I have read both and I second the recommendation of Hacking, with all his faults. Nanda's article I found to be a bit of [perhaps wilful] confusion (in particular a confusion between "unity" and for lack of a better word "absoluteness"). Amartya Sen has written better on matters of whether "science" is Western. Hell, Russell wrote about this stuff way back in "The Impact of Science on Society" and other pieces.
Nanda is begging the question in multiple ways, such as in her use of terms like "reason", and I will give one example: adivasis (early residents or aborigines) in India might say that what they need most urgently is to be left the fuck alone -- whether it is from despotism or know-it-alls. Let us not forget that it is not constructionists, postmodernists, relativists or a few others locked up in remote academic towers that hardly matter (as Stanley Fish pointed out) who affect the lives of those suffering from despotism -- the Brahmins did not need to resort to philosophical excesses to hold their power. They had a simpler method: claim a universal truth and method and their own unique access to it.
In truth and reality ;-), IMHO all this talk of truth and reality does not matter (except for the real reason why it is employed: power -- not dissimilar to the way the GOP and the Dems fight for buzzword ownership: we are the party of freedom; no we are; we are the patriots; they are traitors; etc; etc). We can work very well with provisional notions and utility as measure. And that is the most important point made by Nanda's "radical movement", something that (in the eyes of their critics like Nanda) includes everyone from deconstructionists to historians of science.
Here are chunks of Gonzalo Munevar explicating Paul Feyerabend (the first part of it ties both into my description of two ways to describe "science", in response to Andy F, and also to the question raised above regarding the West and science -- it should be realized that PKF does not consider science to be uniquely a product of the West):
> Just as an idea discredited for two thousand years – the idea that
> the earth moves – can revolutionize science, the ideas from other
> cultures also have the potential to contribute to the progress of
> science. This implies that we should treat with respect cultures that
> differ from the Western culture, no only in spite of the admiration
> we feel for the Western advances made possible by science, but
> precisely because that respect will help maintain the climate of
> pluralism that is vital for the progress of our celebrated science (I
> explain this point below).
>
> Therefore, the lack of respect towards the traditions of ordinary
> people – the "vulgar," as philosophers used to say – and especially
> the lack of respect prompted by an empiricist conception of science
> can lead to a very damaging intellectual arrogance.
>
> Consider for a moment that until rather recently a person could end
> up in prison for practicing acupuncture (medical fraud); that in the
> name of "development" millions of women in the Third World were
> advised to stop breast-feeding their children and use powder milk
> instead (which of course they mixed with contaminated water on more
> than one occasion)
>
> [...]
>
> Feyerabend detected that sort of arrogance in the contempt that many
> intellectuals feel towards ordinary people, their beliefs and their
> traditional customs. That is why he made fun of intellectuals,
> shattered their "reason", and called them "fanatics" and "criminals"
> for creating suffering and misery in the world by imposing their
> abstract "truths" on everyone else. His reaction may seem
> exaggerated, but we must understand it in the proper context. In the
> first place, if a tradition has served a society well and has allowed
> its members to adapt well to their environment, we have no right to
> impose our truth on them, no matter how scientific and confirmed it
> may appear to be. In the second place, many of the intellectuals'
> abstractions, even if named "truth" or "justice", are the result of
> bad reasoning (which he demonstrated with many examples), while the
> valuable ones are so only within a limited practical context.
Here is what Hacking writes (qouted from a review -- my copy of the book is at home):
> "Politics, ideology, and power matter more than metaphysics to most
> advocates of construction analyses of social and cultural phenomena.
> Talk of construction tends to undermine the authority of knowledge
> and categorization. It challenges complacent assumptions about the
> inevitability of what we have found out or our present ways of doing
> things." p. 58
That, if I may say so, is the "money" quote. You can take "construction" out of that and put any similarly reviled set: "postmodernists", "relativists", "pluralists", "primitivists", and the point holds, and it holds in such a way as to demonstrate exactly the point made above: the central issue is one of authority.
Hacking, in the text quoted by Bryan/Nanda, it is important to note, says "people ***resisting despotism and its lies*** need *ideals* of one truth, one reason" (my emphasis) -- sure, you [may] need ideals in order to best carry out a particular action. But only the most non-scientific Platonist will confuse the ideal for the real.
--ravi
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