4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST popular local knowledge and skills suffered an eclipse. They were declared unscientific and denied encouragement and support of any kind by the impeiiah^t rulers. Even after gaining formal independence the rulers in the third world continue to follow the imperialist in denying state patronage to local popular knowledge and skills. Thus allopathy, which relies heavily on synthetic drugs, is considered scientific, is taught in universities, is practised in government hospitals and receives research grants from the state. On the other hand, plant medicine, which relics on vast stores of knowledge accumulated over centuries of observation and practice is declared unscientific and is condemned by the medical profession. It does not command government support for research and development. Numerous other examples can be given from the popular practice of agriculture, animal husbandry and weather forecasting. Thus in the third world it is only capitalist science whych receives state support, and is taught and researched in universities, laboratories and other establishments. The title of science in the third world is reserved for that knowledge and those skills which can be incorporated and integrated into the capitalist relations of production, and which is of value and use to the world capitalist system. According to Schemer: ^A fundamental feature of science is its ideal of objectivity, an ideal that subjects all scientific statements to the test of impartial criteria, recognising no authority of persons in the realm of cognition.554 Sharing the same viewpoint J Monod, the French biologist and Nobel laureate, writes: ^Science rests upon a strictly objective approach to the analysis and interpretation of the universe, including Man himself and the human societies. Science ignores and must ignore value judgements.'55 But this commonly held view has come to be increasingly challenged, even by bourgeois philosophers of science. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn launched his controversial attack on the conventional wisdom, popularized in the writings of Popper, that science progresses cumulatively towards an ever greater understanding of physical reality, step by step, guided by logic and the appeal to a theory-independent empirical basis. Kuhn divides science into two types: normal science and revolutionary science^ Normal science consists of the articulation of the paradigm6 to which the scientific community is committed. ^Scientific revolutions are non-cumulative episodes in which an older paradigm is iep]aced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one."7 As subjective, personal and partisan considerations play a decisive role in the acceptance of a new paradigm, science can hardly be said to be an objective, neutral and value-free activity. In fact the metaphysical position of the scientist affects the form that scientific theories take — they are ^regulative principles5 which reflect a view of nature. In western Europe, ever since the seventeenth century, the central paradigm of science has been provided by the mechanical philosophy. In the seventeenth century it achieved a clearcut victory over its rival