All knowledge systems are locally embedded, including modern science

Evidence

Thus in their opportune use of historical and cultural resources, all knowledge systems are distinctively “local” ones - an issue to which we return. Localness does not insure good quality on this account. Individuals and their cultures can easily disappear because of faulty local assumptions; indeed, the extinction of our species perhaps may be the already inevitable consequence of faulty modern assumptions about environments. Modern European-American sciences differ from other cultures’ knowledge systems in important ways, but the specification of how and why this is the case must be sought elsewhere than in the contrast between the purported cultural neutrality of the former and the “ethno” character of the latter. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1585

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critique of scientific neutrality in feminist standpoint theory and to post-Kuhnian sociology of knowledge (Latour, Feyerabend).
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that even our species’ potential extinction could stem from faulty local assumptions of a ‘modern’ knowledge system collapses the West/rest hierarchy in a genuinely radical way.