The plurality of scientific culture and its value

Meifang Zhang

University of Science and Technology Beijing,China

Although the interconnection between science and the humanities has a long history,‘scientific culture’triggering widespread interest as a specific concept is a more recent phenomenon.Specifically,it can be traced back to the famous lecture given by British physicist and novelist Charles Percy Snow at Cambridge University in 1959.Since then,the academic community has frequently discussed the issue of scientific culture according to the relationship between scientific culture and humanistic culture.

The interest of the Chinese academic community in scientific culture is mostly focused on the discussion of the division and integration of the two cultures.Researchers are largely in support of the integration of scientific culture and humanistic culture.However,when it comes to the questions ‘What is scientific culture’ and ‘What was the origin of scientific culture’,two different attitudes emerge.Some believe that scientific culture came with the modern scientific revolution in the West and is a unique cultural system with some universality;others believe that scientific culture has been around since ancient times and evolved in different forms in different societies.

Those two attitudes actually represent different understandings of science.From the perspective of cultural studies,probably no scholar would oppose the fundamental concept of cultural pluralism.Among other things,cultural relativism in anthropology advocates the core principle of respecting differences and pursuing mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence among cultures.Other than the academic community,international organizations have also explicitly included the protection and promotion of cultural diversity in global conventions.For example,theConvention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions,adopted at the 33rd UNESCO General Conference in 2005,stresses that cultural diversity is a fundamental feature of human society and an important driving force for the progress of human civilization;that respect for cultural diversity is not only an inherent requirement for the development of a nation’s own culture but also a requirement for the cultural prosperity of the world.The basic concept of cultural diversity requires maintaining cultural differences and equal competition among all nations,as well as safeguarding cultural exchange and free creation.From this perspective,cultural diversity or pluralism should be a universally recognized viewpoint.

Scientific culture can be considered a unique cultural system with some universality.The reason for this belief has to do with the objectivity and ubiquity of science.Until the 1970s,scientific positivism was the mainstream view in Western academic circles.In positivist philosophy,science is a pure,abstract,value-neutral intellectual activity detached from the social context,and scientific knowledge is a kind of systematic,empirical and universal knowledge.Under this view,the plurality of scientific culture is easily obscured or excluded.It assumes that science is a system of knowledge that can be separated from social and cultural contexts.Thus,scientific culture is considered to be a special culture with a certain universality,unconstrained by the influence of specific social and cultural contexts.However,science is not only manifested in the form of static,systematic knowledge.It also includes the professional activities carried out by the scientific community.Now that science is a social activity performed by humans,by nature it cannot be separated from the specific social context in which humans live.When conducting scientific research,scientists cannot completely escape the influence of the cultural traditions of the society in which they live,and it is also impossible for scientists from different societies to form a somewhat essentialist scientific culture without any differences in their research activities.

Some people believe that science is based on mathematical and experimental methodology,which originated conceptually in ancient Greece and flourished through the modern scientific revolution in the West.Such a definition of science inevitably leads to the claim that ‘there was no science in ancient China’.Scholars who hold this view include not only humanists but also scientists,some of whom insist that ‘ancient China had technology but not science’.The natural extension of this logic is that ancient China had only a technical culture but not a scientific culture.If this view of science is to prevail,the legitimacy of the study on the history of science in ancient China will be challenged.As the saying goes,‘Without science,how could there be the history of science?’ Following this,the history of scientific culture in ancient China also becomes rootless.

However,it is interesting to note that,among the scholars who agree that‘there was science in ancient China’,a large proportion approaches the history of science in ancient China based on the definition of science mentioned above.For example,Joseph Needham used the classification framework of modern science to analyse and evaluate the ancient Chinese knowledge system,and such a method was criticized as having a tendency of‘Whig history’.Accordingly,it is also ‘Whiggish’to use the definitions and standards of modern scientific culture,which have their roots in the West,to look for the elements of scientific culture in ancient China and evaluate their significance on that basis.Such a‘cultural history’that is detached from specific cultural traditions and social contexts is contrary to the basic theory of cultural history studies.

For this reason,if we want to construct the scientific cultural system of ancient China and review its evolution,we should try to foster a new understanding of ancient Chinese knowledge and its activities outside the positivist view of science and the framework of Western mathematical and experimental science.The philosophy of scientific practice has made a serious critique of universality,due to its de-contextualized and de-localized attributes,replacing it with the local nature of knowledge.From this philosophical standpoint,science is not only diachronic but also contextual,and science is essentially local knowledge.Different cultures of different times have given birth to different types of science,and different sciences have produced different scientific cultural systems in their interactions with the societies to which they belong.These systems learn from and influence each other in the course of exchanges and interactions.

We cannot use the modern mathematical and experimental science of the West as the standard to review and evaluate ancient Chinese science.More generally,we cannot use the criteria of one scientific culture to review and measure the value of another scientific culture.Ancient Chinese science and scientific culture should be perceived and evaluated in the context of their long tradition of practice.The significance of the plurality of scientific cultures lies in recognizing and emphasizing the once neglected and devalued knowledge and its cultural values by questioning the sole criteria in existence.

While moving beyond the Eurocentric position,we also need to guard against a cultural chauvinist position of any kind.We should respect the plurality of scientific culture and trace the past with equality,reviewing and acknowledging the contributions made by different nations and cultures to science.We should look into the future from the perspective of communication and integration and stress the importance of exchanges and cooperation among different nations and cultures in the development of science.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.