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Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Sun 14 Jan 2007 10:11 PM PST  

Response to my critics


by Meera Nanda

Correspondence to: Meera Nanda,
71 Brainard Rd, Rd, West Hartford.
CT 06117, USA

in

Social Epistemology
A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy

Vol. 19, No. 1, January–March, 2005, pp. 147–191
ISSN 0269–1728 (print)/ISSN 1464–5297 (online)
© 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/02691720500084358 
Ltd1910000002005

---

1. Introduction

“The day the Enlightenment went out”, is how Gary Wills described the re-election of
President George W. Bush in an op-ed column in the New York Times (November 4,
2004). Reflecting upon the conservative religious vote that put Bush back in the White
House, Wills wondered if there was any connection between the fact that many more
Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin’s theory of evolution and that 75
percent of Bush supporters actually believed—without an iota of credible evidence—
that Iraq was directly responsible for the terrorist attack on 9/11. Wills asks if a people
that have lost respect for evidence and critical reasoning can still be called an enlight-
ened nation.

“Belief that does not require proof or evidence” is how the Webster New World
Dictionary defines the word “faith”. It also defines “faith” as “faith in God”. The
American elections, then, turned out to be a massive faith-based initiative in both these
senses of the word. Belief and policies backed not by evidence, but by religious values
wedded to an aggressive nationalism are driving American politics. In this America is
not alone. India, the subject matter of much of what follows, has had its own brush with
faith-driven politics in which an aggressive Hindu nationalism came to color public
policies, including science education.1

The question is: how do secular democracies like the United States and India (the
world’s first and the world’s largest democracies, respectively), manage to square off
their official commitment to enlightened values of openness and religion–state separa-
tion with the realities of faith-based politics? How do matters of fact—that is, questions
that in principle can be decided by empirical evidence—end up getting decided on the
basis of religious faith. This alchemy of turning secular matters of fact into religious-
civilizational matters holds the key to understanding the democratic-populist route to
religious fundamentalism. If people can be mobilized to freely vote for parties with radi-
cal religion-infused social agendas, where is the need for fatwas and book-burnings and
bloody revolutions?

So how can people be made to believe in something regardless of what the evidence
says, and still maintain the fiction of an open public sphere? One way to do it is to, in
the name of empowerment and deeper democracy, extend the “right” to the people to
construct their own truths, by their own lights, while denying the very possibility of
objective facts backed by impartial evidence.

Consider the statement that Richard Viguerie, a well-known conservative media
tycoon, made in a recent conversation with Bill Moyers on the public TV Programme
Now (December 17, 2004). Moyers is concerned about how baseless assertions put out
by the Swift Boat veterans casting doubts on John Kerry’s military service managed to
acquire the kind of credibility they did during the run up to the elections:

People, in other words, are entitled to construct their own facts by choosing whose
evidence to believe in. There is no right or wrong, better or worse evidence anyway,
because “It’s all opinion. Just opinion”. The right-wing media are more virtuous on
this account, Viguerie tells Moyers, as they make “no claim to be objective unbiased
observers. They are up front about their biases”. The problem, as Viguerie frames it, lies
with those liberal elites who aspire for objectivity, not with those who openly defy the
very idea. Why should the rules of liberal media be treated as the universal standard
of what is acceptable as fact, Viguerie demands to know? He ends with a declaration of
independence: “we’re not gonna play by the liberal establishment rules”.2

Prophets Facing Backward, my book under discussion here, claims that the cluster of
social constructivist, feminist and postcolonial theories that deny any cognitive distinc-
tions between warranted knowledge and collectively accepted beliefs3—or between
facts and opinions in a more popular parlance of Richard Viguerie—have provided
philosophical justifications for the kind of populist interpretive flexibility that Viguerie
and his right-wing colleagues find so “beautiful”. Set against the backdrop of the rise of
Hindu nationalism in India, the book argues that the relentless debunking the very idea
of universally valid, bias-free facts has received in the hands of its many academic critics,
has added to a culture of doublethink where truth has becomes infinitely malleable,
open to all kinds of nativist, pseudo-scientific and faith-based interpretations. Intellec-
tuals, whose job it is to challenge such mystifications, I argue, have betrayed their calling
by condemning the very possibility of impartial and universally valid truth that can cut
through cultural and national boundaries. This betrayal has made it easier for the reli-
gious right to present itself as the defender of the tradition, dressed up as “alternative
science”, which it claims has been unfairly rejected and willfully suppressed by the
secular elite. The logic of deconstruction of modern science simultaneously provides

Social Epistemology 149
 
the logic for the construction of “sacred sciences” by the resurgent religious-political
movements that have sprung up among the Hindus, Christian and Muslims alike.

Even though the book is set in India, the concerns I raise are becoming increasingly
relevant to the United States as well. The patterns of reactionary modernity that I
describe for India under the Hindu nationalists are, unfortunately, beginning to gain
momentum in America under George W. Bush. One shared symptom of reactionary
modernism is the aggressive state sponsorship of pseudo-sciences aimed at absorbing
science into the religious worldview, which in turn is yoked to nationalism in varying
degrees and forms in both countries. The White House’s active induction of Christian
evangelicals and corporate scientists (who often work together) to shape science policy,
ranging from the open support of the Biblical Flood geology in the Grand Canyons to
the research policies and funding for AIDS, contraception and stem cell research 4, is
not very different from the state sponsorship of Vedic astrology and Vedas-inspired
research grants to unproven indigenous “sciences” (in medicine, architecture, and even
in defense) during the Hindu nationalist years that I describe in the Prophets.

Appearing as it does on the heels of American and Indian elections, this issue of
Social Epistemology comes at an opportune time. It is indeed high time for science
studies to get engaged in the thorny issues raised by the attempt of religious extrem-
ists to take on the prestige of science for their objectively false and outdated cosmolo-
gies. It is gratifying to note that the debate I began in the Prophets has now been
joined. My colleagues from science studies and postcolonial studies have done me the
honor of critically engaging with the concerns I have raised regarding the political
dangers of epistemic multiculturalism in this age of religious fundamentalisms. In
this essay, I will respond at length to the issues my critics have raised in their readings
of the Prophets.

2. Restating the Argument

A good place to start this conversation is to lay out—clearly and unambiguously—the
main theses of the book. This will help clarify some misunderstandings that crop up
time and again regarding the nature of linkages I describe between the social
constructivist and allied critics of science, and those who peddle the romance of
Vedas-as-science.

Who are these prophets who have their faces turned backward, even as they want to
surge forward, as all prophets are wont to? There are two kinds, one coming from the
postmodernist left and the other from the religious right, both united in seeking
inspiration for the future from the non-modern past. My book traces the many points
of convergences and contacts—but also divergences––between the two. One of the
aims of the book was to raise an alarm about the unintended consequence of anti-
Enlightenment ideas as they have filtered out of the globalized Ivory Tower into the
messy world we live in.

I describe the prophets from the left as those postmodernist intellectuals—the clerks,
as I sometimes call them—who come from the secular academia and/or new social move-
ments traditionally allied with progressive social causes (opposition to imperialism and

150 M. Nanda

racism, defense of the environment and women’s rights). But what sets them apart from
the traditional liberal and Marxist left is that while they “uphold left-wing political
ideals,...[they] have lost all confidence in the traditional left-wing cultural ideals of scien-
tific reason, modernity and the Enlightenment....They display a passion for radical social
transformation, alongside an equally passionate rage against the Enlightenment’s prom-
ise of progressive social change through a rational critique of superstition, ideologies
and flawed reasoning” (p. 1). These postmodernist prophets insist that a critique of
oppression must include a critique of modernity, especially modern science which they
have come to see as a bastion of Eurocentrism and patriarchy. They believe that non-
modern traditions, especially the traditions of non-Western societies colonized by the
West, can provide them with less alienated and less reductionist models for conducting
scientific inquiry into nature. Thus, postmodernists do not see themselves as rejecting
science altogether but as “improving” it, transcending its limitations by examining its
conceptual framework from the vantage point of other traditions.

This valorization of the non-modern and the non-Western knowledge traditions
requires, first and foremost, that they be treated as still viable sciences, satisfying the
requirements of empirical evidence and logic, at least within their own conceptual
schemes. (Without this assumption, it would be patently irrational to insist on the
cognitive value of non-modern, non-Western traditions, although they could, of
course, still be prized for their aesthetic and historical value.) The requisite philo-
sophical justification of “symmetry” or “parity” between modern science and other
ways of knowing was provided by the Strong Programme of sociology of scientific
knowledge which draws upon the post-positivist philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
and Thomas Kuhn. On this account, the objective truth of accepted beliefs in any
society is to be treated as irrelevant for understanding why these beliefs are accepted
as facts by members of that society. All accepted beliefs, regardless of whether they
were true or false, are to be explained as having the same type of social, non-rational
causes. Herein lies the famous “symmetry” of the Strong Programme: Modern
science is no less of an ethno-science than any other local knowledge; its best
confirmed theories offer a description of nature no less filtered through socially
accepted metaphors, models and values of the local (i.e. Western) society, as do the
sciences of other traditions.

I devote two substantial chapters of the book (chapters 5 and 6) to a critical reading
of the Strong Programme, along with their offshoots, including cultural studies and
feminist epistemologies. I also include postcolonial theory since it shares the anti-real-
ism and perspectivalism of social constructivism. Among other things, I object to their
attitude of “epistemic charity” toward all ways of knowing which

But these prophets from the left for whom social egalitarianism has come to demand
an epistemological egalitarianism, make up only half of the story that I have to tell. The

Social Epistemology 151

other half is made up of the prophets who seek a model for the future—for India but
also for the West—from the high-Hindu traditions of spiritual monism taught by the
Advaita Vedanta. They believe that a rediscovery of the supposedly pristine Hindu
roots of India—which they locate largely in the spiritual monist tradition of Vedanta—
can help India modernize without having to go through the Western “pathologies” of
a secular modernity. Like their left-wing counterparts, they too are looking for alterna-
tive models to modernize, but they simply absorb the folk knowledges of “the people”
much prized by the left-wing into the elite, spiritual-mystical traditions of Hinduism.

For the most part, Hindu nationalists do not fit into the mold of Taliban-style reviv-
alists or Christian fundamentalists who resist any attempt to update the sacred texts.
Nor are they old-fashioned conservatives seeking to hold on to the caste, gender and
class privileges of the old order (even though they are vehement in their defense of the
“integral” organism-like “harmony” the caste society, shorn of its “excesses” of
untouchability, preferable to the individualism of the liberal order). I describe these
prophets from the right as “reactionary modernists” who are not necessarily opposed
to modern science, technology and the instrumentalities of the modern mass politics,
provided they can be annexed to the ideology of Hindutva or Hindu-ness. I define reac-
tionary modernist as simply those who “embrace modern technology while rejecting
Enlightenment reason” (p. 7)5. Their goal is to aggressively re-traditionalize the public
sphere, while equally aggressively modernizing the economy, the military and the tech-
nological infrastructure (chapter 1, passim).

The re-traditonalization of the culture—and this is of crucial importance to my
thesis—in the hands of Hindu nationalists takes the form not of an outright rejection
of scientific reasoning but its translation, or restatement, into a Hindu civilizational
idiom, derived for the most part from Vedanta. Hindu nationalists insist upon the many
ways in which Hinduism—both its panentheistic worldview and its spiritual-mystical
practices, including yogic meditation—are “like” modern science, say the “same” thing
and show the “same” spirit of inquiry and respect for evidence. In the hands of Hindu
nationalists, the modern, I try to show, is not rejected outright as un-Hindu but
There is nothing inherently objectionable in this kind of a cultural indigenization of
novel ideas. I fully recognize and appreciate the need of all prophets to look back, that
is, to find cultural homologues for new ideas from within the existing cultural-religious
repertoire (see p. 17 and passim). But the dominant tendency among modern Hindu
reformers (whose legacy Hindu contemporary nationalists are carrying on, and which
had the blessings of the state during the BJP regime) has been to draw spurious parallels
between the spiritual monism or panentheism of Advaita Vedanta and modern science,
while completely bypassing—indeed, aggressively denigrating—the mechanistic
world view and empiricist methodology of modern science as “reductionist”, “lower

152 M. Nanda

knowledge” of “mere matter” which has been, supposedly, overthrown by quantum
physics, relativity theory and other “holistic” sciences (a grab bag which includes every-
thing from Gaia theory, discredited vitalistic theories of biology, parapsychology and
spiritual theories of evolution to deep ecology and eco-feminism). The result was been
an Orwellian doublespeak wherein, in the name of supporting science, the Hindu
nationalist-led government started funding and promoting a New Age-style mysti-
cism—including such superstitions as astrology, Vastu (the Hindu version of Feng
shui), mind-over-body theories of healing and vitalistic theories of life and evolution
(see chapters 2, 3 and 4).

Now, for the central thesis of the book: I show that there are strong family resem-
blances between the social constructivist theories of “equal rationality of all sciences”
and the Hindu nationalists’ propensity to establish equivalences and parities between
Vedic cosmology and modern science. The same logic that leads the left-wing post-
modernists to decry the universal meta-narratives of modernity in defense of the ratio-
nality of local knowledges of “the people”, fuels the right-wing nationalists’ project of
glorifying the “scientific rationality” of the Hindu metaphysics and mysticism. Both
sides, I argue, are engaged in removing science from the larger Enlightenment project
of creating a secular society and a disenchanted nature and translating it into the jargon
of cultural authenticity of the folk culture (on the left) and an elite, Brahminical religi-
osity (on the right). The overall result, on both sides, is to restate the logos of science
into the mythos of Hinduism (p. 30), a mythos which Hindu right-wing uses as badge
of superiority over other faiths and other peoples. What is more, both sides defend this
translation by making a social constructivist argument about the inseparability of the
logos from the mythos, or the inseparability of the logic of science from the larger
culture. Both sides are engaged in advocacy of “alternative universals”, or an alternative
ways of being modern, which do not require either the disenchantment of nature or
secularization of the culture. Yes, the language and the style of the partisans of
Hindutva tends to be less scholarly, their idea less well developed, their books less well
footnoted. But for all the distortions, they are saying nothing that has not been said by
legions of well-meaning left-leaning intellectuals themselves.

I fully appreciate—and repeatedly acknowledge—the starkly different motivations
for this turn to alternative modernities. Postmodernist and postcolonial intellectuals
defend the local and the traditional in order to oppose the real but often exaggerated
scientism of Westernized elites and technocrats, while the right-wing Hindu national-
ists encourage scientism of their own kind by turning the spiritual and wisdom tradi-
tions of Hinduism into an actual, supposedly scientific description of nature. In other
words, the former are motivated by a multiculturalist impulse to let a thousand flowers
bloom, while the latter by a chauvinist impulse to subsume all knowledge traditions—
especially modern science—into the rubric of Vedantic spiritual holism, and in this
process take on the prestige of modern science for Hinduism. The shared ground
between the left and the right, my thesis is, lies not so much in shared motivations or
intentional political collaboration—albeit there are instances when the stalwarts of the
left-prophets, notably Vandana Shiva, Claude Alvares, Sundar Lal Bahuguna of
the Chipko fame and others of “patriotic science” groups, have openly worked with the

Social Epistemology 153

right-prophets on anti-globalization and environmental issues. Rather, the shared
ground lies in their shared denigration of autonomy of science from forms of life, and
in their shared defense of the alternative sciences embedded in the indigenous forms of
life.

But the question remains: How is this shared intellectual ground between the post-
modernist left and the Hindutva right mediated? Exactly what kind of sharing or
borrowing of ideas am I suggesting? I point out many instances of contact and
convergence. But these examples are scattered through out the book, giving the
impression to some that I provide “no evidence” (as suggested by Sandra Harding,
Jim Maffie and Helen Verran), and to others that I am claiming too tight a fit
amounting to an “alliance” or a collaboration between the two sides (as suggested by
Vinay Lal and Susantha Goonatilake). If I were write the book again, I would take care
to delineate, more clearly, the nature and extent of these connections in order to
avoid both extremes of interpretation. For now, let me make amends and indicate, as
clearly as I can, what kind of evidence I am basing my thesis upon.

Fortunately for me, I now have a much discussed exemplar from a prominent
science studies scholar that I can point to and say, “this is what I mean! This is the kind
of connection that I have pointing to all along!” I refer here to Bruno Latour’s famous
second thoughts that appeared in the April 2004 issue of Critical Inquiry.
 
Just around the time when the Prophets came out in print (December 2003), Latour
published his troubled reflections over what has become of the critical spirit of science
studies: “has it run out of steam?....It might not be aiming at the right target” (Latour,
2004, p. 225). Latour argues that

Let us see what kind of evidence Latour provides to support his claim that “dangerous
extremists” (or “bad guys” as he calls them) are using the “very same argument of social
constructivism”—a thesis which is obviously very similar to the one I am making in the
Prophets.

Latour’s claim of the “very same argument of social constructivism” being used by
both sides hinges primarily on a New York Times editorial on global warming wherein
a Republican strategist invokes the “lack of scientific certainty” as an excuse for avoiding
stricter controls on greenhouse gases. Latour is troubled because he recognizes that,
despite all the distortions and simplifications, the Republican argument for disregarding
the existing evidence for global warming is “troublingly similar in the structure of expla-
nation” to those offered by himself and his colleagues in science studies. Latour acknowl-
edges that he himself has “spent some time in the past trying to show the ‘lack of scientific
certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts...[in order to] emancipate the public from
prematurely naturalized facts” (p. 227, emphases in the original). Even though the popu-
larized versions of skepticism toward science are “an absurd deformation of our own

154 M. Nanda

arguments, but like weapons smuggled through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these
are our weapons nonetheless” (pp. 229 and 230).

Latour’s example helps to illustrate the nature of connections I have tried to high-
light in the Prophets. Like Latour, I have been trying to warn of the “troubling similar-
ities”—what I call family resemblances—between the discourse of the defenders of
Vedas-as-science and that of the academic defenders of ‘alternative sciences’
constructed out of non-Western categories. Just as in the case of Latour where the
Republican strategist did not directly quote Latour, or any other social constructivist
for that matter, my case does not does not hinge upon how many times the “bad guys”
directly quote the “good guys”, even though I do provide ample evidence of direct use
of science studies and postcolonial literature by Hindu nationalists. What I am getting
at is the shared Weltanschauung of a suspicion of secular modernity and the shared
glorification of the state of a-modernity where natural science, and indeed nature itself,
were integrated into the wider webs of cultural and religious meanings. But even more
than that, I am pointing out “troubling similarities” between the science studies argu-
ments for symmetry and context-dependence of evidence and the conservative Hindu
habit of thinking through analogies and parallels which are ultimately justified by a
hierarchical relativism of all truths. The whole idealization of bricolage or cyborg epis-
temology that has gripped the imagination of academic “radicals” in the West and in
India, I am suggesting, has long been a dominant episteme of Hinduism which has
allowed it to ignore all contradictions, as it absorbs novel ideas into its idealistic meta-
physics. This dominant episteme, I am worried, is being revived and glorified under the
combined influence of a variety of intellectual streams united in their insistence that
India must be understood through indigenous (which inevitably turn out to be Hindu)
categories of thought alone. What is more, I fear that the postmodernist denigration of
the very possibility of objective knowledge through the classical empirical-materialist
episteme as Western and patriarchal, has silenced critics of the dominant Hindu
episteme by stigmatizing them as speaking from a colonial perspective. These are the
kind of connections I am positing.

In order to be able to answer the critics in the rest of the essay, let me list the four
distinct sets of arguments I offer as evidence to back up my thesis.

First, at the most macroscopic level, the social constructivist defense of parity or
symmetry of all ways of knowing turns out to be nothing more than a rediscovery and
a restatement of the hoary old Hindu mantra of all paths to knowledge of the Absolute
being equally valid—within their own context, fixed by the caste order of birth which
determined the innate ability, purity and the right, or adhikar, to different types and
levels of knowledge. Indeed, given the high degree of pluralism and contextual style of
thinking in Hinduism, Hindus have been described as the “ancient postmoderns” by
Wendy Doniger (1987) who suggests that “it might humble the postmodernists to learn
that [their] vision of reality was discovered long before the twentieth century and
nowhere near Paris”. Others have described postmodernism as having been “created
especially for Hinduism in which literally anything goes, where anything can be
connected to anything else and where anything is all”, to quote Axel Michaels, a
German Indologist (Michaels, 2004, p. 9). The idea of plurality of context-dependent

Social Epistemology 155

truth, each open to multiple interpretations, which is often celebrated in the West as
challenging the universal meta-narratives of one science and/or one God, is in fact the
dominant tradition of Hinduism. Indeed, India offers a sobering counter-example to
the fashionable postmodernist idea that partial and multiple truths are egalitarian and
respectful of the “other”, while universal meta-narratives are “totalitarian” and
“violent”: Hinduism is a clear example where interpretive flexibility of relativized
truths has served to protect the status quo and silence the oppositional worldviews.

I have argued that the rage for Vedic sciences that flared up under the BJP was merely
an example of how Hindu elite have always asserted the authority of the Vedas over
post-Vedic, non-Vedic and even anti-Vedic ideas. Hinduism has always turned every
new idea under the sun into a derivative of the Vedas by refusing to acknowledge that
the new idea is actually saying something new, and that it might actually contradict and
falsify the old. The “other” is not recognized in its otherness, but simply interpreted as
“saying the same thing” within its own limited context, what the Vedas have always
known. The Hindu orthodoxy works not by suppressing the heterodox ideas that
contradict its “eternal truths”, but by relativizing them to their context and then
presenting them as deformed, aberrant versions of the higher Gnostic truths always
already contained in the Vedas 6.

My thesis is that in the Indian context, where relativistic eclecticism is the central
episteme, fully sanctioned by the dominant religion and hitched to a Hindu nationalist
project since the nineteenth century, the prescriptions of social constructivist and postco-
lonial critics read more like actual descriptions of the Hindu nationalist strategy for
subsuming modern science into the Vedic orthodoxy.

There are two components of Hindu orthodoxy regarding modern science—
namely hierarchical relativism and inclusivism or parallelism—and both of them are
entirely congruent with the prescriptions of social constructivist and postcolonial
theory. The first simply declares the naturalistic-empiricist worldview of modern
science (which includes nearly all of conventionally accepted mainstream science) as
“lower” or “partial” knowledge, valid only within the supposedly outdated materialist,
dualist metaphysics of the Judeo-Christian, Western cultures. The validity of this
science is not denied, but “only” relativized to the Western metaphysics, so that it
ceases to have any critical implications for the “higher” or “holistic” non-mechanistic
knowledge of the Vedic “sciences” (like astrology, or Vedic creationism). Once this
relativist logic is admitted, the stage is set for inclusion of data from fringe sciences like
parapsychology and defunct ideas of vitalism as legitimate evidence “proving” the
validity of Vedic theory of evolution or the Vedic astrology. This entire style of think-
ing bears unmistakable resemblances with the social constructivist insistence on the
relativity of evidence to the conceptual schemes and cognitive values; the postcolonial
insistence on understanding local worldviews through local categories alone and the
feminist and postcolonial condemnation of the mechanistic philosophy as a Western
and male way of thinking which completely separates the knower from the object,
rendering the latter completely devoid of all meanings and agency. I also examine the
radical constructivist arguments for a return to the state of a-modern conceptions of
nature and knowledge as seamless, un-differentiated webs of meanings which did not

156 M. Nanda

divest the objects of nature of all meanings, subjectivity and even agency (see chapter 5
for these connections).

The other strategy of parallelism or inclusivism combines relativism with bricolage,
that is, fitting bits of quantum physics here and the bits of mind–body medicine or even
parapshycolology there, into the essentially spirit-driven metaphysics of Vedanta. This
method of combining what are actually contradictory bodies of knowledge, I argue, is
an exact example of bricolage, “knowledge collage” or critical traditionalism that the
various theories of epistemic multiculturalism have been recommending. Have
feminist epistemologists and postcolonial science studies scholars not recommended
multicultural epistemologies in which contradictions are simply treated as so many
sites for expressing “difference”? Have they not agitated for the preservation of the
cultural gestalt of the oppressed over self-critique of traditions? I show that this kind of
eclecticism is precisely the mechanism which the Hindu nationalists are using to co-opt
modern science into the orthodoxy. (See chapter 6 for more details).

The problem with these academic-left prescriptions, in other words, is that each one
of them has long been “captured” by the Hindu nationalist style of reasoning, to use a
science studies concept introduced by Australian scholars, Pam Scott, Evelleen
Richards and Brian Martin (Scott et al., 1990, and also, Hess, 1997). As science studies
scholars have come to realize, thanks to the work of Scott and her colleagues, the
recommendation to be even-handed between objectively true and false, rational or
irrational beliefs is “almost always more useful to the side with less scientific credibility
or cognitive authority” (Scott et al., 1990, p. 490). But as the case of India shows, it is
not true (as assumed by countless feminist and postcolonial epistemologists) that those
who lack scientific credibility are also always socially oppressed or marginalized.
Indeed, Hindu metaphysics which has very little real scientific credibility has always
enjoyed far more cultural authority than any other worldview in India (note: cultural
authority is not to be confused with the higher profile of science and technology in the
technocratic agencies of the state and private capital. In India, where modern science
was not an organic growth of the indigenous culture, there is a mismatch between the
cultural and the political-legislative authority).

The first set of arguments, then, establishes how social constructivist prescriptions
have inadvertently rediscovered and reinforced the dominant Hindu episteme of
hierarchy of truths, each valid within its own context.
 
The second point of contact is the direct use of social constructivist and postcolonial
literature by the advocates of a uniquely Hindu holistic science in order to accomplish
three goals: (1) discredit the naturalistic metaphysics of modern science; (2) justify
mysticism or non-sensory experiences as permissible sources of scientific inference;
and (3) to agitate for the “decolonization of the Hindu mind”.

The most egregious example that I have come across is that of the idea of “knowl-
edge filtration” that the champions of “Vedic creationism” use to discredit the fossil
record and the mechanism of natural selection on the grounds of Western biases and
career interests of the mainstream evolutionary biologists who work in the Darwinian
tradition. The names of Kuhn and Feyerabend also crop up now and then in the liter-
ature on “Vedic physics” which tries to make room for mysticism as a source of

Social Epistemology 157

empirically verifiable knowledge of the natural world. (Because in the Vedantic meta-
physics, consciousness is supposed to be the primary stuff which takes various mate-
rial forms, altered states of consciousness through mystical practices can lead to a
“direct perception” of natural laws.) Last but not the least, I point to direct references
to postcolonial theories and theorists by the champions of Hindutva, who see them-
selves as furthering the postcolonial theory’s agenda of recovering the worldview of
the victims of colonialism.

Direct citation of social constructivist and other critics of science is worrisome, as it
lends the proponents of pseudo-sciences an air of intellectual respectability. Yet, I do
not treat it as a smoking gun. The fact is that while Hindu nationalists would gladly use
whatever help they get from the Western critics of science, the Hindutva case for scien-
tizing mysticism did not start with postmodernist theory and has independent
resources. Postmodernism only reinforces the methodological and epistemological
relativism which has a long history in Hinduism. Votaries of neo-Hinduism, for exam-
ple, have always treated the conventional meaning of scientific empiricism, which
admits only sensory experiences as evidence, to be an artificial limitation on the totality
of possible experiences. Countless number of Hindu thinkers, including such erudite
philosophers as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, have long deployed a relativist, forms-of-life
argument to insist that within Hindu monism, where there is an original unity between
mind and matter, knowing the mind through introspective and meditative practices
allows you to infer the laws of nature, or knowing the microcosm within allows you to
know the macrocosm. This move allows Hindu apologists to accept modern science as
valid within its limited, materialist context of sensory seeing, but only as a partial truth
which is superceded and encompassed within the higher Vedic truths. No doubt, there
are tendencies in other faiths as well—the reformed epistemology among Protestant
Christians, for example (see Plantinga, 2000)—that are trying to bring non-sensory
evidence of faith as a legitimately foundational experience for the believers. But treating
mysticism and non-sensory seeing as verifiable, rational evidence for knowledge of
nature has the blessings of the mainstream of Hindu teachings.

The third connection is more in the realm of social movements. I show that many of
the local initiatives of women and women’s ways of knowing embraced by feminist
epistemologists and eco-feminists only look “oppositional” when seen from the West-
ern perspective. In India, these local initiatives (subsistence agriculture and Chipko, the
tree-hugging movement to save the trees) have always shared the mythology and
worldview informed by Hinduism, which, like all other religions, has its share of patri-
archal traditions. In recent years, nearly all of these ecological and subsistence agricul-
ture movements have been co-opted by religious environmentalists who want to
project Hinduism as a uniquely ecological religion around the world. Alternative
development, organic agriculture and other small-is-beautiful movements are being
recoded into a religious idiom which serves as the mobilizing ideology for the
peasantry.

Last but not the least, what concerns me is that radical critics of the very content and
logic of universalism and objectivity are left with no principled grounds to challenge
the onslaught nationalistic pseudoscience. This is not to deny that the Indian scientific

158 M. Nanda

community did fight back the more egregious initiatives like Vedic astrology. But when
it comes to hard and slow task of challenging the cultural authority of the entrenched
ways of reasoning which privilege unobservable, unverifiable mystical “truths”, Indian
intellectuals have not measured up to the task. The vogue of anti-Enlightenment, anti-
modernist ideas only weakened the already shaky consensus for what used to be called
“scientific temper” among Indian intellectuals.

Before I conclude this section, let me offer an apology for the bad editing that some
have noticed and commented upon. I apologize and take full responsibility for the
many editorial errors and mis-spelt names that appear in the book. I completed the
draft under very difficult conditions, having suffered a retinal detachment in the final
stages of writing. I was in no condition to adequately check the proofs. My apologies to
all those names I have mangled, and to my readers who have had to suffer through these
errors.

3. Response to Science Studies Critics

In this and the following section, I will respond to the issues raised by the critics whose
readings of the Prophets appear in this volume. I will start first with scholars who write
primarily from the perspective of science studies (James Maffie, Sandra Harding, David
Turnbull, Helen Verran, Sujatha Raman and Zaheer Baber). In the next section, I will
respond to the cluster of scholars whose primary interest lies in India and postcolonial
societies more generally (T. Jayaraman, Vinay Lal, Susantha Goonatilake and Walter
Mignolo).

James Maffie applies his talents as an analytical philosopher to cut through my argu-
ments. He raises important questions that include my (allegedly) politically motivated
critique of social constructivism, my “fundamentalist” understanding of the Enlight-
enment and my inconsistent position on realism and pragmatism. These questions are
of great importance and I am glad to have this opportunity to explain my positions
better.

But before I do that, let me clear up some relatively minor but still important misun-
derstandings. First, the issue of intended audience: I did not write the Prophets “for a
first-world rather than a third-world audience” (emphasis mine), but for a first-world
and a third-world audience (the Indian edition of the book was published in August
2004) 7. My quarrel with science studies has always had two sources, both equally
important to me: one, that it fails to get science right; and two, that it fails to appreciate
the unfulfilled potential of science for the creation and maintenance of secular cultures
around the world. The book is intended to engage with theorists of “different sciences”
or “alternative epistemologies” wherever they are located in the global chain of ideas.
But the book is also intended for rationalists, dalits and other partisans of the Enlight-
enment rationalism wherever they are located in the global chain of ideas, but chiefly
in India where they have been on the defensive for too long.

Then there are matters of labels and language. Maffie consistently identifies Hindu
nationalism as “Hindu fascism”. There are two problems with this highly charged and
damning characterization: one, it is factually incorrect; two, it gives the impression

Social Epistemology 159 

(considering that Maffie is reviewing my book) that I so characterize Hindu national-
ism. Far from being a fascist state, India’s democracy has demonstrated its vitality by
conducting a free and fair election in an exemplary manner (which holds many lessons
for the conduct of elections in the United States). The BJP-led coalition was voted out,
giving Congress another stab at running the country and (hopefully) recovering the
cultural ground lost to religious passions in the last decade or so. But even at the height
of Hindutva fervor and power, it would not have been correct to characterize India as
fascist. I do point out some shared traits between Hindu nationalists and national
socialists in Germany (more on that in my response to Vinay Lal who also raises the
fascism question). But despite my very real concerns, let me remind the readers that in
my book I most explicitly denied that India under Hindu nationalism could be called
fascist: “while I see clear signs of creeping fascism in India, the country has not yet
capitulated. There is great danger...but there is also hope....clerical fascism is still more
of a threat than a reality in India” (pp. 17–8).

To stay with the issues of labels and characterizations, I take umbrage at Maffie’s
characterization of my position as if it were in opposition to feminism. Yes, I am criti-
cal of the wrong turn some feminists have taken on this whole issue of feminist episte-
mology. But that does not mean I am opposed to feminism per se. I consider myself a
feminist who speaks from with the Enlightenment tradition, the original home of
feminism. Finally, that I am accusing the critics of science of “apostasy” and demand-
ing that they “recant their ideas” are Maffie’s words, not mine. Following Julien Benda,
I do talk of the betrayal of the clerks of their calling to defend the universal against the
particular, the moral good over the customary (p. 29). But nowhere in my book do I
cast this issue in the language of religious persecution and moral grandstanding that
words like apostasy and recantation evoke.

Now for the substantive issues that Maffie raises.

The first objection Maffie raises is quite serious. He argues that I condemn the post-
modernist heterodoxy not because I have demonstrated their philosophical or factual
errors, but because I dislike the political consequences of the epistemological relativism
that follows from the heterodoxy. I reject the heterodoxy for tactical and not principled
reasons.

This would be damning if it were true. Do I offer a merely “tactical or moral reading”
of the heterodoxy while devoting “negligible time” to philosophical critiques of the
content of their ideas? Having devoted two sizable chapters to a philosophical engage-
ment with the relativist logic of the major schools of science studies (chapters 5 and 6),
another outlining a Dewey and Ambedkar inspired pragmatist middle ground (chapter
7) and yet another citing empirical data to counter the case for eco-feminist philosophy
and politics (Chapter 9), I am a bit puzzled at Maffie’s complaint. Just for the record, I
have to my credit an extended critique of social constructivism from the standpoint of
scientific realism (Nanda, 1997).8 I decided not to include that essay, or refer to it in
the Prophets, as I have gradually moved away from my strident, table-thumping realism
in favor of a more fallible, a critical common-sensist defense of realism (yes, I do believe
that it is possible to be a moderate scientific realist and a pragmatist at the same time.
More on this later). I decided that one more defense of epistemological realism from

160 M. Nanda

me was not going to settle the issue that the legions of clever philosophers have not
been able to settle since the beginning of philosophy.

In my book, I side-step some of the perennial debates in philosophy of science. Based
upon the writings of philosophers whose ideas I find persuasive—especially the writ-
ings of Philip Kitcher (1993) and Susan Haack (1993)—I assume a fallible version of a
moderate scientific realism and proceed from there (pp. 20–1). Indeed, I have come to
believe that the social constructivist debates do not hinge on realism versus anti-
realism as much on evidentialism. [Emphasis added.] There are many verificationists and pragmatists who are anti-realists, but who are nevertheless deeply opposed to social constructivism. The axis of the social constructivist debate runs on the issue whether reason and evidence,
and not social factors, that decide what scientific theories should be accepted 9. In my
book therefore, I do not go into the “subtle debate” between realists and anti-realists
who are nevertheless evidentialists 10. That is to say, I enlist the support of sworn anti-
realists like Larry Laudan in my opposition to those who think that evidence itself is a
matter of social interpretation.

Because my book moves at a tangent to these subtle intramural debates among
evidentialists themselves (that is between realist, pragmatists and positivists), a classical
philosopher of science might find it either confused, or/and devoid of any philosophi-
cal interest whatsoever. But that would be a great mistake. Such a narrow approach will
prevent the readers of my book from appreciating the kind of philosophy I am trying
to do.

Here is the kind of philosophy I see myself doing in my interrogation of social
constructivism: I am subjecting social constructivist theories to John Dewey’s “first-
rate test of the value of any philosophy that is offered to us”. This test lies in asking the
following question of any philosophical school of thought:

Rather than stay mired in the realist-antirealist debate, I apply Dewey’s test of value to
the issues of universalism and relativism. [Emphasis added.] I ask of the various schools of social constructivism if they render “more significant, more luminous, more fruitful” one fairly ordinary, everyday experience that literally millions of people have, everyday, all around the
world. I am referring to the nearly universal acceptance of the universalism of modern
science. It is simply an empirical fact of the modern world that regardless of the culture
they were born into, ordinary people when introduced to scientific theories and
reasoning behind them, tend to find them as rationally persuasive and empirically
warranted. People everywhere, I have argued, do not merely seek a social consensus
over what they will deem as true. Rather people everywhere have an interest in
increasing the “stock of their true beliefs and not just accepted beliefs” (p. 132) and a
universally shared inclination to bring their beliefs in accord with better evidence
because they understand evidence as tracking the causal links between beliefs and

Social Epistemology 161

actual states of the world. Explanations of natural phenomena that are backed by scien-
tific evidence are found to be equally persuasive by people across different cultures,
because they satisfy the universal human interest in acquiring reliable knowledge.

My critical engagement with social constructivism shows that it fails miserably to
illuminate this universally accepted fact of universalism of modern science. [Emphasis added.] Far from rendering it “more significant, more luminous, more fruitful”, various schools of constructivism render universalism of science as a form of “epistemic violence”, as an
imposition of alien cultural categories on the other. Far from sympathizing with
millions of ordinary men and women around the world who struggle to educate them-
selves and their children in modern sciences, the critics make them look like dupes of
the West. Moreover, for all their talk of “emancipation” of the oppressed, social
constructivists fail to account for the interest the oppressed have in truth and evidence-
based reasoning (for example, the dalit struggle to create a religion of reason which
incorporates many epistemic virtues of modern science). Far from acknowledging the
knowledge interest of the oppressed, social constructivist theories disarm their quest by
rendering modern science as no less conventional and motivated by power interests
than the myths of mystagogues in all societies.

These failures, I have shown, cannot be ascribed to excessive politicization of the
apolitical and “scientific” approach of the original doctrines of the Strong Programme.
I argue that the Strong Programme opened the door for politicization of science by
making evidence itself relative to the background cultural values (which are invariably
informed by the religious cosmology) and by dogmatically insisting on the inability of
experimental evidence to decide between competing claims.

This should persuade Maffie that far from offering a merely tactical and strategic
critique of the heterodoxy, I do go into the logic of the arguments that make all knowl-
edge ultimately local and deny the grounds for critique of locally agreed upon stan-
dards of evidence and truth. I make a case that a conception of knowledge which leaves
no space for a transcendent criterion for judgment must be rejected because it is flawed
in itself, regardless of whether it provides aids or comfort to the right or to the left, for
that matters.

To stay with this issue of my supposedly “tactical” opposition to social constructiv-
ism, Maffie does me a grave injustice when he suggests that if “skepticism [toward
science] were politically enabling in other circumstances, Nanda would presumably
deem it acceptable and hence true. But is the truth of skepticism relative to political
circumstances?” But this judgment is based upon incorrect facts. I was among the first
to subject the standpoint epistemology arguments made popular by Vandana Shiva, the
global icon of feminists and environmentalists, to a thorough critique (see Nanda,
1990). I have been one of the most persistent critics of the politicization of the logic of
science whether it is found “politically enabling” by the right or by the left.

This leads us to the second issue Maffie raises which has to do with my allegedly
“narrow” view of the Enlightenment. I will readily admit to my bias for the Enlighten-
ment. I will readily grant that my project is driven by the goal of challenging religious
metaphysics, revising traditional standards of truth and evidence sanctioned by upper-
caste, Brahminical Hinduism which underpin the social ethics of caste hierarchy,

162 M. Nanda

patriarchy and the whole mass of occult superstitions in India. This is a classical
Enlightenment mode of thinking and I make no secret of my admiration for what the
European Enlightenment set out to accomplish. I have been agitating for an Indian
Enlightenment for some time (see especially my essay on the Indian Enlightenment in
my previous book, Breaking the Spell of Dharma and Other Essays, Nanda, 2002). But is
my conception of the Enlightenment as narrow as Maffie makes it out to be? Is my
antagonism toward holistic and organicist thinkers and ideas misplaced?

In the Prophets and more clearly in Breaking the Spell, I follow the mainstream
interpretation of Euorpean Enlightenment derived from my reading of Ernst Cassirer,
Peter Gay, Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob and Stephen Bronner among others—an inter-
pretation, incidentally, that has been reaffirmed by the overall framework of the new
four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment 11. I understand the Enlightenment, at
its most basic, as a revolt against supernaturalism in all its guises. This revolt took the
shape (I follow Cassierer here) of a concerted attack on metaphysical systems which
offered all-explaining axioms and essences arrived at through deduction from first
principles which were nearly always backed by divine revelations. The Enlightenment
thinkers sought to replace this kind of deduction with a spirit of empiricism and induc-
tion exemplified by Newtonian science. The permanent achievement of the Enlighten-
ment was to bring about a change in the cultural habitus by setting new standards for
evidence, truth and authority that were inspired by advances in science. This integra-
tion of a scientific temper with the cultural common sense is what I admire in John
Dewey, whose ideas (among others’) influenced the dalit-Buddhist case for an Indian
Enlightenment that I describe.

Now, Maffie believes that my emphasis on this empiricist and naturalistic strain in
the Enlightenment is narrow-minded for it excludes some thinkers who should have
been included. He is especially irked by my exclusion of philosophers who espoused
absolute idealism and a more organicist thinking, philosophers such as G.W.F. Hegel,
A. N. Whitehead, George Berkeley, F.H. Bradley, among others. Maffie sees this exclu-
sion motivated by my a priori assumption that “holism and organicism are ex hypothesi
hierarchical and hence contrary to l

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