Steve Fuller. Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. viii + 159 pp. ISBN 0816631255, $14.95 (paper); ISBN 0816631247, $37.95 (hardcover).

Sandra G. Harding. Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. x + 264 pp. ISBN 0253211565, $14.95 (paper); ISBN 0253333652, $35.00 (hardcover).

Reviewed by
Merle Jacob, Department of Theory of Science and Research, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, SWEDEN

One of the persistent challenges for contemporary historiography of science is the problem of why three great ancient cultures (China, India, and Egypt) display, independently of one another, a similar pattern with respect to science. The pattern is one of "aborted discovery " in each of them in spite of the availability of talents, social organization, and peace - the standard explanatory devices furnished by the sociologies of science on which that historiography relies.

Almost a decade ago, Janet L. Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony (1991) made two points that are of critical import in understanding the above challenge and how the publications under review may be of interest to world(-)systems scholars. One was that the fall of the East was a necessary precondition for the rise of the modern world(-)system and that since "the East had already substantially 'fallen' before the Portuguese men-of-war appeared in the Indian Ocean," then "no special 'virtue' inhered in the conquerors ..." (p. 260). The second of Abu-Lughod's points was that in understanding the rise of the West, we should focus not on the Portuguese takeover of the Indian Ocean zone but on the Spanish incorporation of the New World. Without detracting from the achievements of Fuller and Harding, I think it would be fair to say that their contributions follow the path so succinctly sketched by Abu-Lughod with respect to tracing the roots of modern science.

Science and Is Science Multicultural? share a common theme in the sense that both are concerned with debunking the age-old myth of European superiority and the uniqueness of science to Europe. The two authors approach the task in very different ways, however, and this reviewer makes no pretence at being able to comprehensively encapsulate the intricacies of either author's reasoning within the pages provided here. Nevertheless, I would like to focus on two broad themes that in my view constitute important moments in both discussions: European science as a co-production of Europe's interaction with other cultures, and the place of science in contemporary understanding of the world (public understanding of science). These themes have become increasingly important as the myth of a science that is the unique invention of Europe has come under attack from the margins (feminist and postcolonial) and the center (social studies of science). A second and not unimportant reason for the increased attention to these questions is provided by Samuel Huntington ("The Clash of Civilizations?", Foreign Affairs, 1993), who contends that

It is these discourses (feminist, postcolonial, and social studies of science) that form the point of departure for Fuller and Harding. Harding begins with a concern about integrating the insights of postcolonial and feminist criticism of received understandings of science and the universality of the knowledge claims produced from this process. For Fuller, the initial concern is with public understanding of science in the light of recent sociological critiques which demonstrate the social and cultural embeddedness of the process of knowledge production and the claims that emerge from such a process. Despite their divergence in point of departure, these two writers are both grappling with the "legacy of Thomas Kuhn." By this, I refer to the post-World War II tradition of treating modern science as a "historical, sociological, cultural and political phenomenon." This body of work has revealed several invaluable insights and has both helped to uncover as well as make problematic a satisfactory resolution of the issues on which Science and Is Science Multicultural? focus.

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Science takes the reader from initiatives such as Science Week in Britain, which is a government effort to demonstrate to the public the fruits of science, to the thorny question of "what is science?" and finally to the view of Western science from outside. This involves Fuller's gazing at the practice of science from the vantage points of Islam, Japan, and a report purportedly written by Martian anthropologists. This approach is a pedagogical demonstration of the old adage of "practicing what one preaches" in that if we take seriously the insight that our understanding of science is determined by our situatedness, then the view from a different location ought to reveal different insights into the same process. Harding retraces and expands on some of the more fundamental questions such as the role of rationality in science and what constitutes objectivity in the light of postcolonial, feminist, and postmodern contestations of traditional understandings of these concepts. Put differently, she provides insight to the reader as to the "why" of Fuller's exploration of different standpoints from which to view science. Although my use of the term "standpoint" to describe Fuller's different perspectives is a loose one, I think it is justified if only as a tool to underscore the complementarity of Fuller's and Harding's contributions.

Harding is first and foremost preoccupied with the problem of how to correct the worst aspects of Europe's Eurocentric views on science through informing it with that of other accounts. In this sense her objectives are similar to Fuller's in that he too is concerned with bringing another perspective on Western science to the forefront of the discussion. Whereas Fuller sees this task as a part of an effort to improve public understanding of science, Harding's interest lies in saving what she sees as key European concepts, such as rationality and objectivity. Harding does not tell us why these concepts or their European versions are central or why they are worthy of preservation. More importantly, it is unclear whether the different critiques of Western science can be satisfactorily addressed through this approach. One sometimes gets the feeling that Harding's position is too much like that of a supervisor faced with a fairly well developed critique of mainstream theory from a clever Ph.D. student. Rather than push the student in the direction of developing this critique to stand on its own terms vis a vis the Received View, Harding's approach is to show how such a critique may be integrated without losing the central concepts of the Received View. This approach, while in line with the Kuhnian account of how science progresses, assumes fundamental agreement on the part of all parties that the subject to be saved - in this case the concepts of rationality and objectivity - should be saved. Harding however, argues that such agreement is not necessary since her account is not intended to be a universal one but merely one position from which the Western observer could read science. This raises the issue of standpoint epistemology, a point to which I will return presently. I would like, however, to leave Harding for a moment and turn to some aspects of the testimony Fuller brings forth when he gazes at science from other standpoints.

One insight that Fuller gleaned from the Martian anthropologists’ report is that human faith in science is superstitious, given the widespread public ignorance as to the nature of this enterprise and the belief among practicing scientists that every scientific achievement is an advance towards the "Truth." Here Fuller connects the discussion to what I believe is his central concern in this book, i.e. "the public understanding of science." On this issue, he poses two main questions: "what is the public view of science?" and "can an enriched understanding of science that takes into account other perspectives on science contribute to informed public understanding?"

Fuller's argument is that science has superseded religion in the public's minds' eye, but whereas religion had been able to hold the attention of its audience for centuries, the congregation of science - after only a few decades of worship - has started to experience a loss of faith. At the risk of extending the analogy too far, it would not be unfair to posit that science faces a dilemma similar to that encountered by the Catholic Church when demands were made for Mass to be said in the language of the congregation rather than Latin. Just as using the language of the congregation was initially read as a process of demystification that would in turn threaten the authority of religion, so too can one argue that sociological accounts of science are undermining of its authority.

Rituals such as Science Week are designed on the assumption that the public presentation of a glowing array of black boxes labeled as "achievements of science" would be enough to reassure the public that their tax money is well invested. "Would a public informed of the mundane reality behind the production of such black boxes be willing to continue to fund their production on the same basis as it currently does?" Fuller believes that the answer to this question is yes. Judging from the science wars, many scientists think otherwise. Fuller further believes that a public informed of the fact that science is not a uniquely European product but a process that has over time appropriated and borrowed knowledge from other cultures would also be willing to continue to support science. While I share Fuller's optimism about the public's willingness to pay for science, I would like to play devil's advocate here and raise two points. The first is an alternative reading of the potential impact on public understanding of science. The second is to raise the issue that at the core of all these discussions is a genuine concern with the problem of the political accountability of science. This accountability has several other dimensions apart from those represented in the publications under review. In an attempt to broaden the discussion I will shortly sketch out some of these and their relation to the problem at hand. An alternative reading: both Fuller and Harding are arguing, and quite rightly so, that it is about time that the public understands that Western science is not an exclusively European invention. They both show in different ways how the achievements of Western science have been the result of interplay between the West and other cultures. I doubt very much however, whether such a subtle account of science will capture the imagination of the public. Instead, I would like to pose that the response will be similar to that faced by world systems and dependency analyses when they showed that the view that modernization was a uniquely European effort was a myth. That is, the new evidence will sway a small percentage of the academic and maybe even the policy community, but the vast majority will remain untouched.

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The power of the idea of science as a uniquely European achievement lies in its simplicity, its appeal to vanity, and its bolstering the image of the West as the benevolent winner that can now show others how to imitate its success. The more complex and accurate account has only one thing going for it - accuracy - and while this may be irresistible to scientists, I doubt it would have a similar impact on policymakers.

The public understanding of science is only one dimension of a larger problem which Fuller mentions in passing, i.e., the public accountability of science. Several observers have noted that we are witnessing a new era of demands for science to be accountable. In the 1960s, the movement for a socially and politically accountable science was most concerned that science should above all be non-oppressive and promote peace. The accountability of the 1990s is radically different and in many ways more layered than that which inspired, among other things, the social study of science and technology. Contemporary science faces two main types of accountability pressure: environmental and financial. The latter may be further subdivided into accountability to the taxpayer and the more narrow notion of user accountability. The second of these two is raised by Fuller, and I am in full agreement with his view that there is no reason why science should not be made to be accountable as any other activity that demands a share of the taxpayers' purse. Within this broad agreement however, there is a great deal to quibble over as to how this accountability should be implemented. Should the British research assessment exercises be the model or should we strive for some other type of evaluation mechanism? These issues have been and are still being debated elsewhere.

Fuller neglects, however, another dimension of the accountability drive which connects to both the ideal image of science and to the new image of science that both Fuller and Harding are striving to promote. Research councils, governments, and private enterprise have reached a consensus on the notion that scientific research should be conducted in such a fashion as to integrate the needs and views of users at every step of the process from project design to implementation. This is a great idea both in theory and in practice. It is also in keeping with some longstanding demands from several communities such as the social studies of science, the public, and last but not least radical scientists and some corporations (cf. the Lucas Aerospace cooperation experiment).

The recent wave of unalduterated enthusiasm for this practice, however, has raised some problems if not for the public at least for the scientists' understanding of science and the University, which has until recently had a monopoly on determining the rules of understanding for how science should be produced. Strangely enough, I think that it is in social science where the move away from a science done in private and results presented in public has had the most dubious impact. This is ironic. Some might call it poetic justice, since social scientists have been those most eager to have a participatory science.

This dubious impact manifests itself in cases where the new ideology of stakeholder/user/client participation in social science research leaves little room for the social scientist to reflect on the impact of his/her research on communities beyond the narrowly defined groups considered to be the community of interest to the project. In many instances, social science work robbed of this reflexive moment becomes a mere facilitation of policy or other goals. This type of work, while useful and in many cases necessary, puts into question the critical function of social science.

A further observation of the Martians' report is that the history of Western science is viewed as an obligatory passage point through which all aspiring cultures must go. On further examination, the Martians discover that this conclusion rests on a view of the history of science that necessitates a reconstruction of the events in that history so that they form one continuous episode. This is one of the seeds that gave birth to the discussion that now goes under the rubric of multiculturalism and science. Other distortions of the history of modern science of interest to this account include the invisibility of the other in the history of modern science. Put differently, received accounts of the history of modern science depict science as the unique achievement of the European (usually male) person. The debate about multiculturalism, particularly as it manifests itself with respect to the issue of why science developed in the way it did in the West as opposed to other cultures, is a strange one. The very term multiculturalism is baffling since it now denotes everything from a cultural relativist stance to a collective description of non-White cultures. It is as if having discovered cultural diversity, Eurocentric thought frames demand the creation of a new bipolar category, multicultural vs. monocultural, the "European us" and a "complex others." This performance of mental acrobatics takes on even more bizarre proportions when one considers some of the claims made in the pursuit of reclaiming an Islamic Science, Hindu Science, or even Afrocentrism. By this I refer to the fact that some of these accounts, in their efforts to point to the flaws in the Eurocentric construction of modern history of science, themselves commit the same errors. A classic example is the way arguments for non-Western science get caught up in the issue of claiming priority which is a quintessential part of the Eurocentric moment in science.

Both Science and Is Science Multicultural? attempt with careful scholarship to stem the tide of excess that sometimes characterizes popular and even some academic attempts to do battle with Eurocentrism. Both accounts affirm that science is a complex social phenomenon that is at the very least a co-production of European and non-European ideas and materials. Harding's reading of postcolonial accounts traces the role of science in the "voyages of discovery" and the great enterprise of colonialism. Two aspects of this account that struck me most were, first, the - to use an anachronistic description - mission-oriented nature of science in the colonies. This contradicts the colonial history of science narratives about colonial science qua civilization of non-Europeans and substitutes an account which speaks of science as a process of the accumulation of knowledge necessary to displace and subjugate non-Europeans in space that was previously theirs. The instrumentalist leanings of colonial science also raises questions about the validity of another popular belief about modern science, which is science as a disinterested search for knowledge. Second, I was struck by Harding's synthesis of these concerns with the major battleground issues in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science, i.e., rationality, relativism, and standpoint epistemology. This is where Is Science Multicultural? reveals itself to be a potential candidate for classroom use. Harding's account is as insightful as it is pedagogical and her contribution, like Fuller's, is one that should be on the reading list for graduate courses this fall.

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