I frankly didn't know where to start criticizing. The fact that some people can keep a straight face, and claim these outlandish and bizarre ideas as actual science accomplished in ancient India is beyond me. There is a fascination in India with pseudo-science, due to its deeply conservative, iconoclastic and semi-literate culture. Homeopathy is very common in practice, even though the entire civilized world has almost discarded it as a fake medical theory. Astrology has got one of the largest followers in India. Even in the so-called educated liberal urban intellectual elite, Yoga and Vaastushastra and Ayurveda are extremely common. Serious discussions happen with topics such as Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Hypnotism and other parapsychological hokum, ideas which have been thoroughly rejected due to lack of evidence in the West. Due to the argumentative and unreasonable nature of Indian cultural discourse and mindset, no debate ever happens in national narrative, and semi-literate journalists ameliorate the false science and propagate it among the masses, which transforms it into coffee-table discussion factoids.

Here's the accepted process in modern science: regardless of any claim, as long as there is no empirical evidence to back it up, it is not a fact, it is not true. Be it political science, economics, or physical science, the most important thing is data and numbers and evidence. There are theorists who come out with theories, and then there are experimental scientists or empiricists who define how to quantify or process or corroborate the theory. Again, it is same in all the disciplines. Someone can theorize about God particles, but then there needs to be experiment to prove it. That then goes to other physicists who try to duplicate the initial hypothesis in a separate experiment. If the results match, the findings go to a double blind peer-reviewed journal, and is published to the scientific community, with a discretion that anyone can challenge the findings, provided they can prove it is wrong.

Same process is followed in political science or economics. One can talk as much about "a security dilemma," "clash of civilizations" or "democratic peace theory," if they are not corroborated with quantifiable data, or causal generalization with other similar incidents or evidence from the past, with regards to other great powers, then it won't be accepted as a valid theory. This is the same reason why post-modernism and social science are ridiculed by the mainstream political science or economics community as gibberish without empirical evidence.

Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)