Decolonising science: Victory in Cape Town
Monday, December 18th, 2017The panel discussion on decolonising science at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was a great victory. It publicly exposed that no one in the UCT had a single serious argument against me. Indeed, in the last two decades not a single person in the West has put forward a single serious argument against my proposals for decolonising science.
My advance summary of points was posted here.
My claims involved three broad areas: (a) mathematics and science, (b) its philosophy, and (c) its teaching. Accordingly, the panel which responded to me had three senior faculty members from (a) math (Henri Laurie), (b) philosophy (Bernhard Weiss), and (c) education (Leslie Le Grange).
Below is a video record of my presentation.
The panel response is here.
Summary
My three fundamental arguments were that
(1) The current philosophy of formal math involves a bad metaphysics related to church theology,
(2) this bad metaphysics results in bad science
3) eliminating it and reverting to normal math makes math easy and results in better science.
None of the respondents engaged with any of these three fundamental arguments.
The mathematician spent most of his time telling his autobiography. The philosopher could not go beyond some irrelevant quibbles. The educationist did a good thing by summarising my points, but then made some general statements unconnected with my claims.
More details (more…)
