Is western science just one science among many?

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Politics - Political Theory and the History of Ideas Journal, grade: Distinction, London School of Economics (Department of Government), course: Foundations of Political Theory, language: English, abstract: Western science is a systematic way of building and organizing knowledge. Its underlying principles are causality, logic, rationality, universality and physicalism. This kind of science is, in line with its claim of universal validity, widely seen as the only way of doing science. Is this truly the case? Or is western science just one science among many? An application of global epistemic relativism and the equal-validity thesis to these questions leads in a first step to the notion that western science is just one science among many. In a second step, an absolutist objection challenges this view. Three relativist responses to this challenge result in the finding that, theoretically, western science is just one among many. In a last step, it is argued that this finding seems counter-intuitive. This essay does not cover how non-western science could look like in detail.

Graduate student at the London School of Economics and Political Science