Subject: BHA: Hindutva Social Science, doing science & CR
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2004 11:31:58 -0500


Meera, Viren et al.,

Meera, no need to apologize for getting into the debate.  Your essay is enlightening, and I am looking forward to reading the second half.  I have three comments in response to your helpful clarification.

1.  It remains important to distinguish between strong and weak social constructivism.  Weak social constructionism is not only compatible with critical realism, it is an important part of what makes this kind of realism "critical" rather than "naïve."

2.  Only local knowledge that makes scientific claims needs to be tested scientifically.  Some local knowledge is a matter of "faith," and cannot be proven either false or true by any kind of empirical testing. 

3.  I think that in addition to the liberal distinction between faith and reason, we also need to distinguish "reason" from empirical science.  

Best regards,

Dick Moodey

Hi all:

Meera Nanda just responded to me off list with the following remark.  It seems to speak to a number of concerns raised by other list-members.

Viren

Dear V. Murthy:

. . .

The fundamental social-constructivist thesis - namely, all truths are active cultural constructions, and not closer representations of the independently
existing objects in nature --   has opened the door for justifying
alternative truths as equally valid, equally scientific and equally deserving of state support for education and research.

. . .

Does this mean I am censoring all defenses of all local knowledges? Does that mean I am rejecting all empricial sciences of non-Western peoples? Not at all. I am only suggesting that they all need to prove their worth against the same standards of acceptability as those developed by modern science. Local knowledges are welcome as long as they can pass rigorous double-blind tests and as long as the causal mechanisms underlying them can be discovered and expressed in universal laws of science. (The universality of the standards has been under attack by the postmodernists.)

. . .

Now, the central aim of all these so-called "sacred sciences" is to present their own Brahman-soaked/ God-created cosmologies as legitimate scientific explanations of the world. All these movements of "strong religion" (Scott Appleby's label for fundamentalists) are not content to take god as a light in their hearts. They want their version of God to be actually working in the world of nature and men, right here and now, at every moment, everywhere. The liberal separation of faith and reason is not for them: they want faith to actively inform reason.


     --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---