Japanese Science and Western Hegemonies

Cultural studies ¹ of science include at least three kinds of research, two of which have been applied to Japan at one time or another. One approach is to question whether other ways of practicing science, or alternative epistemologies, can be considered as science at all. That is, in comparing the effects of culture on science, can we speak of more than one kind of science? Science, after all, can be defined so that nothing outside a Western tradition will be admissible. Yet, if science is considered as an epistemology in the sense of a coherent, internally logical, and systematic way of ordering knowledge about the world, and which has predictive and testable capabilities, other rationalities may count as sciences. Pioneering classics dealing with specifically "eastern" approaches to knowledge (Capra 1975; Holbrook 1981; Needham 1956), foreshadowed the study of other comparative epistemologies of pre- and post-technological societies around the world (Selin 1992; Tambiah 1990).