How to tell if academics can be ignored

At The Conservation:

We surveyed 316 researchers from research organisations across New Zealand on their engagement with Māori and their attitudes towards mātauranga Māori (Indigenous knowledge system). We found the majority agree engagement is important and mātauranga Māori is relevant to their research.

Our preliminary findings show most of the surveyed researchers engaged with Māori to some degree in the past and expect to keep doing so in the future. A majority agreed mātauranga Māori should be valued on par with Western science.

Any academic who refers to science as “western science” can almost certainly be dismissed as not serious. There is no such thing as western science, just science. We don’t have western gravity.

Oxford defines science as:

the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained.

Anything from any country, race or culture that meets that definition is science. Note it is not just observation but testing against evidence.

The Guardian notes:

What is only now becoming clear (to many in the west) is that during the dark ages of medieval Europe, incredible scientific advances were made in the Muslim world. Geniuses in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Cordoba took on the scholarly works of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, India and China, developing what we would call “modern” science. New disciplines emerged – algebra, trigonometry and chemistry as well as major advances in medicine, astronomy, engineering and agriculture. Arabic texts replaced Greek as the fonts of wisdom, helping to shape the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. What the medieval scientists of the Muslim world articulated so brilliantly is that science is universal, the common language of the human race. 

Again science is not western. All cultures and races own science. It is about a method.

So an easy rule of thumb is to dismiss anyone who talks about Western science. They have no understanding of either science or history.

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