Since the beginning of their dramatic development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the natural sciences have been able to come to a large measure of agreement among themselves, even across the most impenetrable cultural frontiers, about the basic tenets of physics, chemistry, and so on, up to and including neurophysiology. (I leave aside here the question of objectivity at the levels of quantum or relativity theory.) Physicists, for example, do not teach and practice European, or Chinese, or Muslim, or African physics, but just physics. The organization of the profession of physics, the way it is taught, its popular authority in matters like the creation of the earth or the explanation of miracles-these things of course vary between different countries and different cultures. But within the professional domain of physics, where observation and experiment, rather than interpretation, are at issue, physicists of all religious persuasions or political opinions meet as colleagues and as equals.
This non-hegemonic agreement needs to be stressed because ofa postmodern tendency to challenge it in the name of historical or cultural relativity. Pretensions to have arrived at absolute truth certainly ought to be disclaimed, but the slow and sure convergence and accumulation of limited bodies of empirical knowledge makes no claim to truth of this sort -only to the existence of a sufficiently robust and integral propositional structure (perpetually unfinished, perpetually undergoing modification) whose practical and theoretical content can be counted on for action and prediction. Galileo asked no more of his "new sciences"; the ambition to know everything, the pride of scientists who congratulated themselves on having understood everything, were later additions incompatible with the true scientific spirit.
The human or social sciences, on the other hand, remain often fragmentary and partial, forming schools, movements, and the like, without collegial or sometimes even courteous relations among themselves, displaying internal contradictions and considerable regional and ideological diversity. The uncertainty begins already with "human or social", if not with "sciences" itself-forms of knowledge, certainly, but not formalized, rarely quantitative, resembling one