Knowledge and Power in the Sciences A Comment

Abstract

Everett Mendelsohn claims that since the late nineteenth century, a combination of factors has transformed scientific knowledge into a form of socially illegitimate and abusive power. According to Mendelsohn, these factors include the tendency of science to serve powerful interests rather than to be neutral; the role of science in magnifying the power of the nation-state and its involvement in modern wars and mass murder; the professionalization of science which has increasingly excluded laymen not only as co-participants in, but even as an audience of, scientific discourse. Finally, science, according to Mendelsohn, has contributed to the substitution of technical training for moral education. He echoes Rousseau’s fear of specialists unrestrained by a comprehensive moral outlook. As such, he observes, the scientists become involved in what George Bernard Shaw called “a grand conspiracy against the laity.”