Science is about knowledge and power. In our time, natural science defines the human being's place in nature and history and provides the instruments of domination of the body and the community. By constructing the category nature, natural science imposes limits on history and self-formation. Between the First World War and the present, biology has been transformed from a science centered on the organism, understood in functionalist terms, to a science studying automated technological devices, understood in terms of cybernetic systems. Life science moved from physiology to systems theory, from scientific medicine to investment management, from Taylorite scientific management and human engineering of the person to modern ergnomics and population control, from psychobiology to sociobiology.
Scientists are scrupulous representatives of the facts.
The facts themselves, beyond all question, but also their authorized spokespersons. This is another insoluble question with which the modern philosophy of science will wrestle over the course of three centuries. These mute entities are thus capable of speaking, writing, signifying within the artificial chamber of the laboratory or inside the even more rarefied chamber of the vacuum pump. Little groups of gentlemen take testimony from natural forces, and they testify to each other that they arenot betraying but translating the silent behaviour of objects. The traditional sciences were cultivated in all the traditional civilizations known to man ranging from the Egyptian to the Aztec and Mayan, but since the more elaborate formulations of the traditional sciences which have survived at least to some extent to this day are to be found mostly among Oriental civilizations such as the Indian and Islamic, it is appropriate to turn to these worlds to examine their relation to Western science.