Summing Up

This chapter summarizes the main discussions in the preceding chapters and provides a brief account of the history and theory of knowledge production, in Asia as well as Europe, from the earliest times to the rise of new physics, largely following the theoretical perspective of Social Formation and depending on the secondary works, except for analysing the homology between the Social Formation and the knowledge form, in the third chapter, where the illustrations are drawn from the primary source. In that sense the role of the primary source is supplementary and confined to the study of specific instances of the concepts, designs, and methodology of Indian knowledge production. Tracing through a variety of thoughts, the birth of science, the making of new science, the book ends up with consciousness as a problem of particle physics. Roger Penrose, dismissing the matter–mind dichotomy, declares that laws of new science about the quantum gravity seem to govern consciousness too.

European Roots

This chapter discusses the Greek and Hellenic history of thoughts and ideas. It is followed by a discussion of the Arab Muslim engagement with the classical Greek and Hellenic knowledge by way of translation, interpretation, and academic extension. Drawing the broad contours of the Arab epistemology, the section shows how the Arab scholars retained, improved upon, and carried forward the Greek scholarship in different fields, enabling Europe to trigger the Renaissance movement. It includes a review in recognition of the medieval Catholic scholars’ contribution to the growth of new knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, and philosophy, which also had a role in the intellectual preparation for the onset of Renaissance in Europe.

Knowledge Production

The chapter traces the non-European roots of specialized knowledge production in the ancient times as illustrated by the civilizations of the Indian and the Chinese regions. Examining the archaeology and ethno-archaeology of remains of the civilizations in the valleys of the Indus and Yellow rivers, we try and capture the earliest knowledge in crafts production technology such as architecture, metallurgy, lapidary, and ceramics. Orally transmitted Vedic knowledge, eschatology, metaphysics, grammar, phonetics, astronomy, the post-Vedic systems of thought, Ayurvedic knowledge, architecture, nature of metallurgical texts, the Indian and Chinese textual traditions, and epistemological traces constitute other contents of the chapter. This chapter underscores the early India’s methodologically distinct aphoristic structure of stating truth as astute observations generalized as self-validated principles, the logic of which corresponds to that of mathematical equations or formulas. It discusses the history of mathematical astronomy. A distinct epistemic shift is explicit in India’s astronomy of fourteenth to sixteenth centuries CE. Mādhava of Sangamagrāma (c. 1340–1425 CE) in Kerala marks the beginnings of this shift through his path-breaking mathematical advances in conceptualizing infinite series. The chapter ends with a concise discussion of the Chinese history of knowledge systems across the material cultures

Introduction

It is the introductory chapter that seeks to explain the need to theorize the history of knowledge production through an overview of the compelling features that necessitate theorization. It points out the landmarks in the history of knowledge production during the hoary past. A brief discussion of the methodological preoccupation, the theory of social formation as the central framework, and a chapter-wise outline is given.

Science of Uncertainty

This chapter virtually illuminates the invisible universe of subatomic dynamics through mathematical formalism and probability theory rather than empiricism based on instrumentation. A series of strange discoveries go into the making of the New Science and a discussion of the process constitutes the core of this chapter. Max Planck’s proposition of the Quanta, Niels Bohr’s discovery of objects’ non-observable and immeasurable complementary properties, Erwin Schrodinger’s interpretation of the object-subject split as a figment of imagination, Werner Karl Heisenberg’s enunciation of the Uncertainty Principle precluding the possibility of precision about certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, Kurt Friedrich Godel’s thesis of Undecidability based on his incompleteness theorems demonstrating certain inherent limits of provability about formal axiomatic theories, Murray Gell-Mann’s theory of Complexity in particle physics, Richard Feynman’s thesis on quantum mechanics, and Einstein’s theories of relativity, literally shook Newtonian physics of certainty with problems of uncertainty and subjectivity. At the end, the chapter makes a review of speculative thoughts and imagination about the dynamics of subatomic micro-universe as well as the mechanics of the galactic macro-universe.

The Rise of Science

A review of knowledge production in the Age of Renaissance, impetus of great intellectuals like Roger Bacon, growth of natural philosophy of Copernicus, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Newton on contemporary knowledge production; and the making of the Age of Enlightenment constitute the fifth chapter. How Newton’s theories of objects, position, relations, dynamic, and velocity went into the making of a new field of knowledge called mechanics in Natural Philosophy, explaining the fundamental laws of the motion of bodies under the action of forces, became the hegemonic model for the centuries that succeeded, is the core of the chapter. It shows how the Newtonian inductive theorization of absolute space as independent of objects and of the universal time revolutionized the entire domain of knowledge and became the epochal model.

Social Theory of Knowledge Production

A concise representation of the social theory of knowledge production is the main task that we try and summarize in this chapter. Tracing the antecedents of social theories about the origins of knowledge by briefly reviewing the ideas of Giovanbattista Vico and Auguste Comte we focus on Karl Marx’s theory. Other theories explaining the social foundation of knowledge through multiple analyses of the influences of social affairs, conditions, and processes of human existence on the cognitive outputs have also been summarized.