Are You sure you want to delete Member from list ?
Why is science challenged in Postmodernism
Postmodernism :
Question the Enlightenment
Doubt in progress, reason, and objective truth. If reason can provide ultimate progress and liberty then why wars,violence, colonialism, capitalism etc shows the dark side of progress.
The same "instrumental reason" used to build factories and medicine was used to engineer the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. They suggested that when nature and humans are treated merely as objects to be measured and mastered, it leads to "barbarism" rather than progress.
Study :Critics from the Frankfurt School
Science A Social Construct
Scientific findings are social constructs influenced by culture, politics, economic, military interests of that scientific institution.
society—not nature decides what questions are worth asking.
Governments or corporations etc. determines which discoveries are made and which are ignored.
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), argues that a "fact" only becomes a fact through social agreement by a study of strong programmes.
Power is knowledge
Dominant groups actually use science as a tool to enforce their power over other people, to establish their authority.
e.g Dominance of West, White people, Males, Bourgeois marginalizing the alternate non- western culture, women, indigenous people
Algorithms and data science aren't 'neutral' tools. They are used to track our behavior, predict our purchases, and rank our credit scores. This isn't 'discovery'; it's surveillance. 'Scientific' data is the new way the powerful keep the rest of us in line.”
Relativism vs Universalism
If science is applied to every corner of the world as being universal truth , then the indigenous knowledge, local narratives, and cultural practices are ignored which are true for those very specific areas. These conflicting pluralistic truths actually challenge universal truths.
Expertise used to silence indigenous knowledge, artistic insight, or lived emotional experiences.
Scientists operate within "paradigms"—shared sets of beliefs and methods. When paradigm shifts, truth changes.
For example: Quantum physics changed the paradigm of classical physics.
Feminist Science Critiques
The "fluid mechanics" was neglected by science compared to "solid mechanics" due to patriarchal bias as solids are associated with masculine rigidity and fluids with feminine characteristics.
Western cultural imperialism and relativism
Indigenous healing practices e.g spiritual elements are equally valid as modern medicine and cannot be dismissed as "unscientific" because then it will be an act of Western cultural imperialism rather than a search for objective truth.
Challenges to Biological Sex Categories
Categories like "male" and "female" are socially assigned rather than being fixed physical realities discovered by biology.
When a doctor looks at an ultrasound and says, "It’s a girl," they aren't just observing a fact, they are performing an act that forces that child into a massive system of social expectations.
Scientific focus on genitals or chromosomes is a choice we make to justify our social hierarchies.
The fact that doctors have historically performed corrective surgeries on intersex infants proves that science is trying to force nature to fit the theory, rather than letting nature be as diverse and fluid as it actually is.
Genome Editing
Scientists treat the "genome" as a code to be hacked.
When scientists "improve" a crop, they are actually imposing capitalist values (like shelf-life and pesticide resistance)
Changing the genome turns human traits (intelligence, height, eye colour) into commodities.
A "genetic divide" is created where the rich can buy "superior" biological narratives.
