Why Getting It POSTMODERNISM AND TRUTH Right Matters

ere is a story you probably haven't heard, about how a team of American researchers inadvertently introduced a virus into a third-world country they were stud:-ing. They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects. The virus they introduced had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general decline in the health and well-being of women and children, and, perhaps worst of all indirectly undermined the only effective political force for de~ocracy in the country, strengthening the hand of the traditional despot who ruled the nation. When the researchers were confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their response was frustrating, to say the least: they still thought that what they were doing was, all things considered, in the interests of the people, and declared that the standards bv which this so-called devastation was being measured were s~ply not appropriate. Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose "Western" standards in a cultural environment that had no use for them. In this strange defense they were warmly supported by the country's leaders-not surprisingly-and little was heard-also not surprisingly-from those who might haw been said, by Western standa~ds, to have suffered as a result of their acthities. These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new strains of rice. nor were they agri-business chemists testing new pesticides. or doctors trying out vaccines that couldn't legally be tested in the United States. They were postmodernist science critics and other multiculturalists who were arguing, in the course of their professional researches on the culture and traditional "science" of this country, that Western science was just one among many equally valid narratives, not to be "privileged" in its competition with native traditions that