On the peripheries of western science:Indian science from 1910 to 1930, a cognitive-philosophical analysis.

Abstract

That newcomers often take up science remains a prominent feature of scientific practice. Thus, around the established centers of scientific knowledge there grows up a periphery, consisting of various types of newcomers: self-trained autodidacts, people from different disciplines as well as researchers from other cultures and other communities. As new communities join the previously-existing core group, the size of the network increases, setting up complex relationships of collaboration and competition among members of the community. Behind most of the scientific communities that today exist in the non-West, there lies this kind of a complicated history of origin. And yet, within the existing philosophical models of scientific practice that we have with us today, there seems to be no account that can tell us how such newcomers—who become scientists mainly through their own individual efforts—function in science. This seemed remarkable to me when I first started reading the literature of philosophy of science during my initial years in the graduate school. Scientists from the non-West constitute one such prominent group of newcomers who often work from the peripheries of scientific knowledge. In his well-known model of the expansion of Western science into the locations of the non-West, George Basalla (1967) considered peripheral science, i.e., science practiced outside of Europe and North America, to be an instance of diffusion: thus stating, in effect, that those who accept science under such circumstances, accept it as a recipient. As is well-known, this model has been extensively criticized and it has also been suggested that science is perhaps a case of a moving metropolis, that the centers of established knowledge in science shift dynamically over time. However, precisely how the metropolis of science shifts from one place to another and how the newcomers who join the practice of science function within it, remained unclear. Thus, Basalla’s model might have been rejected, but nothing adequate so far has been put into its place. This dissertation is an attempt to think about this long-neglected topic. It seeks to understand peripheral scientific communities and peripheral interactions, and the growth of scientific knowledge within those non-standard contexts. It is about those scientists whose research take place outside of the main community, and yet who often contribute quite significantly to the stock of scientific knowledge. It is written in the belief that there is more to peripheral science than passive acceptance and manifest individual difficulty, that it is intrinsically interesting, and that it tells us a story about science itself, especially about how science is socially organized, and the epistemic consequences of such organization. Hopefully, here is a new topic that can be elucidated by further research—by myself, and by others, who I hope, will join me soon.