Tag - history of science

Beyond the Margin of Error: The Bias of Science

Overall, Brian Martin's book provides a valuable tool for demonstrating how scientific work is tied up in social and political forces. The book should be of particular value in academic courses which deal with the nature of the scientific process and I hope it will serve as a model for analyses of topics such as...

Alternatives for India: Western or Indigenous Science

Support to the traditional systems of science and technology in the third world countries has often been attacked as a reactionary attempt to hold back the national progress and to go back in history. These attacks originate from vested interests as well as well-meaning radical groups. Movements to defend the...

Vietnam Rebuilds: Dialectics and Diodes

What we learn from Vietnam (not only directly from Vietnam, but from the fact of working together for Vietnam) is useful in our everyday political activity, modifies our relation to scientific work, opens a new, critical frame for our past experiences as scientists. It gives us a number of new dimensions in which to...

Politics of Scientific Conceptualization

Regular readers of Science for the People are already familiar with some of the ways in which science is inescapably political. And yet there is a more fundamental, less familiar, intrinsic link between science and politics, the implications of which we have barely begun to discern. In its most basic aspects, the...

The Inherited Ideology of Science

We have inherited from bourgeois society a science whose structure presupposes that man exists inherently as a passive object of external natural laws that science must discover but over which man has no ultimate control. A revolutionary movement that intends to liberate man's repressed desires will need to overcome...