Sciences from Below Quotes

“By exceptionalism I mean the belief that Western sciences alone among all human knowledge systems are capable of grasping reality in its own terms—“cutting nature at its joints,” as philosophers of science typically enjoy referring to the matter. According to this view, only modern Western sciences have demonstrated that they have the resources to escape the universal human tendency to project onto nature cultural assumptions, fears, and desires. Indeed, these research projects alone of all human inquiries into natural and social orders are entitled to be called sciences, according to the defenders of exceptionalism. Critics document just how such exceptionalists conflate Science with science. That is, the exceptionalists conflate the West’s idealized understandings of its own practices with the universal human impulse to understand ourselves and the world around us in ways that permit effective interactions with such worlds. In contrast, the critics argue that “all people operate within the domains of magic, science, and religion” (Malinowski, Magic 196; quoted by Nader, Naked Science 5). Modern Western sciences are just one set of sciences today, albeit powerful ones, among the many others that have existed and do today around the globe. Moreover they are not constituted entirely by Europeans or within European civilizations; in fact they owe great debts, mostly unacknowledged, to the science traditions that preceded them,”
― Sandra G. Harding, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities