The concept of local knowledge has recently come to the fore in the field of the sociology of scientific knowledge, where it is a common empirical finding that knowledge production is an essentially local process. Knowledge claims are not adjudicated by absolute standards; rather their authority is established through the workings of localnegotiations and judgments in particular contexts. This focus on the localness of knowledge production provides the condition for the possibility for a fully fledged comparison between the ways in which understandings of the natural world have been produced by different cultures and at different times. Such crosscultural comparisons of knowledge production systems have hitherto been largely absent from the sociology of science. A necessary condition for fully equitable comparisons is that Western contemporary technosciences, rather than being taken as definitional of knowledge, rationality, or objectivity, should be treated as varieties of such...
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Turnbull, D. (2008). Knowledge Systems: Local Knowledge. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_8705
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