Indian Science from 1910 to 1930, a Cognitive-Philosophical Analysis

On the Peripheries of Western Science: Indian Science from 1910 to 1930, A Cognitive-Philosophical Analysis A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Deepanwita Dasgupta IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ronald Giere December 2010 ©Deepanwita Dasgupta, December, 2010 "There needs to be greater recognition that what is called Western science drew on a world heritage, on the basis of sharing ideas that make science what it is. The sharing culture of science must be recognized as an important organisational tradition , which continues to be significant today." — Amartya Sen , New Scientist, No 2340, 27 April 2002 (italics mine) i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A journey like this requires mentors, friends, and several supporters along the way. Additionally, I completed this project while being half-a-world away from my home country. For the first time in my life, I was away from my family and from the culture in which I was used to think, write, and function. Thus, my journey in producing this dissertation resembles somewhat the journey of the scientists that I have written about. Like them, I too had taken up a new practice that originated in the contexts of a different culture; like them I too was seeking to adopt that practice in order to make it express something new, exporting it to an altogether different context. My thanks go first to Ronald Giere, my advisor, who patiently stayed with me while I stumbled through many false turns and an equally numerous number of partial and incomplete drafts. Not only was he stuck with the job of reading and correcting all my drafts— the usual task of an advisor—he was additionally charged with the task of editing out my numerous non- standard usages of English, which made the process of advising certainly very interesting on both sides! I thank my wonderful committee members, whose feedback allowed me to arrange my views into some sort of a coherent framework, especially in the last few weeks when we were working towards the final draft of this dissertation. Naomi Scheman urged me to engage more deeply with the claims that I was making—which made me rewrite several paragraphs and at least one entire section. Alan Love wanted me to place more emphasis on certain important distinctions that I was making in my text, and finally, Paul Johnson wanted my project to be clearly demarcated from other similar projects. I benefitted from all of their suggestions. My thanks go to all of them for their insightful comments and their suggestions. To my friend James McAllister, I owe a special ‘thank you’ for his company, conversation, and above all, for his steadfast love during all these years when I was writing this dissertation. He always believed my project to be worthwhile, even when both of us disagreed about the specifics of how this project must be accomplished. I owe also a special thank you to Prof. Joseph Margolis, who wrote letters in my support when I applied to the graduate program in Philosophy in Minnesota, and whose support letters actually got me admitted into the program. My thanks go to Subrata Dasgupta and to Susan Hawthorne for their continued conversation, exchange of views, and above all, for their emotional support. To Kathryn Plaisance, I owe heartfelt thanks for providing me with a crucial input about the organization of my dissertation which caused me to rewrite the entire first chapter (thank you, Katie!). To my friends Karen Treiber, Amel Khalfaoui, and Pamela Ludford— my main social supports during all these years in Minnesota—I say ‘thank you’. I appreciate your concern about my well-being, and will always remember the many wonderful evenings that I have spent in your company and in your house. Finally, my thanks go to the Philosophy Department at the University of Minnesota, which has been my institutional home for the last eight years, and which provided me with a fellowship under the Graduate Research Partnership Program (GRPP) in 2008, and two other similar summer fellowships during the summers of 2004 and 2005. I thank the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota, which offered me a year-long Visiting Fellowship during 2002, which is how I first arrived at Minnesota. I thank the organizers of the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) Conference in 2009, and more recently the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Conference, 2010 at the University of Texas, Austin, for ii giving me the opportunity to articulate my views before a sympathetic audience. My thanks go also to the Department of Strategic Management (SMO) at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, for providing me with continued opportunity to be part of their courses on business ethics, which allowed me to see how the practice of business often mirrors the practice of science. Lastly, I say ‘thank you’ to the wonderful staff of the Philosophy Department, to Judy Grandbois, Anita Wallace, and Pam Groscost for their continued support during the years of my graduate program. Finally, this dissertation is given with love to my parents, to Anil and Manisha Dasgupta, who always told me that there is no greater good in life than knowing things well, even when such efforts take you halfway across the world. iii 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. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... ii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................................ viii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. ix Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... x Part I: The Theoretical Framework 1. Science and Peripherality: The Newcomers and the Outsiders of Science 1.1. Does Peripherality Exist in Science? ................................................................................. 1 1.2. Peripheral Science and the Non-West ................................................................................ 8 1.3. How Peripherality Emerges out of Social: Science as Social Knowledge……………… 12 1.3.1. An Idealized Scientific Community................................................................

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