Truth, Science, and Politics: An Analysis of Social Epistemology

Abstract

The relationship between knowledge and politics is one of the main questions of contemporary democracy. There are different ways to analyze this relation. A fundamental one is to use social epistemology to assess the ability of the system science-politics to improve or to weaken the rate of growth of knowledge in science and of utilization of the best knowledge in public policy decisions. The thesis of this article is that nowadays the system of science-politics, particularly in Europe, is generating a worsening of these two epistemological features. At numerous levels of government politics has, for many reasons, introduced into the processes of choice and decision-making in science, forms of rationality and values that are close to the bureaucratic and agency model, and are far from the rationality and values that are implied in the growth of knowledge. Moreover, politics supported by the theses of contemporary sociology of science and the new philosophy of science has began to undermine the traditional image of science as a truth pursuing enterprise. The scientific community is represented as the reign of political bargaining and egotistic motivations. These two phenomena seem to have weakened on one hand the free production of original knowledge and, on the other, the authority of science as the legitimate source of knowledge for public decision making. The perverse effects of these two phenomena is a reduction of the stock of knowledge useful for social and economic ends and a deterioration of the public policy decision making because of the present reduced possibility of relying on a, universally recognized, uncontrovertible source of knowledge.