Universality of Science : Historical Validation of a Philosophical Idea

Chap 12, in Habib, S. Irfan and Raina, Dhruv (eds.), Situating the history of science : Dialogues with Joseph Needham, Oxford University Press (New Delhi), 1999, p. 303-324 (Oxford India Paperbacks, 2001). (Trad. en anglais, par M.P. Original français : 1997f, 1999c).The question of the universality of science is considered, in contemporary debates, under the most varied and opposed positions depending whether one is sharing the point of view of an "ideal science" or that of a "social production of science". In the first case, science is conceived as the "hard core" of its statements and results at the period under consideration, and its supposed universality ignores factors that relativize its contents of knowledge, and which can be of a conceptual as well as a social nature. Conversely, an exclusive focalization on the social aspects of the production of scientific knowledge ignores the objective character of these knowledge contents, be they either thought objects such as mathematical ones, or phenomena of the real, physico-biological as well as human and social, world. These two extreme positions, although caricatural, are shared by many. They illustrate the absence or ignorance of interdisciplinar analyse between philosophy, the various sciences, history of sciences and general history. We shall first evoke very briefly elements of the critique set against the universality of science as they stand nowadays from inquiries of philosophy of knowledge, sociology of knowwledge, history of science, history and anthropology. Then we shall try to set philosophically the problem of the universality of science as a philosophical idea, strongly linked to science and to philosophy since their genesis. We shall see, by following the idea at various stages of the history of thought, that the philosophical statement of universality of science has to be confronted with the historical reality of the production, diffusion and assimilation or appropriation of scientific knowledge, always specifying the various dimensions of that one (which include its applications and its links to techniques and to technology)