Science, Culture and Development

Last night in my seminar on UNESCO a student asked about the relationship between natural science and culture. There is a culture of science, and science seems to thrive in some cultures and not in others, but I think she was asking specifically about the impact of science on culture. Let me make a few suggestions in that direction.

I think an important aspect of culture is the body of things which people sharing a culture believe to be true. Science changes that body of "knowledge". A culture is different when people come to believe malaria is caused by a pathogenic microorganism and not be bad air, or when people know how much water is in the aquifer under them and how rapidly it is recharged. These are examples of useful scientific knowledge, which has a relatively obvious impact on the ways in which people in a culture behave.

I think that scientific knowledge may also have an impact on culture even when it is not immediately useful. Think about the impact of astronomy on Christian cultures. Copernicus and Galileo showed that the planets moved around the sun, that there were moons moving around some planets, and that the moon showed impact craters so that celestial bodies were not perfect and changeless. The scientific knowledge challenged the idea of perfect celestial spheres circling the earth, and led people to question whether the heavens of the afterlife was in the celestial heaven, and if not where.

The scientific understanding that the earth was billions of years old, and that evolution had formed species over hundreds of millions of years similarly challenged Christian beliefs that the earth had been created a few thousand years ago, and that there was a great chain of being of unchanging species created at the creation of the world. In the United States these scientific findings are still seen as threatening to a significant portion of the population, no doubt because they imply larger changes in the beliefs embedded in the culturt.

If natural science is increasingly seen as the preferred source of information about the natural world, that has cultural implications. Scientific epistemology becomes more important, replacing other ways of knowing found in the culture. Think of the way that science has replaced religion as a means of obtaining knowledge about the natural world in Western culture. If people go to scientific institutions rather than traditional institutions for information about the natural world, that change affects the authority of the traditional institutions, not only in the sense of their credibility as sources of certain kinds of information but also (often) in terms of authoritarian power.

I would suggest that there are even more fundamental cultural impacts of science. Positivism is a philosophical system based on the tenet that knowledge should be based on observation, and especially on scientific observation. According to Wikipedia:

The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a scientistic ideology, and is often shared by technocrats who believe in the necessity of progress through scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In psychology, a positivistic approach is favored by behaviorism.

Philosophical positivism clearly grows in importance within a culture as science becomes more fully accepted in that culture as a way of knowing. I would suggest that as a culture changes to be more accepting of science as a source of knowledge, that culture is also likely to become more accepting of behaviorism as a way of understanding psychology, of technocratic approaches to problem solving, and indeed of the concept of progress.

To illustrate the point, check out this poster:

Read more about the class.