Kwame Anthony Appiah

In My Father's House

The development of science is not a free-for-all with all the participants cheering each other on with the cry: 'And may the best theory win.' But science is, crucially, adversarial, and the norms of publication and reproducibility of results, even though only imperfectly adhered to, are explicitly intended to lay theories and experimental claims open to attack by one's peers, and thus make competition from the adventurous 'young Turk' possible.

More important than the hugely oversimplified contrast between an experimental, skeptical, science and an unexperimental, 'dogmatic' traditional mode of thought is the difference in images of knowledge that are represented in the differences in the social organization of inquiry in modem as opposed to 'traditional' societies. Scientists, like the rest of us, hold onto theories longer than they may be entitled to, suppress, unconsciously or half consciously, evidence they do not know how to handle, lie a little; in precolonial societies there were, we can be sure, individual doubters who kept their own counsel, resisters against the local dogma. But what is interesting about modem modes of theorizing is that they are organized around an image of constant change: we expect new theories, we reward and encourage the search for them, we believe that today's best theories will be revised beyond recognition if the enterprise of science survives. My ancestors in Asante never organized a specialized activity that was based around this thought. They knew that some people know more than others, and that there are things to be found out. But they do not seem to have thought it necessary to invest social effort in working out new theories of how the world works, not for some practical end (this they did constantly) but, as we say, for its own sake.

The differences between traditional religious theory and the theories of the sciences reside in the social organization of inquiry, as a systematic business, and it is differences in social organization that account, I think, both for the difference we feel in the character of natural scientific and traditional religious theory—they are the products of different kinds of social process—and for the spectacular expansion of the domain of successful prediction and control, an expansion that characterizes natural science but is notably absent in traditional society. Experimentation, the publication and reproduction of results, the systematic development of alternative theories in precise terms, all these ideals, however imperfectly they are realized in scientific practice, are intelligible only in an organized social enterprise of knowledge. But what can have prompted this radically different approach to knowledge? Why have the practitioners of traditional religion, even the priests, who are the professionals, never developed the organized 'adversarial' methods of the sciences? There are, no doubt, many historical sources. A few, familiar suggestions strike one immediately.

Social mobility leads to political individualism, of a kind that is rare in the traditional polity; political individualism allows cognitive authority to shift, also, from priest and king to commoner; and social mobility is a feature of industrial societies.

Or, in traditional societies, accommodating conflicting theoretical views is part of the general process of accommodation necessary for those who are bound to each other as neighbors for life. I remember once discussing differences between Ghana and America in cultural style with a fellow Ghanaian and an American. The American student asked what had struck us both as the most important cultural difference between Ghana and the United States when we first arrived. 'You are so aggressive,' said my Ghanaian friend. 'In Ghana, we would not think that very good manners.' Of course, what he had noticed was not aggression but simply a different conversational style. In Ghana, but not in America, it is impolite to disagree, to argue, to confute.