At the Athena Institute we see science as entangled with local practices and situated in specific circumstances. But the opposite is often claimed. In public pronouncements, science is frequently upheld as universal and independent of its place. What agendas have driven such statements and what has it meant for science to be universal in a changing world?
Background
Public spokespeople for science – whether philosophers, journalists, or David Attenborough – have long claimed scientific knowledge and scientific methods to be universal. On this view, science is elevated above the world of human affairs and independent of the place and culture where it is practiced. Such statements tend to carry political implications – about which science should be transferred where, for example, or about what forms of knowledge are legitimate. This project, led by dr. Geert Somsen, examines the agendas of universalist pronouncements and places them – paradoxically – in historically specific contexts.
Objectives
This project seeks to localize scientific universalism, that is: it relates universalist declarations to the circumstances in which they were made. People usually state that science is universal because they want to say something about the international affairs of their time. For example, the famous sociologist Robert Merton declared “universalism” to be a norm of science in the face of the rise of fascism, which, he felt, violated that norm. At the same time, Italian fascists celebrated ‘Scienza Universale’ in an exhibit to show the world how much it was indebted to Italian geniuses like Galileo. Talking about science has hence been a vehicle to promote particular conceptions of geopolitical order, pictures of how the world hangs together and which countries count most. In many historical instances, such pictures have been imperial in nature and science has been a vector for projecting Western dominance.
Approach
Revealing such agendas requires scraping below the surface. No universalist ever exposed their particular agendas – that would have undermined the very message they were trying to convey. And so, our research needs to take into account what audiences statements spoke to, what issues they addressed. It also needs to work to ‘decode’ the lofty words into what they actually stood for – as when imperialists talked about ‘spreading civilization’. This way scientific internationalism often appears as a way to promote specific international relations or to sustain geopolitical status quos.