Theory of Knowledge - Course Companion for Students Marija Uzunova Dang Arvin Singh Uzunov Dang

II. Perspectives
the kind of problems I
“Actually,
they were thinking of were
think
the kind of problems that were
not
at all. Our real problem was:
there
do you explore the ocean when
How
sitting on the deck of a ship,
you’re
the average depth of the ocean
and
two and a half miles, and we’re
is
there on the surface with these
right
little tools to try to sample
pathetic
can listen to Sylvia Earle’s
You
on a life exploring the
reflections
in conversation with Krista
ocean,
in the linked On Being
Tippett
terms: Sylvia
Search
Her Deepness
Earle
the 1970s and 1980s, the “gender lens” of
In
gave way to genders, feminisms
feminism
indeed lenses. At around the same time,
and
theory, the roots of which go
post-colonial
deeper, turned its critique to how science
even
being deployed globally. This critique is
was
of attempts to depoliticize modern
suspicious
science and present versions of it
Western
are decoupled from its colonial and
that
history. It would be impossible to
imperialist
the involvement of science in European
deny
and that far from playing merely
expansion,
unfortunate accompanying role, science
an
instrumental to the colonial project. This
was
reminds us that science cannot
discourse
move on from its “colonial moment”,
simply
needs to recover from it. This project of
it
has been picked up by decolonization
recovery
science studies challenge both the
Post-colonial
of a single valid explanation of the natural
idea
and the claim that modern Western
world
is the single valid way to arrive at
science
explanation. It questions the narrative of
that
as rational, objective and true, and the
science
of pre-modern and/or non-European
framing
traditions as irrational and false.
knowledge
today would argue this explicitly, but the
Few
is implicit in the claim that science
suggestion
in 17th-century Europe. Post-colonial
“began”
points out that this defines non-
scholarship
peoples as newcomers to science and
Western
a tradition that is only now embracing them
to
of diversity and inclusiveness. It also calls
out
attention to a history, little of which is
our
even today, of how Indigenous,
acknowledged
and local knowledges of astronomy,
traditional
navigation and herbalism became
medicine,
into the body of scientific
apppropriated
7
this huge expanse of living blue?”
podcast.
On Being
movements worldwide.
knowledge, with their origins forgotten.
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