Abstract
The story is sometimes told as follows: Once science was a disinterested activity giving scientists the opportunity to freely solve the puzzle of nature to the benefit of all. Nowadays science seems more and more driven by the search for patents and dollars compelling scientists to follow the logic of capitalism and corporatization. Take-home lesson: science is for sale and we should do everything to reverse this evolution. In this contribution, I want to analyze the narrator’s assumptions implicit in this account of science. In particular, the rosy description of earlier disinterested forms of scientific research will be questioned, as well as the lack of alternatives to the dichotomy disinterested versus corporatized. I will argue that beyond the dichotomy an interest-driven science can be conceived framed within an epistemic democracy.
The author would like to thank Robrecht Vanderbeeken and an anonymous referee for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf., Matthias Adam (2008), for instance, who defends that science should be understood as a profession (recommending to change the culture of science to emphasize science as a profession), and like all professions, having an obligation to be disinterested and to help humanity. Another example of defending the disinterestedness of the Golden Mertonian Age can be found in this volume, cf. the chapter of Rik Pinxten: “The notion of disinterested and so-called ‘free’ research, – advocated forcibly in the early twentieth century by T. Veblen in the USA, and several top researchers in Europe (B. Russell, and a series of Nobel laureates but also philosophers such as P. Bourdieu) –, is under attack.”
- 2.
These epistemic interests and values are sometimes referred to as cognitive goals or values, constitutive values, theoretical virtues, etc.
- 3.
Cf. Kuhn (1977: 322): “In addition, when deployed together, they repeatedly prove to conflict with one another; accuracy may, for example, dictate the choice of one theory, scope the choice of its competitor.”
- 4.
- 5.
One can think here of the bias paradox characterised by Louise Antony (1993), contrasting (a) the ideal of trying to remove all background biases from scientific tests with (b) the ideal of preserving only background biases likely to track the truth when combined with empirical tests. The puzzling situation of the feminist is then: “Rejection of the ideal of impartiality in science because it leads to gender bias appears both to reject the ideal of impartiality and at the same time to accept it.” (Campbell 2006: 251–252).
- 6.
Longino is not alone in considering objectivity as constructed by a certain kind of practices, performed by concrete situated subjects entangled in power relations, in disclosing particular concrete phenomena; other contributions to ‘naturalizing’ objectivity are, for instance, Harding (1991) and Daston and Galison (2007).
- 7.
Longino (1990: 80) does recognize that some interests will be shared by the entire cultural community, and will therefore be invisible. These widely held views will “not become visible until individuals who do not share the community’s assumptions can provide alternative explanations of the phenomena without those assumptions”.
- 8.
And she continues as follows: “In addition, discussions about androcentrism regularly meet with resistance or hostility from many of those within science, so one cannot say that science as we have known it to date necessarily welcomes calls to examine and sift out certain kinds of non-epistemic factors, calls that according to its stated truth-seeking, value-free mission it surely ought to welcome. The gradual separation of the non-epistemic from the epistemic does not seem to be as constitutively guaranteed as McMullin would like. It sometimes seems to require specific “external” historical political shifts, such as the admission of women into science, or the development of second-wave feminism. These clearly did not come from constitutive “truth-seeking” impulses internal to the institutions and practices of science itself.” (Rooney 1992: 20).
- 9.
The first two are discussed by Philip Kitcher, as: (a) the Interest Problem: the (democratic) setting of the research agenda. The Interest Problem “arises when the hypotheses accepted conform to nature in a way that suits the concerns of only of a subgroup of the species.” (Kitcher 2002: 557); (b) the Millian Problem: the inclusion in scientific inquiry of a variety of different points of view, representing different cultures and social groups, in order to better get at the truth (the Millian Problem). The Millian Problem “arises when the choice of alternative hypotheses is restricted because of the exclusion of some group of people from scientific deliberation, so that the hypothesis that would conform to nature is left out.” (Kitcher 2002: 557).
- 10.
Kitcher’s points seem to be more politically or morally driven, i.e., there should be a fairer distribution of the right of free inquiry. Let us just add for future reflection that a politically more correct science is not necessarily an epistemically better science, and vice versa (obviously epistemically better will have to be specified), cf. Freedman (2009).
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Van Bouwel, J. (2012). What Is There Beyond Mertonian and Dollar Green Science? Exploring the Contours of Epistemic Democracy. In: Vanderbeeken, R., Le Roy, F., Stalpaert, C., Aerts, D. (eds) Drunk on Capitalism. An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Market Economy, Art and Science. Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2082-4_4
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