, many disciplines, be it natural sciences, mathematics, Ayurveda (science of medicine), astronomy, etc. were implicitly aware of, and subscribed to many of the core metaphysical and epistemological tenets within various prevailing systems of philosophy. To understand the similarity between Indian mathematics and logic in their methods of proof one must look more closely at the development of Indian logic, which never emerged as a distinct, independent subject. On the contrary, logic was always embedded in epistemology. Matilal (2005, 96) remarks, “On account of this genesis, Indian logic imbibed an epistemological character which was never removed throughout its history.” The roots of Indian logic are traced to the traditions of vāda and pramāṇa. The Vāda tradition is concerned with laying down the principles of argumentation to be applied in debates, whereas the pramāṇa tradition is concerned with inference as a source of sound knowledge. Mohanty and Chatterjee (2009, 903) argue that “no Indian philosophical systems take a purely formal approach to inference or inferential knowledge,” and given the embeddedness of Indian logic in epistemological tenets, the former developed certain characterizations which are absent from Western logic. One such characterization was the “truth-​preserving” and “truth-​giving” aspects of inferential knowledge. Since inference is taken by most Indian schools as a valid means of knowledge—​a way of knowing, as a pramāṇa (the instrumental cause of valid cognition)—​it is not enough for a conclusion to merely be a derivative from its premise set, but it must also be, of necessity,

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true. “It is expected of such a theory of inference that it lays down conditions of validity/​consistency as well as conditions of soundness” (Mohanty and Chatterjee 2009, 903–​904). Unlike Western formal logic where conditions of validity are independent of the conditions of soundness, in Indian logic such separation was never maintained; for inference was a way of knowing the world, and therefore, ensuring validity was not a sufficient epistemic demand: soundness and epistemic advancements were also to be guaranteed. The Western formal logical system in its primary focus on preserving the distinction between truth and validity seems to put a pause on the issue of inference, tying it up with knowledge of the world. We claim, taking cues from the explanations regarding why Indian logic never developed as a formal system, that it would be unreasonable to expect proofs in Indian mathematics to be formulated in line with the Greco-​ European model. Bhattacharyya provides an intricate analysis of why the Western concept of proof is unknown in Indian mathematics and therefore is not found in the mathematical and logical systems in India. He argues that the Platonic distinction between knowledge and opinion, reason and sense, serves as the basis of the Western notion of proof. On the Platonic conception, reason is understood as yielding knowledge (Episteme) that is superior to opinion (Doxa). This separation of opinion from knowledge, relegating reason to a superior instrumental means of knowledge, leads to a further “distinction between contingent and necessary truths, between material truth and formal truth, between rational knowledge which can be proved and empirical knowledge which can only be verified.” Contrary to this approach, no Indian philosophy accords “reason” (in its Western sense) a status that is logically superior to the senses. Bhattacharyya (1987, 193) says, “the very concept of reason is unknown in Indian philosophy.” The difference between perception and inference is on the ground that inferential knowledge is acquired through vyāpti-​jñāna, another type of knowledge, while perception is not. He reiterates that there is no corresponding term in Sanskrit for “proof.” Pramāṇa, loosely translated as “proof ” and used in vernaculars, has a completely different sense in Indian philosophy. Pramāṇa means “the instrumental cause of knowledge” and not formally true knowledge. In Indian theories of pramāṇa, pratyaksha (perception) is understood as an independent means of knowledge, whereas other terms, like anumāna (inference), upamāna (analogy), etc., are in some ways dependent on perception. Unlike Plato’s treatment of “reason” as always superior to the “senses,” reason was never considered as superior to knowledge provided by the senses. The development of a particular system of proof, as argued, is not insulated from the very intentions and goals responsible for the emergence of that discipline, implicitly affecting the very selection of methodologies recognized in a tradition.

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Notes 1 Joseph (2011, 323) considers Vedāṅgas as the “limbs” or appendixes to the main Vedas. 2 By diverse mathematical practices, I suggest the very possibility of having various methodological approaches in mathematics. 3 In Buddhist logic, an adequate hetu must have three characteristics: (i) a sign must be present in the subject-​locus (pakṣa) where the signified would be inferred; (ii)  it  should be known to occur in similar locations (sapakṣa/​homologues); and (iii) it should not be known to occur in dissimilar locations (vipakṣa/​heterologues). For details see Chatterjee and Sirker (2010, 319) and Tanaka, Chapter 24 in this volume. 4 Timeline reference consulted from Bag (1979, 26). 5 For further details see Srinivas (2005). 6 Theories of prāmāṇyavāda broadly deal with the determination of conditions of truth of knowledge. They primarily center around two questions: (i) what are the conditions that generate truth; and (ii) how is the truth of any knowledge known? For the Nyāya, both the generation and knowledge of truth are extrinsic (parataḥ), whereas for the Mīmāmsā both are intrinsic (svataḥ).

References Bag, A. K. (1979). Mathematics in Ancient and Medieval India. Chaukhamba Orientalia. Bhattacharyya, S. (1987). Doubt, Belief and Knowledge. ICPR and Allied Publishers. Boyer, C. B. (1949). The History of Calculus and its Conceptual Development. Dover Publications. Chatterjee, A. and Sirker, S. (2010). Diṅnāga and Mental Models: A Reconstruction. Philosophy East and West 60 (3), 315–​340. Colebrooke, H. T. (1817). Algebra with Arithmetic and Mensuration from the Sanscrit of Brahmagupta and Bhāscara. J. Murray. Datta, B. and Singh, A. V. (1938). History of Hindu Mathematics Part II. Algebra. Motilal Benarsi Das. Joseph, G. G. (2011). The Crest of the Peacock: Non-​European Roots of Mathematics. 3rd ed., Princeton University Press. Kline, M. (1972). Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. 1. Oxford University Press. Matilal, B. K. (1998). The Character of Logic in India. Ed. J. Ganeri & H. Tiwari. SUNY Press. Matilal, B. K. (2005). Epistemology, Logic and Grammar in Indian Philosophical Analysis. Ed. J. Ganeri. Oxford University Press. Mohanty, J. N. & Chatterjee, A. (2009). Indian logic: Introduction. In Haaparanta, L., ed. The Development of Modern Logic. Oxford University Press, 903–​962. Srinivas, M. D. (2005). Proofs in Indian mathematics. In Emch, G. G. et al., eds. Contributions to the History of Indian Mathematics. Hindustan Book Agency, 209–​248.

The Indian mathematical tradition  295 Weil, A. (1984). Number Theory: An Approach Through History of Hammurapi to Legendre. Birkhauser Whish, C. M. (1834). XXXIII. On the Hindu Quadrature of the Circle, and the Infinite Series of the Proportion of the Circumference to the Diameter Exhibited in the Four Śāstras, the Tantra Sangraham, Yucti Bhāshā, Carana Padhati, and Sadratnamāla. Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3, 509–​523.

Chapter 26

Science as craftwork with integrity Harry Collins

Introduction As a philosophically inclined sociologist I have looked at a few sciences and I will present some conclusions here, many drawn from my 45-​year study of gravitational wave (GW) detection physics.1 It turns out that detailed sociological and historical studies of science show that even the most exact and glorious episodes are often not as they are described in the public domain nor as thought about by many scientists and philosophers. A striking example is the famous Michelson-​Morley experiment conducted in 1887, which is usually said to have decisively proved the constancy of the speed of light, giving rise to an anomaly not resolved until Einstein came up with the theory of relativity. Closer examination shows that the Michelson-​Morley experiment was not a decisive proof; that it was, rather, a failed attempt to measure the speed of the Earth through the ether; that it was never completed; and that it was still being experimentally disputed at least until the 1930s.2 But even if the standard accounts of this experiment and its many equivalents, which we might refer to as the “crown jewels” of science, were true, and all that careful historical and sociological work had not been done, it would still be obvious that most science that finds itself in the public domain is not like this. Most science in the public domain is beset with huge numbers of variables with chaotic relationships between at least some of them, often including social and behavioral factors which have complex feedback relationships with the policies that emerge from the science.3 This leaves models of science that turn on the crown jewels vulnerable to a disappointed public when they encounter the sciences that concern them, such as weather forecasting, economic forecasting, combating the spread of diseases, and so on. These sciences look like failures when compared to the crown jewels. The Covid pandemic, which, fortuitously(!) presented itself immediately after a first draft of this article was written, illustrates many of the points in it. Though there is enough in Covid science to tell us when governments are going wrong in a few respects, such as failures to arrange large numbers of

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tests and to manage testing and tracing and failure to buy enough protective equipment for front-​line health workers, there isn’t enough to tell governments with any certainty what to do and when to do it in terms of lockdowns. And if one group of scientists did come up with a plan another group would be sure to disagree. For instance, what is the correct balance of ill-​health caused by Covid and ill-​health caused by lockdown (e.g., cancelling existing cancer diagnoses and treatments and long-​term damage to health services caused by a collapsed economy)? There is no scientific answer to questions like this and, if the public expect one, the danger is that disappointment will leave the public more ready to be persuaded by populist politicians to reject scientific expertise, and, indeed, expertise of all kinds, further eroding the borderline between populism and fascism. We need, then, a justification for science that is not based on crown-​jewels-​ like success, or other kinds of magic, like Stephen Hawking’s and others’ incomprehensible books and claimed discoveries of “the face of god” or the “god particle.” We need a justification that is not based on science’s success. We need, if not an unqualified unconditional love of science, a love that is unconditional enough to allow for scientists to disagree and for scientific findings and judgments to be wrong: we need to love a science that is unlike religion and magic because it is allowed to fail. We need to be ready to love science’s failures as well as its successes—​simply showing how to love scientific success is far too easy a task for philosophy. This love cannot be completely unconditional because it will be justified by science’s ideals, not by every one of its practices. We should not love corrupt science—​science where the results are conditioned by the power of money and political pressure, as a disturbing amount of science is these days. The science we should love will be driven by the search for truth even if the purity of the motive is hard to maintain because the forces that subvert it are unnoticeable. But the science we should love will never knowingly subvert the formative motive; when it is shown that the motive is unattainable, the science we should love will still aspire to attain it. The same applies to truth itself: the truth may not be found, but the goal must still be to find it. The reason to love science in spite of the unattainability of its goals is that, unlike so many institutions that run on greed and the quest for power, it is an institution in which truth, and therefore integrity, are foundational. We should love science other than that which is visibly corrupt, because basing political decisions upon it gives rise to the best decisions even when they are not necessarily the right decisions. They are the best decisions because they are based on the search for truth using the best available methods of observation and experimentation. Science is “craftwork with integrity.” If you want the best possible decision, have it informed by those who base their advice on craftwork with integrity. And if you want democracy to survive, and not be displaced by the spurious notion that elected leaders represent a higher authority because they represent a will of the people which cannot be

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gainsaid by experts, have it model its decisions on the decisions of scientific experts and have it accept scientific expertise, uncertain and fallible though it may be, as a check and balance on the actions of elected authority.4 The second part of this chapter will develop the science and democracy theme a little further while the first part will try to explain why sciences that depend too heavily on statistics can go terribly wrong, but that fixing them is likely to be a matter of improving their statistical procedures and propensities in only a few cases, such as medical drug trials. Applying this statistical fix to most of the sciences is not going to work. What is needed to solve most of science’s problems is better craftwork with integrity.

A lesson about statistical confidence levels as a warrant for scientific claims: tangible versus inferential experiments and observations In 2005 Ioannidis published a paper called “Why Most Published Research Findings are False.” He was referring to medical science and explained that the 2-​sigma (“less than 1 chance in 20”) criterion for a result being due to sampling error, which was widespread across medical science as the bar to be surmounted for publication, was unreliable. Any such result is all too easily overwhelmed by systematic errors. We also know that there is a “replication crisis”—​many or most results that rely on the 2-​sigma criterion cannot be replicated—​something that seems to have come as a great shock to, for example, psychologists. But we can learn from physics that the replication crisis should not have come as a shock to anyone. The criterion for publication of a “discovery” in physics is 5 standard deviations, or 1 chance in 3.5 million of the result being due to random sampling error, and even that is not proof against mistakes as the occasional well-​publicized example of failure illustrates.5 As a result of experience, physics has steadily increased its standards, from 3-​ sigma in the 1960s. When I asked a past director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-​Wave Observatory (LIGO) why this change had come about, Jay Marx repeated how it had been explained to him (Collins 2013, 99): Years ago, difficult experiments were done to study the weak interaction. Some of those experiments with published high significance—​3-​sigma and greater—​later turned out to be wrong, while experiments that had a 5-​sigma effect mostly turned out to be right. The result was a common wisdom—​or mythology—​that one should not be confident in a result unless it was a 5-​sigma effect. I was taught that as a student. … When you have a quoted confidence level, it assumes you know all your systematic errors, which may not always be true. A 5-​sigma confidence level seemed to give one enough confidence because it gives a wide enough berth to cover the unknowns.

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The escalation of the discovery-​publication criterion of physics, and the explanation in this quotation, arises out of physics being pretty well the only science that has enough data to run this kind of real-​life experiment on the trustworthiness of statistics. Physics does lots of experiments with machines that generate lots of data so it can, effectively, try out various confidence levels and see which one works and which ones do not. It turns out that, if you are relying on a confidence level, it has to be very high to have any chance of being reliable: that is not because things that happen 1 time in 3.5 million do not happen much, but because there’s a lot more going on in an experiment than random chance. The literature that has followed on from Ioannides’s 2005 article and the replication crisis includes suggestions for all manner of cures, such as raising the standard criterion to 3-​sigma or reducing publication pressure so as to encourage more careful work, but physics shows that these are also going to be hopeless endeavors. Physics has already rejected the 3-​sigma standard, and physics is almost certainly less vulnerable to systematic errors than medicine or psychology and the like. Indeed, it is likely that sciences with low statistical standards compared with physics are even more vulnerable to systematic mistakes, not less. The future looks glum, therefore, because almost no science but physics can gather enough data to get its statistics to 5-​sigma; even 3-​sigma is hard to reach for most sciences. Another popular response to the replication crisis, supported by Ioannides himself, is of “metascience”—​which turns on the aggregation of all experimental work in a domain and a meta-​analysis of the statistics and procedures. This has become a well-​funded movement.6 The danger is that meta-​analysis will be taken as another “magic bullet” enabling science to become the exact thing that so many people want it to be. It is because the metascience movement is becoming so successful, yet still will not remove the likelihood of public disappointment because it promises too much for too many sciences, that we should look at craftwork with integrity as an alternative. Ioannides’s initial paper grew out of the analysis of medical research and one can imagine metascience having some application in sciences where so little is understood that statistical analysis in the absence of deep understanding is the only way forward. Medical drug trials are such an area because measuring the efficacy of a drug is confounded by the power of the placebo effect, so it pays to use double-​blind testing on many, many, drugs even when the detailed biological effects may not be well understood. Even here, though, if one is pulling together many experiments where the statistical result is overwhelmed by systematic errors, and double-​blind testing is not always as blind as it seems, adding the numbers together will not produce sound results—​“garbage in, garbage out.”7 But even if metascience does produce more reassurance where inaction would be irresponsible, as is often the case where health is concerned, to take such a domain as representing science as a whole is dangerous.

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Where sciences depend less on statistics alone, things are, however, not as glum as they seem. Better science usually depends on more than better statistics even when this may not be apparent. Here I provide some examples.8 Two detections of gravitational waves Consider the first detection of a gravitational wave (GW), which appeared to be a matter of finding a coincident pair of signals on two huge interferometers that were separated by 2,000 miles, and calculating the statistical likelihood of that coincidence turning up by chance—​and making sure it was less than 1 in 3.5 million. That calculation took a long time and involved a certain amount of heart-​searching about procedures, since the first pass produced 4.9 sigma not 5 and some slight adjustment of procedure was necessary to get it to more than 5. Since I was involved in the whole episode, I can tell you that the scientists themselves were convinced they had seen something real within a couple of days and this was not to do with the statistics but with the way the waveforms in the two detectors corresponded almost exactly. That correspondence was part of a long calculation, but you could see it without any calculation at all and see that it corresponded to what you would expect if it was caused by two massive stars spiraling into each other. Because interferometers follow waveforms in real time (unlike the earlier generation of resonant-​bars, which could look only for excesses of energy in coincidence), there was something “tangible” about the signal—​it wasn’t just a statistical unlikelihood. Here’s a couple of quotes from scientists talking to me about the event. The first one is from just a few days after the signal first showed itself on the detectors, on September 14 (Collins 2017, 15): Mon., Sept. 21, 12:25: A [founder of the field] told me that that graph was the single most important piece of evidence that convinced him that this was real. I’m in that camp, too. The second one is from November, after the statistics had been worked out (Collins 2017, 166): Look, they formally established greater than 4.9—​it’s fucking a lot greater than 4.9, it’s 5 [as you can see from the graph]. But somebody thought there would be some jerk who’d quote 4.9 and say it’s not 5. So we came up with an answer that doesn’t offend our standards very much, if at all, that lets us say 5.1 instead of 4.9 and we stopped some bullshit. Exactly the same situation applied to the second most exciting discovery, an account of which was published in 2017 (Collins 2019, 120ff.). This was the discovery of a GW signal from an inspiraling binary neutron star system. It

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was the second most important discovery so far because it was a new source that could be correlated with its electromagnetic emissions, such as gamma rays, whereas black-​hole inspirals are dark in the electromagnetic spectrum. In one of the two detectors that saw the signal, the trace was dominated by a large glitch. This was grounds for a veto of the signal according to the statistical protocols and, indeed, the signal was vetoed by the automatic detection program. So, applying the very strictest standards of statistical punctiliousness would have consigned it to oblivion. Further examination of the signal indicated that it was strong and interesting, so the glitch was filtered out and the result published with no objections. As a respondent told me on September 29, 2017 (Collins 2017, 120): We did have formal vetoes that vetoed this event, but we’ve gotten used to looking into interesting things even after formal vetoes … we’ve gotten used to not feeling that those automatic procedures are the last word. … we had practice in trusting our guts over rules. I actually am surprised that not a single person (of whom I’m aware, anyway) expressed qualms in going ahead. … but the tenor of the discussion all along was that it “smelled” correct from the start, and we heard nothing to dissuade us. Just as you summarize, we could look at the Q scan ([a graphical representation of the signal which is in this case] the best representation of the [tangible] character of this measurement) and assure ourselves that we scientists could understand this event better than any automatic procedure that we’d previously invented. Sociological experiments and tangibility The same lesson can be learned from some sociological experiments conducted by myself and my colleagues in the 2000s. We conducted “Imitation Games,” which are Turing Tests, but with the computer replaced by a human pretending to be a kind of person they are not. We were testing the idea of “interactional expertise,” which is the claim that one can learn to understand the world of another kind of person by being immersed in their spoken discourse for long enough. We started by comparing color-​blind persons pretending to be color perceivers with color-​perceivers pretending to be color-​blind. The theory says that the color blind will do better than the color-​perceivers because they spend their lives immersed in the talk of color-​perceivers whereas the reverse is not the case. The experiment was a success. Then we tried persons with perfect pitch pretending not to possess it and vice versa, where we expected those with perfect pitch to be the most successful (think about it), which they were. Later we showed that those blind from an early age did better at pretending to be sighted than the sighted who were pretending to be blind. If we aggregated the support for our hypothesis across all three experiments, we were able to generate huge statistical significance.9

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We knew, however, that a lot of what we were doing did not meet physics standards of statistical punctiliousness. For example, the number of cases was very small, even though the statistics were highly significant, because the effect sizes were so large. Nevertheless, since each experiment involved people who knew what the outcome was supposed to be and who were continually guiding the players about the experimental protocols, there could have been all kinds of subtle clues guiding the pretenders and the judges. Nevertheless, we were certain the results were sound. Once more, the reason we were certain the results were right was not the statistics but the actual content of the dialogues between participants. In reading the dialogues we were learning all kinds of new things about the color-​blind, the blind, and those with perfect pitch—​new things that were already known to the expert judges and were quickly leading to very rapid correct guesses by the judges; we could not have been prompting those guesses because the content was so fascinating and new. We could see the experiments working just as they should have worked: it was “tangible.” Why did we bother with the statistical analysis? Because it was expected of us—​just as 5-​sigma is expected of the physicists—​and because it supported what we were arguing. But this support was not exactly a “proof ”; it was more in the way of an illustration—​as though the statistics filled the role of a diagram in a published argument, making things clearer and more persuasive. It was the post-​hoc search for the justification of what we had done that first led us to understand the difference between the tangible and the inferential when it comes to the justification of experimental and observational results and the role of statistical analysis within them. The airplane event Gravitational wave detection physicists, when they are exercising statistical punctiliousness, have a rule about carefully stating and then freezing their statistical protocols before looking at the bulk of their data. This makes it impossible to adjust the protocol retrospectively so as to favor one result or another. But since statistical protocols need to be tuned using real data so as to be maximally effective at extracting signal from noise, the tuning is done on a small subset of data—​the “playground”—​before the protocol is frozen and the “box is opened” on the bulk of the data. In 2004, this rule gave rise to a problem. It involved not a claim about a positive detection but rather a claim about the upper limit of the strength of gravitational waves hitting the earth but this also depended on a decision about whether a certain potential signal was in fact noise. The box was opened on a stretch of data after the statistical protocols had been frozen, but it was belatedly discovered that a certain significant “signal” in the data had been caused by an airplane flying low over the site of one of the detectors—​it was just noise. A very long and heated row ensued between those who said

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that the rule about freezing protocols meant that their knowledge of the cause of the airplane noise had to be ignored or they would be engaging in post-​hoc “statistical massage” and those who said that this would mean publishing a result that they knew to be incorrect. Eventually, after months of argument and a vote, the paper was published with the airplane event deleted. Consequently, some scientists insisted on having their names removed from the list of authors and one resigned from the entire collaboration—​it was a traumatic experience for all concerned. But it would not have been traumatic if the physicists had understood, as they were to come to understand ten years later, that statistical protocols are not the last word and what you can see going on is more important—​the tangible is only supported by the inferential, not ruled by it. It would have been crazy not to remove the airplane for the sake of a quasi-​religious statistical purity. Conclusion on tangible and inferential justification of results Now we know what we know about the replication crisis, the hopelessness of the 2-​sigma standard, and the hopelessness of rescuing the “2-​sigma sciences” by improving their statistical standards except in some very special cases, we need to think about experiments and observations in a different way. The solution to the replication crisis is not better statistics (though good statistical procedures are important); the solution is a matter of trying to find a way of making the mechanisms that underlie a hypothesis more tangible; this is better craftwork—​more inventiveness, better experiments, and better observations, reported with the overriding aim of finding the truth of the matter. What we need is more and better craftwork with integrity.

The presentation of science in democracies To return to the introductory section, we need to justify science in a way it can live up to. The presentation of science to the public is a more and more vital topic with the growth of populist politics in countries where one had come to think that pluralist democracy was secure. Western populists define the winning vote at an election as expressing “the will of the people” and they are then able to describe the losing side’s preferences, and the checks and balances found in pluralist democracies, as traitorous. The Brexit debate in the UK was almost a caricature of this rhetoric, and, frighteningly, it worked. Science is one of the checks and balances in that it limits the freedom of an elected leader to say what they like about certain policies and that’s why economic advice was derided by ministers during the Brexit debate. Populism also explains President Trump’s attitude to climate change and other kinds of scientific advice and the growth of the post-​truth environment.10 In the light of all this, I found my attention riveted by the way the first detection of

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a gravitational wave was presented by a community that had supported my work for decades and who I had grown to like enormously and to admire; I thought their presentation of the nature of science was wrong! As an honorary “insider” I had to accept the community’s determination to keep the potential discovery secret for five months (from September 14, 2015, when it was first sighted), as they explored every possible flaw in their work before holding a press conference with great fanfare; I thought they should have told the public during this five months that they were engaged in analysing a potential sighting, revealing the process of science for what it was. In other words, I thought they should be prepared to say “we think we might have found something but we might be wrong,” whereas they were only prepared to say announce anything once they were sure they were right. This meant five months went by while the community practiced lying and deceiving while, in the wider world, rumors of the potential discovery grew more and more exact. I did not like the deceit I was forced into and I did not agree with the philosophy underlying it. The whole episode is described in the book I published in 2017 called Gravity’s Kiss. As time has gone by, the only people from the GW community I can find to agree with me tend to be the younger members; the senior members, who I still like and admire, keep telling me I’m wrong. Of course, they are following the established traditions in physics, which turn on being first and being right, and that means keeping things secret until you are sure your announcement won’t have to be retracted. So deeply embedded is this way of thinking in the community that when I say they should not have kept the search secret people often hear me saying that they should not have done the five months checking. I’m saying they should have exposed the five months checking to the public in real time to show them what science is, and that what science is includes the ever-​present possibility of being wrong. What we would see would be the determination and the degree of integrity and perseverance that is needed if you aspire to be right: what we would see is that science, when done properly, is better than politics as a paradigm of decision-​making where clarity is elusive, because its aspirations are incomparably higher. Science’s aspirations and integrity can give moral leadership to political decision-​making and right now we need as much moral leadership from people with integrity as we can get. What we get from scientists, instead of a demonstration of science’s integrity and caution, is a magic show: “we pulled the rabbit out of the hat—​ another flawless jewel.” That is not what was going on in the 45 years of brilliant perseverance that lead to the detection of gravitational waves; it is what happened at the press conference enabled by that five months of secrecy hiding the process. Magic is exactly the right metaphor because magic depends on hiding the process by which events are accomplished. So if science presents itself like magic, it might as well be using all the tricks of magic rather than what it does—​which, opposite to magic, turns on an aspiration to reveal the truth not fool the viewer with a trick. Why hide that display of virtuosity and

Science as craftwork with integrity  305

integrity for the sake of a stage show? Why abandon it for the demand for quasi-​religious adoration, as in Stephen Hawking’s and others’ completely incomprehensible-​yet-​best-​selling books—​just like the Latin Bible—​or the claims to have seen “the face of god” in the cosmic microwave background? Why not just explain how long and hard it was to find out these things—​isn’t that good enough as a defense of science? The trouble is that the icons of physics are those simple things like discovering gravitational waves, or the pattern of the microwave background (or the anomaly in the perihelion of Mercury, or all the things that came with Newtonian physics). I say “simple” even though they are brilliant and immensely difficult discoveries, but they are simple in that the world they are exploring is not complex. As mentioned in the Introduction, you cannot justify the science of global warming or the science of social and economic behavior or the science of weather forecasting by referring to these exact discoveries; even less so if you present these discoveries as quasi-​magical or quasi-​religious: the sciences that confront the citizen in the political sphere aren’t exact and aren’t open to being presented as magic or religion.11 Science has to be respected, not because it is always right, like magic or religion are said to be; it isn’t always right but is still the best way to generate conclusions which feed into politics. Science is craftwork with integrity and that is the best we can hope for. But the craftwork with integrity of the best sciences remains a moral object lesson for decision-​making in complex domains. If only our current crop of politicians could give us craftwork with integrity rather than slogans and targeted disinformation! As this last section of the chapter shows, even the exact sciences are inexact and need huge effort and huge integrity to make them work and effortful deceit to make them look otherwise than inexact and fallible. As the first main section of this paper shows, meta-​analysis is not a magic bullet where most of the weaker sciences are concerned but, mostly, more and better craftwork and integrity will feed into better decisions. As is argued throughout, understanding this is vital for the survival of democracy.

Notes 1 Collins (2004, 2013, 2017) are books about the search for and first detection of gravitational waves. The details of the story of the first detection, as it unfolded over six months, is set out in Collins’s (2017), Gravity’s Kiss. A methodological analysis of this kind of work can be found in Collins (2019), Forms of Life: The Method and Meaning of Sociology. I hope that this piece will show, among other things, how detailed sociological studies of science bear on the philosophy of science. 2 For example, Stephen Hawking’s best-​selling—​if incomprehensible to nearly all its readers—​ Brief History of Time, published in 1988, repeats the false account of the Michelson-​Morley experiment. Collins and Pinch’s (1993), The Golem, gives a more accurate account of the Michelson-​Morley experiment and a number of other such cases. Collins (1985), Changing Order, sets the sociological examination of science in a philosophical context aided by three main case studies.

306  Harry Collins 3 The (supposed) “crown jewels” of science generally emerge from the empty realms of outer space or the equally uncomplicated atomic and sub-​atomic realm. 4 For a more complete working out of these ideas see Collins and Evans’s (2017) Why Democracies Need Science and Collins et al. (2019), Experts and the Will of the People. 5 Such as Keating (2018), Losing the Nobel Prize: an analysis of his own group’s mistaking cosmic dust for the evidence of cosmic “inflation” as indicated by polarization of the cosmic background radiation, something which became clear only after a triumphant news conference. Physicists are all aware of the “non-​discovery” of the magnetic monopole. 6 I am grateful to David Peterson for drawing this movement to my attention. Peterson and Panofsky (2020) are concerned that it is in conflict with the very different kinds of activity found across the sciences. 7 For an analysis of double-​blind testing and the placebo effect see Collins and Pinch (2005, ch. 1). For reasons why double-​blind tests might be flawed see Epstein (1996) or Collins and Pinch (2005, ch. 7), which summarizes it. For some philosophical problems of statistical meta-​analysis see Collins (2013, ch. 5). 8 This section on tangible and inferential draws heavily on Collins (2019, ch. 9). 9 An account of the early experiments can be found in Collins et al. (2006). 10 Collins et al. (2019b) is titled Expertise and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science; it explains the relationship of expertise and pluralist democracy. Collins and Evans (2017), Why Democracies Need Science, explores the overlap between scientific and democratic values. I discuss the UK and US because I know them well but the same conclusions apply wherever populism is in tension with democracy, as it is in many countries. For criticism of the current attitude within the field of science and technology studies (STS) see Collins et al. (2017). 11 The interrelationship between philosophy of science and sociology of science, including the sociology of the “exact sciences,” is further illustrated here.

References Collins, H. M. (1985). Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. SAGE. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 1992. Collins, H. M. (2004) Gravity’s Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves. University of Chicago Press. Collins, H. M. (2013). Gravity’s Ghost and Big Dog: Scientific Discovery and Social Analysis in the Twenty-​First Century. University of Chicago Press. Collins, H. M. (2017). Gravity’s Kiss: The Detection of Gravitational Waves. MIT Press. Collins, H. M. (2019). Forms of Life: The Method and Meaning of Sociology. MIT Press. Collins, H. M. & Evans, R. (2017) Why Democracies Need Science. Polity Press. Collins, H. M., Evans, R., Durant, D. & Weinel, M. (2019). Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science. Palgrave. Collins, H. M., Evans, R., Ribeiro, R. & Hall, M. (2006). Experiments with Interactional Expertise. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 37 (A/​4), 656–​674. Collins, H. M., Evans, R. & Weinel, M. (2017). STS as Science or Politics. Social Studies of Science 47 (4), 580–​586. Collins, H. M. and Pinch, T. (1993). The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science. Cambridge University Press. New ed., 1998.

Science as craftwork with integrity  307 Collins, H. M. & Pinch, T. (2005). Dr Golem: How to Think about Medicine. University of Chicago Press. Epstein, S. (1996) Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. University of California Press. Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2005). Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLOS Medicine 2 (8), 696–​701. Keating, B. (2018). Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor. W. W. Norton. Peterson, D. & Panofsky, A. (2020). Metascience as a Scientific Social Movement. SocArXiv. https://​doi.org/​10.31235/​osf.io/​4dsqa.

Postscript Luis Reyes-​G alindo, Luana Poliseli, Zinhle Mncube, David Ludwig, and Inkeri Koskinen

It was a dark and stormy night … And then it was a dark and stormy day, and then a dark and stormy night, and so the cycle repeated itself. Nothing unusual, it being the Netherlands.1 Five early career scholars (some “earlier” than others) are sitting together in a room in the Wageningen International Congress Center during the first week of December 2018. Unusual for an academic meeting of any sort, they are not just following the event schedule to the dot, but—​even more impressive—​the meeting is actually proving productive. This was the concrete starting point of Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science: two European, two Latin American, and one African scholar trying to work out what, exactly, they would like to see in an edited volume on “global epistemology.” It is a testament to David’s ability to harness the power of Northern European discipline (and weather) to not only physically bring and keep together this geo-​cultural-​philosophical motley crew, but indeed to guide the project to the finish line of a complete manuscript. Diverse as the group might’ve been, the truth is that there were also significant similarities: an interest in pluricultural perspectives on science and philosophy; experience, as researchers, in philosophy and science studies that cross-​cut geographical and disciplinary borders; and generally, an inclination for fresher outlooks in contemporary philosophy of science. As the idea for the book continued being discussed through the initial meeting, it became clear that there was indeed a shared consensus for what such a book would look like; one including—​as far as possible—​as many perspectives from both the geographical spectrum and the philosophy landscape representative of what it means and implies to do “science” plus “philosophy” in today’s world. Bit by bit, a list of necessary topics and potential authors that could be pooled together to consolidate a book proposal was drawn up. One golden-​ and-​ cunningly-​ conquered pineapple later (because, Latin Americans), the group disbanded from the Netherlands with a set purpose: to complete the already quite complete list of topics, and begin inviting authors to contribute to the project. The chapters were intended to be accessible,

Postscript 309

concrete, yet also of relevance to a general scholarly audience that had a philosophical interest in stretching their necks outside of their normal professional and cultural spaces. All of the authors that were invited were chosen both as recognized experts in their fields and as scholars the team felt would be in tune with the project. It was deeply satisfying that we received consistently positive responses from invitees. One pandemic later (though it’s not quite over), after incalculable emails, multiple Skype sessions and a vast number of Google Doc edits (plus the now-​normal balancing of the unending commitments and struggles of pandemic (academic) life), we have a finished, 26-​chapter manuscript; and that, even with only one member of the group having Finnish superpowers.2 The word “global” in the title of this volume can be read in many ways, and there are at least three major uses in the chapters we received. All three tie to broad discussions that extend across academia, and have in recent years led to important work in philosophy and in the philosophy of science. First, in today’s world we face global, complex, and urgent problems such as biodiversity loss and climate change. Scientists increasingly attempt to tackle these problems through inter-​and transdisciplinary collaborations where experts from different fields, both from within academia and from elsewhere, join forces. Philosophers, including philosophers of science, engage in such collaborations and study them. “Global” here points to the global nature of the problems: they respect neither state borders nor disciplinary boundaries. But transdisciplinary collaborations often also include distinctly local aspects, as the global problems take different forms in different local contexts. Moreover, such projects can involve people from communities that are usually quite far away from academia. Which links this meaning of “global” to the other two meanings. Secondly, there is a push for philosophy to become more globally engaged in the sense of drawing from the diverse ways in which people in different parts of the globe produce knowledge and understanding, and reflexively reason about them.3 “Global” here is not the opposite of “local,” but rather notes that academic philosophy has always been in certain senses local by nature (though in what senses exactly, remains highly contested). We should therefore pay more attention to the plurality of those local perspectives that have thus far been largely ignored—​we should look for instance into African or Asian philosophical traditions, not just European. Philosophy can become more global by doing so. And thirdly, there is a push for philosophy to become more globally engaged in the sense of addressing political questions that have some clear philosophical aspect, but that concern communities for whose members it has only relatively recently become possible to be heard in academia. Philosophers, including philosophers of science, have played important roles in the development of postcolonial and feminist discussions and debates that extend

310  Luis Reyes-Galindo et al.

across disciplines and beyond universities. In the chapters taking part in these discussions, the word “global” is used to argue that we philosophers often use local criteria of importance when choosing the problems we address. And that a broader understanding of problems that arise in different loci will make philosophy more global. This push is clear, for instance, in the recent philosophical discussion about epistemic decolonisation,4 or discussions about the locally varying effects of global phenomena such as the commodification of science. This book can hopefully be read as a proof of concept of how such issues and ideas can be fruitfully brought into mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science, and how they could open up new research agendas. But while we want to stimulate constructive dialogues with the mainstream of epistemology and philosophy of science, the book also reflects some impatience with the current state of these fields. Let’s be honest, debates about decolonization and the intellectual marginalization of the Global South are not exactly brand new in academia. Critical scholarship on science and technology has been picking up on these issues for decades with decolonial, postcolonial, and global “turns” being regularly proclaimed in science and technology studies, anthropology of science, science education, science policy, and so on. Of course, a lot of “turns” in these fields remain largely at the level of proclamations. Still, there is at least some level of awareness.5 In contrast, philosophy of science has often remained blissfully ignorant of these developments and simply avoided the challenge of addressing knowledge production from contested global perspectives. At the same time, the book leaves us hopeful about the prospects of change. Philosophy of science has opened up considerably in recent decades, as also reflected in the mainstreaming of feminist philosophy of science. When feminist standpoint theories were articulated in the 1980s, they largely remained at the margins of institutionalized philosophy of science. Responses from scientists and philosophers were often openly hostile, ridiculing feminist scholars as “intellectual imposters”6 with extreme anti-​scientific and relativist views. Times have changed! Feminist philosophy of science has very much moved from the margins into the centre of the field—​not only intellectually through debates about issues such as “scientific pluralism” or “science and values,” but also in some respects, institutionally. A few decades ago, it would have been hard to imagine Helen Longino and Alison Wylie, two of the founding figures of feminist philosophy of science, shaping the future of the field as recent presidents of the Philosophy of Science Association. The chapters of this book provide many challenging but nuanced interventions that may open similar trajectories for global and even decolonial perspectives on epistemology and philosophy of science. Rather than thinking of decolonial challenges as anti-​scientific and relativist programs that are incompatible with philosophy of science, the intellectual wealth of our book contributors suggests exciting new ways of thinking about the global

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complexity of knowledge production and its messy interactions with social realities. This is not to say that it is going to be a smooth ride on the road ahead. Mainstreaming perspectives from the Global South meets institutional barriers that are difficult to overcome. For example, the institutional structure of philosophy of science—​e.g., major conference series of the Philosophy of Science Association, the European Philosophy of Science Association  or the Society of Philosophy of Science in Practice—​remain monopolized in Europe and North America. Non-​committal sympathy towards the inclusion of global perspectives does not directly translate into difficult institutional change—​institutional change in the form of more diverse hiring and publishing practices, demographic composition of staff and students, and curricula, amongst others. There can be no substantive decolonising of the field without this type of “material decolonization.” Also, the mainstreaming of critical perspectives always comes with risks of assimilation. It is not obvious how perspectives from the Global South can be mainstreamed in academia without risking the loss of at least some of their decolonial bite. Yet the book also invites readers to think about North-​to-​South and inter-​South flows—​and not only of South-​to-​North exchanges. There are often-​ unacknowledged institutional and pragmatic barriers to having inter-​South dialogues (linguistic, cultural, political), and one cannot ignore the fact that that insularity and unreflexive adoption of Northern paradigms can also be negative, or at least very problematic, for the South in a global setting. Our book does not provide simple answers to these questions and it does not articulate a unified program for Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science. Instead, it is an invitation for a critical and intercultural dialogue about where we stand and where we are going as a field, which is reflected in the various positions on North–​South perspectives on knowledge flow that are touched upon across the book.

Notes 1 —​ Hey, there’s nothing usual there. One of us is, after all, writing this above the Arctic circle, and as it’s December (again), there’s no day. —​ And with South Africa’s ‘load shedding’ (read: frequent power cuts), one of us experienced many days and nights that were literally dark! —​ Right, Latin Americans complaining about Dutch darkness… 2 According to the Standard Eurobarometer 93 from the summer 2020, only 1% of Finns found the measures taken to fight the coronavirus outbreak, in particular the confinement measures, very difficult to cope with. 50% found them fairly easy to cope with, and 23% very easy to cope with, and even an improvement to their daily lives. 3 The Geography of Philosophy Project is an excellent example of this: . 4 See the recent special issue edited by Veli Mitova in Philosophical Papers 49 (2) (2020).

312  Luis Reyes-Galindo et al. 5 For decades, philosophers outside of “philosophy of science” have also been concerned with a “decolonial turn”, postcolonialism, and decolonisation more generally—​from W. E. B. Du Bois, to Frantz Fanon, to Walter Mignolo, to Gloria Anzaldúa, to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to Kwasi Wiredu, to more recently Nelson Maldonado-​Torres, for example. 6 Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science. Profile Books, 1998.

Index

academic philosophy: critical reflexivity, need for 1, 10; demographic diversity, lack of 26; indigenous non-​ participation 127; local nature of 309; marginalizing of global knowledge production 1–​2, 9–​10, 310; Western focus of 2, 6, 8–​9, 127 African environmental ethics, anthropocentric vs. ecocentric theories 199–​200; see also nmandu African traditional medicine (ATM), decolonization of: additive approach to 236; colonial centrality of Western medicine 235; colonial demonization of ATM 235; Cosmopolitanism 112; dialectic rationale for 234, 237; epistemic equality (alleged) of traditions 235–​236; epistemic injustice of marginalizing ATM 236; epistemically equal vs. practically fruitful traditions 240–​241; pluralist approach to 236–​237; randomized controlled trials (RCT), applicability of 238–​240; as rejection of Western medicine 236; tolerance and respect as goal of 238, 240–​241; wholesale medical relativism 6, 237–​238, 240 African traditional medicine (ATM), practice of: African spirituality crucial to 111, 232; disease, concept of 232–​233; holistic healing 239, 240; izangoma 6, 231, 232–​233, 234, 239, 240–​241; muthi 233–​234, 238, 239, 240; placebo effect 239, 240–​241; regulation of 232; sangoma 232–​234, 235, 237, 238, 239; widely consulted by South Africans 112, 231 agnotology 191

agricultural science and technology 1 anti-​colonial feminism 4, 39, 41–​43 anti-​science populism: in Brazil 4, 186–​192; climate change and 303; COVID-​19 and 1, 186–​187, 297; growth of 2; policy–​expert relations and 185–​186; see also post-​truth Aristotelian logic 288, 289, 291, 292 Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP) 223–​224 Asian psychology: addressing dominant Western paradigms 222, 223; American training 221–​222; international networks of practitioners 223–​224; micro-​theories and “glocal” psychology 222; see also indigenous psychology Bayh-​Dole Act 165 Bhāskarācārya I 290 Bhāskarācārya II 290, 291 Bhattacharyya, Sibajiban 289, 290, 291–​292, 293 Bhāvivaka 278 biocentrism, prudential anthropocentrism vs. 6, 199; see also nmandu biodiversity 1, 22, 77, 79, 161, 199, 200, 309 Bolsonaro, Jair 4, 180, 186–​187, 188, 189, 191, 192 borderlands knowledge production 43–​44 Brazil 4; anti-​science populism 186–​187; COVID-​19 186–​187, 188, 189, 190–​191, 192; innovationism in 169, 178–​181

314 Index Brexit referendum, post-​truth and 183, 190, 303 Buddhism: a priori nature of logic 279; analysing Buddhist texts 276, 277; anumāna (inference) 274, 275–​276; concept of self, denial of 63; globally recontextualizing Buddhist ideas 277–​281; knowledge, conditions for 275–​276; mathematics 281, 287; non-​systematicity 281; normative externalism 279–​280; philosopher–​ Buddhologist exchanges 277; psychologism 278; reading Buddhist texts 276–​277 Buen Vivir 44 Candrakīrti 278, 281 Chinese philosophy of science 7–​8; “bourgeois” sciences attacked 53; Chinese culture, focus on 57; government-​driven return to Marxism 53, 55–​57, 58; Marxist first phase and Dialectics of Nature 52–​53; “opening up” to international non-​ Marxist philosophy 52, 54–​55; recruitment of Western academics 57; traditional political domination of academia 51, 58 citizen/​civic science 44 civil rights movement 41, 44 climate change: anti-​science populism and 303; critical reflection required by 1; Dynamic Integrated Climate-​ Economy Model 101; ecological balance and 203; science vs. ethics 101; sustainability science and 5, 100–​101 Confucianism 61, 223, 227 COVID-​19: anti-​science populism and 1, 186–​187, 297; in Brazil 186–​187, 188, 189, 190–​191, 192; uncertainty of the science 296–​297 craftwork with integrity, science as: corrupt science 297; “crown jewel” type science 296–​297; democratic role of scientific expertise 297–​298, 303–​305; inexactness and complexity of most science 4, 296, 305; knowledge production as craftwork 5; love of science unconditional on success 297; “magic show” effect vs. display of craftwork 4, 304–​305; see also statistical confidence

cultural anthropology: culture concept, critique of 134, 135, 140; experimental philosophy and 62, 65, 68, 69–​70; ontological turn and 7, 137; reflexivity, commitment to 136–​137, 138; representationalist paradigm 134, 135–​136, 140; universal concepts, skepticism towards 61; see also ontological turn; radical alterity cultural evolution: assimilation, concept of 212; cultural anthropology objections to 208, 211, 214; emergence of 208, 209; generalized models, use of 211–​213; implicit epistemic value choices 213, 216; indigenous societies, attention to 210–​211; innovation studies and 210; marginalized groups as subject of study, disempowerment of 212, 213, 214, 215; minimization of agency 213–​215; othering 214–​215; population thinking 210, 213; possible demise of 216; reforming and integrating the discipline 215–​216; social learning biases 213, 214; sustainability science and 210; synthetic ambitions of 210, 211 Darwin, Charles 209, 210 decolonial men’s studies 42 democratization of science 8, 9, 185; building public trust 148; collective self-​government, argument from 148–​150, 152; corporate abuse of public support 151; definition of 146; degrees of democratization 146; global vs. nation-​state democracy 152; impact, argument from 147–​148; institutions and mechanisms for 146–​ 147, 151; lay expertise 146; postwar scientific autonomy over means and facts 145; public competence, concern about 150–​151; scientific complicity in social injustice 148; social diversity of scientific community 146; supposed value neutrality of science 145, 148; transformative criticism 148; see also craftwork with integrity, science as Deng, Xiaoping 54, 56 Dharmakīrti 280 Dignāga 280 disagreement, epistemology of: conciliatory vs. steadfast views 78,

Index 315 84, 85, 87; inadequate empirical grounding of scholarship on 77, 79; mediation 87–​88; suspending judgment 85, 87 Douglas, Heather 2, 145, 149, 155, 166 Dutch East India Company 244 Engels, Friedrich 44, 52, 53, 56, 57 Enriquez, Virgilio 221 environmental destruction 1, 202–​203 epistemic asymmetry 136 epistemic diversity: conflicting ontologies and values 6–​7; crucial in tackling global challenges 5, 10, 309; growing academic embrace of 2, 9; representationalist vs. situated 7 epistemic (in)justice 2, 9; academic dependence 118; academic pressure to publish 120, 122–​123; decolonization and 111; discriminatory and distributive 116; diversity plans 120; epistemic plurality as antidote 20; epistemic trust injustice 116, 117; epistemicide 117–​119, 123, 160; expensive technologies as proxy for data quality 120–​121; globalized privatization of science 122; individual vs. structural 116, 117, 123; misrepresentation and 8; participatory epistemic injustice 116–​117, 122; quasi-​globalization 118; reforming institutional injustices 120; testimonial and hermeneutical 115–​116, 121, 122, 123; see also African traditional medicine, decolonization of; linguistic diversity epistemic violence 215 epistemology vs. epistemologies: ambiguity of plural 18, 20–​22, 23; boundary policing, risk of 15; concept dilution, risk of 15; “elevator” words 17, 19, 23; essences vs. family resemblances 17; history of term 17–​18; plurality of knowledge forms 16; postcolonialism and the Global South 19–​20, 22–​23; relativism vs. normativity 18, 20–​24; strategic choice, plural as 23; Western universalism 18, 19, 22; see also philosophy vs. philosophies Escobar, Arturo 3, 40, 41, 42, 189 eugenics and scientific racism 209

European Union 164, 190 evolutionary psychology 209 Expected Utility Theory 95, 100–​102 experimental philosophy: cultural anthropology methods 69–​70; emergence of 61–​62, 65; false assertions 67; Geography of Philosophy Project 68–​70; Gettier cases 66–​67; global engagement of 9; knowing vs. believing 67; limitations of studies 68; linguistic expertise, necessity of 69; skeptical pressure 68; social science methods 65–​66; stakes influence on knowledge ascription 67; see also universal concepts fallist movement 4, 106–​107; see also Science Must Fall Fanon, Frantz 109, 312n5 feminist epistemology 18; see also standpoint theory feminist philosophy of science 7, 51, 115, 117, 123, 310 fisheries management 5, 93, 97, 99, 102 food security 1, 10, 22 Fricker, Miranda 115–​117, 217n6, 236 game theory 95, 98–​100 General Research Council (GRC) 177–​178 “global,” meanings of: plurality of local traditions, attention to 309; problems of various loci and communities, broad understanding of 309–​310; transdisciplinary global challenges 309 Global South: Epistemologies of the South 19, 20, 117–​118, 123; marginalized by academic philosophy 2, 5–​6, 19, 20, 22, 310, 311; market-​ driven agendas, resistance to 3; outsourcing R&D to 8, 164; science as colonial instrument 3; subservient position in globalized research consortia 122 gravitational wave detection 300–​301, 303–​304 Harding, Sandra 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 19, 20, 41, 43, 44, 46n1, 108, 111, 213, 226, 268 Heidegger, Martin 126, 127–​128

316 Index holism see indigenous thought and practices Hu, Jintao 56 Hung, Tscha 53 Iberian colonialism: constitutive of modernity 39, 40; Jesuit apothecaries 42; race, gender, and sexuality 41–​42 Igbo see nmandu Indian mathematical tradition: Early Medieval period 287; Greco-​European proof concept inapplicable to 289, 293; inadequate study of original texts 290; Late Medieval period 287; post-​ Vedic period 287; proof, concept of allegedly lacking 288; proof concept in Indian philosophy, connections with 290, 291–​293; Vedic period 286–​287 Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) movement 111, 112 indigenous psychologies (IP): decolonizing movements and 221, 225; definition of 221; dialogical multiplication 225–​226; local and global psychology 226; positivism, diverse attitudes to 220, 225, 226; relational ethic 226–​227; resurgence within discipline of psychology 220, 225; see also Asian psychology; Māori psychology indigenous thought and practices: holism 129–​130; post-​truth and 184; preservation of 44–​45; spread of science and 267–​268; see also African environmental ethics; method-​itself; indigenous psychologies; nmandu; values in science, saberes inductive risk 149 industry funding of science: academia, effects on 165; applied science favored over basic research 165; commercialization of research 164; conflicts of interest 166, 167; contract research organizations (CROs) 167, 168; Global North’s research agendas imposed on Global South 168–​169; increasing privatization of research 164, 165; intellectual property 165, 167, 168; in Latin America and the Caribbean 168–​169; manufacture

of doubt 166, 186, 192; outsourcing R&D to Global South 8, 164, 168; see also innovationism; pharmaceutical industry innovationism: basic science devalued by 175–​176; failure of in Brazil 178–​181; humanities devalued by 176; Innovation Theory 175, 176; invention vs. innovation 174; national innovation system 175; neoliberalism, innovationism as facet of 175–​176; public interest science devalued by 176–​177; recent retreat of establishment from 177–​178 instrumental rationality 95 intellectual property see industry funding of science interdisciplinary knowledge integration 5; see also transdisciplinary research intersectionality 44 Islam 45, 46, 110, 266 Japan, spread of science to: battle-​zone model (BZM) 270–​271; Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) 269; quantum physics 269–​270; syncretism of European and Japanese practices 268; see also spread of science Jiang, Tianji 53–​54 Jiang, Zemin 56 Kant, Immanuel 58, 61, 62, 226, 279, 282n23 Kitcher, Philip 2, 108, 120, 147, 150, 151, 152, 166, 216 knowledge system, definition of 118 Kṛṣṇa Daivajña 290 Kuhn, Thomas 52, 54, 222, 260, 267 linguistic diversity in philosophy: citations skewed towards English 27–​28, 29; grammatical gender 31–​32; journal boards, Anglophone insularity of 28, 29, 33; lingua franca effect 26, 33, 121; non-​native English speakers disadvantaged 26–​27, 29, 33, 121–​122; semantic reference of proper names 32–​33; spatial relations 30; untranslatable concepts 29–​30 Longino, Helen 51, 148, 149, 310

Index 317 manufacture of doubt see industry funding of science Mao, Zedong 54, 56 Māori ontologies and epistemologies 7, 128, 129–​131, 224; see also indigenous psychologies Māori psychology: community psychology 224, 225; international networks of practitioners 225–​226; praxis, orientation towards 224–​225; relational ethic 227; resisting North American dominance 225; social inequalities and 224 March for Science 189 Marx, Karl 44, 53, 56, 57 Marxism 52, 223; see also Chinese philosophy of science method-​itself: definition of 127–​128; excess and 126, 128, 130–​132; mismatch with indigenous holism 126, 128, 130; see also indigenous thought and practices Michelson-​Morley experiment 296 Mignolo, Walter D. 40, 43, 312n5 Modernity/​Coloniality/​Decoloniality (MCD) 40–​41, 43 modernization theory 42 Morales, Evo 44 New Materialist movement 46 Nishina Yoshio 270 nmandu 6; anthropocentric interpretations of 201, 202–​203; biocentric interpretation of 202, 203, 204; origins and context of 200; symbiotic equilibrium 203–​204; uwa ontology 202, 204–​206 Ojibwa 136, 138, 139–​140 ontological turn: ecological mind 138–​140, 141; origin as critique of representationalism 7, 137, 140; reversing culture–​nature distinction 137–​138, 140; suspicion of belief 134 operations research (OR) 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 102 othering 214–​215 Parameśvara 290 participatory action research (PAR) 42–​43, 44

pharmaceutical industry 164–​165, 166–​167, 169 philosophical cartography: analytic philosophy 257–​258; ancient China 260, 261; cartographic impulse 257, 263; Continental European philosophy 258; Marshall Islands 260–​261, 262; philosophical misconceptions of nature of maps 260; pragmatic philosophy 259; seafaring 260–​262; Vikings 262; world navel 260 philosophy of science: diversity through institutional change, need for 311; misrepresentation 8; pluralist models, move towards 2, 5, 9–​10, 309–​310; politicization of 7–​9, 51, 57–​58, see also Chinese philosophy of science; value neutrality of science 93, 148–​149 Philosophy of Science Association 310 philosophy vs. philosophies 16–​17, 24 Platonic conception of reason 293 pluriverse 41, 46, 226 political economy, centering women’s activities in 42 postcolonial theory 19, 40, 214, 309, 310 post-​truth 4, 303; agnotological perspective on 191–​192; COVID-​19 in Brazil 186–​187, 188, 189, 190–​191, 192; creation of ignorance 191–​192; definition of 183–​184; digital media and 188, 189; fake news 190, 258; Global North vs. Global South contexts 189; policy–​expert relations 184–​186; positive interpretations of 184; relativism and postmodernism as alleged contributors to 184, 185; science and technology studies (STS) perspectives on 185–​186, 187–​189, 190, 191; social contexts, international diversity of 190; social contexts in Brazil 188–​189, 190–​191; sociological investigation required 183 poverty 22, 44, 77, 79, 224 public health 1, 112, 149, 191 quantum physics 53, 55, 269–​270, 278 race and biology in South Africa: amorphous nature of racial and social groups 244–​245, 247, 251; Bantu 243, 245, 250; biology, practical uses of

318 Index 249; “Black” category 245–​246, 250; coerced labor migrations 243–​244; colonial emergence of racial classification 244; “Coloured” classification 246, 250; European migrations 243, 244; “First Nations” debate 250; Griqua 250; Hamitic hypothesis 245, 248, 250, 251; Khoesān peoples 243, 245–​246, 248, 250; land rights 249–​250; phenotypes as racial markers 246–​247; physical anthropology 249; political motivations of racial classification 3, 246, 251; population genetics, need for social science interpretation of 247–​248, 251–​252; postcolonial revival of racist tropes 250–​251 radical alterity: ecological mind 138–​140, 141; representationalist account of 135–​137, 140; reversing culture–​nature distinction 137–​138, 140 rear guard vs. avant garde theory 41, 42 relativity, theory of 53, 296 ren: see Confucianism representationalism see radical alterity Rwandan Genocide 248 saberes: see values in science Said, Edward 40 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 5, 6, 19, 20, 40, 41, 42, 44, 117, 118, 119 Science Must Fall (SMF): African traditional beliefs unaccommodated by science 4, 108–​109; decolonization as aim of 107; medicine as model for reconciling science and African tradition 112–​113; “totalizing” nature of science 108–​109, 111–​113; witchcraft in African tradition 109–​111 Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex 174 science and technology policy (STP) 174, 175, 177 Science Wars 185 secularism 45–​46 shamanism 69–​70, 136, 138 Sinha, Durganand 221 situated knowledge 5, 7 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 3, 19, 119, 214, 225

social contestations of science: colonial uses of science 3; market-​driven science agendas 3–​4; non-​“science” knowledge forms dominated by 5, see also epistemic injustice and Science Must Fall; special interest captures of science 4–​5, 8; see also democratization of science; post-​ truth; values in science South Africa: Apartheid 244, 246; enduring colonial inequality 107; medicine, African traditional 111, 112; Population Registration Act 244, 246; Traditional Health Practitioners Act 232; Witchcraft Suppression Act 235; witchcraft as traditional thought 109–​111; see also African traditional medicine; fallist movement; race and biology in South Africa; Science Must Fall Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 23, 214, 215, 312n5 spread of science: battle-​zone model (BZM) 270–​271; circulation of knowledge model (CKM) 268, 270; colonialism 267; Europe not single origin of science 265–​266; local hybridizations of science 267–​268; multiplicity of science 266; practice and culture, science as 265; resonance model (RM) 268–​270; Simple Diffusion Model (SDM) 266–​267, 270; Three-​Stage-​Model (TSM) 267; “weediness” 265, 267, 268, 270, 271; see also Japan, spread of science to standpoint theory 41, 42, 44, 108, 213, 310 statistical confidence: 2-sigma criterion 298, 303; 3-​sigma criterion 299; 5-​sigma criterion 299; gravitational wave detection 300–​301; Imitation Games 301–​302; medicine 298, 299; metascience 299; physics 298–​299; protocol freezing 302–​303; replication crisis 298, 299, 303; tangibility as craftwork 303; tangible vs. inferential experiments 300, 301, 302, 303 sustainability science: Expected Utility Theory 100–​102; game theory 98–​100; hard vs. soft systems thinking 94–​98, 102; interdisciplinary nature of 92; as management science 93, 94, 97, 102;

Index 319 natural vs. social sciences 5, 92–​94; operations research and 93; qualitative vs. quantitative methods 92; social scientific reflexivity 94; value-​ orientation conflicts 93–​94 sustainable energy 1 systems theory 94–​98 Third World see Global South Trade-​Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights 168 transdisciplinary research 5–​6, 9; case study 80–​88; disagreement as stimulus 88; disagreement–​trust interplay 87–​88; epistemic asymmetry 84, 85; epistemic dependence 77, 79–​80; epistemic trust 80, 85–​86, 87–​88; epistemic vigilance 80, 84, 87; interactive social networks 81–​83; mitigating epistemic imperfection 77; see also disagreement, epistemology of Trump, Donald 191, 303 trust: epistemic trust 78, 79–​80, 85–​86, 87, 116–​117; interplay between trust and disagreement 5, 78, 87–​88, 88; public trust in science 148, 166, 192; trusting scientific instincts 301 Tsinghua University Institute for Science, Technology, and Society 56 under-​determination of scientific evidence 149 United States: COVID-​19 191; intellectual property 165; post-​truth in 183, 189, 190; privatization of science 164, 165 universal concepts: cross-​cultural communication and 64; frequent

postulation of 61, 62–​63; malleability of mind and 64; scepticism about 61, 63; universal cores to culture-​specific concepts 63; value of epistemology and 64; see also experimental philosophy values in science: capital and markets, values of deeply embedded 158–​159, 162; cognitive vs. non-​cognitive values 155, 156; context-​sensitive strategies (CS) 158–​159, 160, 161, 162; decontextualizing strategies (DS) 158–​159, 160, 161, 162; multi-​ strategic research 156–​157; neutrality as furthering rationality and progress 157–​158, 159; neutrality as inclusivity and evenhandedness 156, 157, 159, 161; questionable benefits of some technologies 158; saberes, definition of 159–​160; saberes in multi-​strategic research 160–​162; shared patrimony of humankind, science as 157, 162; supposed value neutrality 93, 148–​149, 156 Vienna Circle 51, 53 Vioxx scandal 167 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 7, 137 World Health Organization 191, 231–​232 World Trade Organization 168 Wylie, Alison 6, 44, 148, 213, 310 Xi, Jinping 52, 56, 57 Yang, Kuo-​Shu 221, 222, 223