After running continuously for more than two years, this will be the last installment of Polydoxy. Look for V.V. Raman’s new column launching March 27 in The Global Spiral. Each of us has a worldview which determines our attitudes and actions in important contexts in life. Our worldview has many components, which take shape and…
A number of philosophers of science have reacted to postmodernism in forceful ways. Most of these are people who have spent some time doing serious science. Just as the religious practitioner reacts with some anger when people who have had no religious experience whatever speak and write about religion as if it is some sort…
It is not surprising that in our age anti-science movements are growing strong. These may be put under four broad categories which sometimes overlap. First there are the technology based anti-science movements. Here, the provocation is quite legitimate in many instances. Even with all the positive things that modern technology has brought to human societies—from…
Postmodernism has infected technical physics also in subtle ways. Recall that the central theme of postmodernism is that all knowledge is relative. Most of all, scientific knowledge too has no objective or factual validity. It is just another epic story like so many others. So we have a book by Roger Jones (Physics for the…
From the founding of the scientific academies in Europe in the seventeenth century up until the middle of the last quarter of the twentieth century, there was the implicit belief that science, such as had been erected during the last few centuries, had a validity that transcends race and religion, creed and nationality. One of…
The history of humanity is characterized by many wars and cultural incursions, religious conversions and cultural transformations. Greek and Roman cultures spread beyond the places of their origin, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam spilled over to regions thousands of miles away from the birthplace of their founders. Hindu art, sculpture, and epics have had significant impacts…
It is no great secret that all through history, and in practically all cultures, men have been dominating women. In a good many contexts they have also been oppressing women in overt and in subtle ways. As in all contexts where one group oppresses another, for many long centuries it did not even occur to…
Sociology was among the many new disciplines initiated by scientific methodology during the nineteenth century. Its goal was to study systematically how societies function, so as to obtain a deeper understanding of human behavior. In the twentieth century it came to be applied to science as a human enterprise. Thus was born a new field:…
Already in the early parts of the twentieth century there were currents against modernism, especially in art and architecture and music. But a new mode of thinking began to emerge in philosophy, social sciences, and science in the second half of the twentieth century. Most importantly post-modernist thought came into the international political scene. One…
By the close of the nineteenth century, physics and biology, science more generally, had attained a level of success and societal respect that only the major religions had enjoyed in ages past. Science had not only flung wide open the doors of knowledge about practically everything, if only one would follow the paved path of…