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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Beyond Postcolonial Theory: Two Undertheorized Perspectives on Science and Technology -- I. Counterhistories -- II. Other Cultures' Sciences -- III. Residues and Reinventions -- IV. Moving Forward: Possible Pathways -- Copyright Acknowledgments -- Index

Intro -- Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Science and Inequality: Controversial Issues -- Controversial Issues -- Do Sciences and their Philosophies have a "Political Unconscious"? -- Which Philosophies of Science are Adequate for a World of Sciences? -- Nature and Culture -- The New Organization of Scientific Inquiry -- Scientific Accountability and Responsibility: from Science as Representation to Science as Practice -- Some Terminological Challenges -- The Importance of Controversy about Science and Society -- Part 1: The Social World of Scientific Research -- 1: Thinking about Race and Science -- Is Science Racist? -- Defenses of Racist Scientific Practices -- Natural Racial Types? -- The Racist Misuse and abuse of sciences and their applications and technologies -- Racist Social Structures in the Sciences -- A World of Sciences: Race, Culture, and Empire -- Conclusion: The Radical Role of Antiracist Resistance -- 2: Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Postcolonial Science Studies -- "Would the Gift the Genie Give Us …" -- Are the Natural Sciences Multicultural? -- Does Modern Science have Non-Western Origins? -- Could there be Other Culturally Distinctive Sciences that Work? -- Is Modern Science Culturally "Western"? -- Other Modern Sciences? -- 3: With Both Eyes Open: A World of Sciences -- One Planet, Many Sciences? -- Projects Starting in the Global South -- Integrate Other Sciences into Western Sciences -- Delinking -- Integrate Northern Sciences into Other Sciences -- Southern Models for Northern Sciences -- Projects Starting in the North -- 4: Northern Feminist Science Studies: New Challenges and Opportunities -- Feminist Science and Technology Studies in the Global North -- Surviving Discriminatory Social Structures.

A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin America (LA) in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one hand, and modernity and capitalism (and their sciences) in Europe, on the other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The effects of that history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations. These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating more accurate and progressive northern philosophies and histories of science as well as social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin American feminists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolonial accounts.

This essay reviews the older utopian & dystopian responses to the title question & examines their assumptions about the nature of science that no longer are empirically or theoretically justifiable. It then identifies themes in recent empirical & theoretical work that point the way to a more realistic understanding of the kind of philosophy of science necessary to contribute to sciences in the service of social justice. Philosophies of science, like the sciences on which they reflect, always participate in larger social discourses. Adapted from the source document.