Summary Of "Science, Politics And Scientism" By Oscar Varsavsky - UNIVERSITY SUMMARIES - E-book - ePub

We have summarized the essentials of two chapters in the following book:The scientific community is international and very homogeneous. Its members support each other because they have a high regard for scientific activity and its rules. The community is led by the northern countries: the United States and the USSR, which are a model of scientific decisions and directions. They are because they have created contemporary science as we know it.
That is why the author says that in the scientific field is where our cultural dependence is most marked. And the hegemony of the United States is accepted by the international community because anyone can go there to study and in principle anyone can win the Nobel Prize, or other prizes that grant status. In addition, scientists from all over the world who go to study there, when they return (if they do return) are more closely linked to the North American scientific community than to that of their country of origin.
They all speak solemnly of freedom of inquiry as if it were the engine of science. But the truth is that this freedom consists in choosing a research topic among those that are already fashionable in the United States. But scientists see their cultural dependence in a very different way: for them it is the most scientifically correct decision, because they see science as a unit of universal validity.
Can there be different kinds of science? Contrary to popular belief, yes, of course. Science develops unevenly in its different branches. It is a historical fact that the natural sciences have been given greater importance (greater budget) than the social sciences. And within the natural sciences, there are some branches more developed than others, and this due to the injection of budget that is guided by North American fashions.
But these fashions respond to historical national interests that vary from country to country and from era to era. And a different distribution of the budget would have as an immediate consequence a different science.