DIMENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON AFRICA 

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CHAPTER THREE: SCIENCE AND AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT

Is Science a Universally Valid Knowledge System?
For most of its career, modern Western science has portrayed itself as the only universally valid framework for the explanation and prediction of natural and social phenomena. It has endeavored to retain and promote this self-made image by proclaiming its knowledge as constituted of a level of objectivity and rationality that makes it universally valid. The point of departure for this view is the claim of science to have secured control over ‘the principle of the uniformity of nature’. This principle states that what has once happened will, all things being equal, under similar circumstances, happen again¹. Thus if the events of nature do not happen at random but follow an unvarying pattern, then the primary aim of science is to discover and apply the laws that govern these regularities in order to successfully predict and explain regularities in nature and social phenomena². Science has met this aim sufficiently to make its explanations universally valid, it is claimed. This achievement of science, it is further claimed, stems from its internal procedures that enable scientists to transcend their own interests as well as the interests and values of the cultures in which they work. Sandra Harding characterizes this as upholding an “internalist epistemology”, and rejects it. In her view, this amounts to claiming that “scientific knowledge and its effects are consequences of ‘internal’ epistemological features of modern scientific processes, such as their inherent rationality, unique logic of justification, universal language and objectivity-achieving method³. Harding objects to this internalist epistemological stance because in her view, a social context determines not only the presence of scientific ideas and practice, but also their nature. Scientific theories and practice are thus socially constructed and ordered.
This order, although it is relative to society, appears to the Western scientist as an objective truth about the world.
The aim of this chapter is to share in the rejection of the internalist epistemology of modern science, and to affirm the dependence of science on particular ontologies, epistemologies and sets of values. Further, we will advance the view that the development theories and their approaches considered in chapter two, as applications of social science, have failed to succeed in Africa because they impose Western ontologies and epistemologies. We begin with an exploration into the basis of the claim to objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge.

 Modern Science: Initial and Current Preoccupations

The insistence on a unique rationality and logic of justification for the explanatory framework of modern Western science is a relic of its origins and initial preoccupations. These origins are located in the Copernican Revolution⁴, the essence of which was the rejection of the geocentric view of the universe which had dominated European thought for 1500 years, for the heliocentric view ⁵. The geocentric view held that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the stars, sun, moon and planets revolved around it. Aristotle, the most influential proponent of the geocentric view, formulated teleological explanations of both the natural and social world. This type of explanation purports to make an event intelligible by ascribing a purpose to it. Accordingly, the physical behaviour of objects was explained in terms of the purposes associated with their material constitution; and the concepts of purpose and design were also applied in understanding and classifying human activity⁶. In fact even contemporaneously, the explanatory power of geocentric science remains. Undoubtedly, purposes constitute reasons, in the social sciences, why people behave in particular ways. Further, “every time the expressions ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ are employed it is testimony to the lingering explanatory power of geocentric system”⁷.
On the other hand, proponents of the Copernican Revolution theorized the sun as center of the universe, around which all celestial objects revolved⁸. A key outcome of this Revolution was acceptance that nature should be theoretically and experimentally explored with reference to its observed and supposed regularities. Hence the aim of science became the discovery of laws – universally valid descriptions of the fundamental structure and patterns of the physical and social world, or “the ways things are!”. In fulfillment of this, explanations in modern natural sciences are deductive-nomological. They are deductive in the sense that their premises (or explanans)⁹ logically entail their conclusions (or explanandum); and they are nomological in that at least one of their premises is a law. These explanations are therefore contingent on the canons of mathematics and formal logic.
As footnote 2 indicates, there is a strong affinity between the natural and social sciences. This is exemplified by a number of facts. One is the insistence of many contemporary philosophers and theorists of the social sciences that the basic theories of the social sciences are reducible to some suitable theory in the natural sciences¹⁰. This means that nomological explanatory principles are applicable to both physical events and human actions¹¹. In short, the criterion for the recognition of a theory as worthy of acceptance, for these philosophers and theorists, is the same in both the natural and social sciences. Thus causal necessity is required by explanations in both branches of science. Another fact is the extrapolation of the mathematical and logical methods to the social sciences. We will discus this more fully in section 3.4.
The preoccupation with causal necessity based on a unique logic of justification seeking certainty is easily traceable to the origins modern science, which are characterized by two exceptional events. The first is the replacement of the geocentric view with the heliocentric view. The second is the Reformation, which refers to a series of events in the first half of the sixteenth century, initiated by the posting by Martin Luther of the “Ninety five theses” on the church at Wittenberg. These events collapsed the Catholic Church’s hold on the production and dissemination of knowledge. Before the Reformation, the monasteries of The Church were centers of excellence for theorizing a unified worship of God, as well as for Aristotelian metaphysics which underlay geocentric science. In spite of its strong connections with geocentric thought, the Church suppressed innovative scientific thinking by branding thinkers as Galileo Galilei and Giodarno Bruno¹² as heretics deserving of anathema and death. In the 1500s, the reformation challenged and overthrew the Vatican as the exclusive seat of religious authority and political dominance. The certainty of geocentric science, accumulated over 1500 years, as well as the hierocratic thinking and ordering of society embedded in the suppression of innovative thought, crumbled with the demise of this unity and authority of The Church and led to the emergence of modern Western science.
The collapse of these two foundations of the production and dissemination of knowledge before the Reformation occasioned “disdainful mistrust and extreme skepticism toward any new system of justifying and authorizing knowledge about nature”¹³. Accordingly, the new scientists promoting the heliocentric view “had an uphill battle presenting themselves as creditable to a nervous, skeptical intelligentsia comprised of intellectual Church officials and scholarly gentlemen affiliated with Royal Courts”¹⁴.
The earliest theorists and practitioners of modern science, then, needed to adopt a unique self-validating posture in order to generate confidence in their methods and results. This is exemplified by the overriding aim of Descartes’ hyperbolic doubt and inquiry in the Meditations¹⁵, and his discovery of cogito ergo sum¹⁶ as the flawless foundation of all knowledge. What is implicit in the Cartesian enterprise is that rationalism, nurtured by the canons of logic and mathematics, is the only infallible source and justification for knowledge. All competing techniques of knowledge production and justification are rejected as quackery and nonsense. Yet to the extent that the ‘truths’ of deductive reason could be valid in their own right, i.e., without reference to the empirical world, Descartes’ rationalism was a metaphysics.

The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Natural Sciences

If science is culture-dependent, then a metaphysics and cultural values are necessarily prior and foundational to its knowledge claims. This must be the case since ontology¹⁷ and epistemology are intimately and inextricably linked by mutual implication. If ontology is the theory of being, and epistemology a theory of the justification of knowledge, then each must imply the other because claiming that something exists rationally implies the question: “how do you know”?; and claiming to know that x implies admitting the existence of x.
In the Western tradition of knowledge production, three special cases that illustrate the profound influence of metaphysics on the natural sciences¹⁸ deserve mention here. The first is Sir Isaac Newton’s works, which held exclusive sway as the paradigm of the natural sciences until the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of Relativity gained currency in the early twentieth century. As discussed in section 3.1, Aristotle was unparalleled in providing the metaphysical and theoretical basis of geocentric science. Newton has been considered by many as the equivalent philosopher and theoretician for modern (heliocentric) mechanistic science¹⁹. His ‘discovery’ of the laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation was considered to be the ultimate realization. This was sufficiently displayed by his contemporaries and posterity. Thus Locke spoke of the “incomparable Mr. Newton, an under-labourer, employed in clearing the ground and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge”²⁰. Burrt records Henry Pembleton, the editor of the third edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, in which these ‘discoveries’ were published, declaring that “…my admiration at the surprising inventions of this man [Newton], carries me to conceive of him as a person, who not only must raise the glory of the country which gave him birth, but that he has even done honour to human nature, by having extended the greatest and most noble of our faculties, reason, to subjects which, till he attempted them, appeared to be wholly beyond the reach of our limited capacities²¹”. Further, the French scientist, Laplace, is reputed to have remarked that “Newton was not only the greatest genius that ever had existed, but also the most fortunate; inasmuch as there is but one universe, and it can therefore happen to but one man in the world’s history to be the interpreter of its laws”²².
So far as objects were masses, moving in space and time, under the impress of forces as Newton had defined them, their behaviour was now, as a result of his theories, “fully explicable in terms of exact mathematics”²³. We need to emphasize that central to Newton’s work was his finding a precise mathematical use for concepts like force, mass and inertia; and employing mathematics to assume definite answers to such fundamental questions as the nature of space, time, matter and motion. In this respect, it is legitimate to conclude that Newton’s greatest contribution to the growth of knowledge is his reduction of “the major phenomena of the whole universe of matter to a single mathematical law”²⁴. For Newton, then, science was composed of laws stating the mathematical behaviour of nature. It is the exact mathematical formulation of the processes of the natural world. This reduction clearly implies authentication of Galileo’s and the Descartes’ doctrine that reason, exemplified by mathematics is, indisputably, the most reliable discoverer and explainer of the laws of nature²⁵.

Declaration 
Acknowledgement 
List of Acronyms 
Key terms 
Summary 
INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPMENT AND PHILOSOPHY 
i. Statement of the Problem
ii. Against Economism
iii. Critique of Competition
iv. Poverty is Unnatural
v. Thesis Statement
vi. Methodology
vii. Structure of Dissertation
CHAPTER ONE: DIMENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON AFRICA 
1.1. What is Development
1.2. Development and Economic Growth
1.3. Schools of Development Thought and their Influence in Africa
1.4. The Neo-Liberal Perspective and its Basic Claims
1.5. Similarities of Neo-Liberalism with earlier Theories
CHAPTER TWO: ‘ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES’ TO DEVELOPMENT 
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The Basic Needs Strategy (BNS)
2.3. Criticisms of the BNS
2.4. Human Development
2.5. The Rights-Based Approach
2.6. The Millennium Development Goals
2.7. Sustainable Development
2.8. The “African Alternative Framework”
2.9. The End of Poverty
2.10. Concluding Remarks
CHAPTER THREE: SCIENCE AND AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT 
3.1. Is Science a Universally Valid Knowledge System?
3.2. Modern Science: Initial and Current Preoccupations
3.3. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Natural Sciences
3.4. The Metaphysical Basis of the Social Sciences
3.5. The Challenge of Theoretical Physicists to ‘Internal Epistemologies’ and the Metaphysics of Science
3.6. Science as Culture and Practice: the Challenge of Contemporary Philosophers and Historians of Science
3.7. African Critique of Internal Epistemologies and Western Science
3.8. The Social Sciences and Africa’s Development
3.9. Indigenous Knowledge, Scientific Systems and Africa’s Development
3.10. Concluding Remarks
CHAPTER FOUR: FOUNDATION FOR AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT 
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Essential Features of African Ontology
4.3. Knowledge and Development
4.4. Some Features of African (Non-Foundationalist) Epistemology:
4.5. Paranormal Cognition and the Causal Theory of Knowledge
4.6. Ontology, Epistemology and Development: Towards Afri-centrism
CHAPTER FIVE: TOWARDS AN ETHICS-BASED DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM FOR AFRICA 
5.1. Ethics and Africa’s Development
5.2. The Basis of African Ethics
5.3. Politics from a Communitarian-ethical Perspective
5.4. Political Culture in an Ethics-based Model of Development
5.5. Humane Economics and Africa’s Development
5.6. Humane Technology, Ethical Ecology and Africa’s Development
5.7 Conclusion
Bibliography
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AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT: THE IMPERATIVES OF INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE AND VALUES