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The
peculiar history of scientific reason
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Articles
The peculiar history of
scientific reason
Pierre Bourdieu1
(1) |
Department of Sociology,
College de France, 11, place Marcelin Berthelot,
75231 Paris Cedex,
France |
Abstract Science is a
social field of forces, struggles, and relationships that is
defined at every moment by the relations of power among the
protagonists. Scientific choices are guided by
taken-for-granted assumptions, interactive with practices, as
to what constitutes real and important problems, valid
methods, and authentic knowledge. Such choices also are shaped
by the social capital controlled by various positions and
stances within the field. This complex and dynamic
representation thus simultaneously rejects both the
absolutist-idealist conception of the immanent development of
science and the historicist relativism of those who consider
science as purely a conventional social construct. The
strategies used in science are at once social and
intellectual; for example, strategies that are founded on
implicit agreement with the established scientific order are
thereby in affinity with the positions of power within the
field itself. In established scientific fields of high
autonomy, revolutions no longer are necessarily at the same
time political ruptures but rather are generated within the
field themselves: the field becomes the site of a permanent
revolution. Under certain conditions, then, strategies used in
struggles for symbolic power transcend themselves as they are
subjected to the crisscrossing censorship that represents the
constitutive reason of the field. The necessary and sufficient
condition for this critical correction is a social
organization such that each participant can realize specific
interest only by mobilizing all the scientific resources
available for overcoming the obstacles shared by all his or
her competitors. Thus, the type of analysis here illustrated
does not lead to reductive bias or sociologism that would
undermine its own foundations. Rather it points to a
comprehensive and reflexive objectivism that opens up a
liberating collective self-analysis.
Key
words science - competition - cultural
production - objectivity - social
field - social capital
For Darwin, living means to
submit an individual difference to the judgement of the entire
congregation of those alive. This judgement includes only two
sanctions: either to die, or to become in turn, for a time,
part of the jury. But, one is always, for as long as one
lives, both judge and judged. (Canguilhem, 1977)
Two people, if they truly wish
to understand one another, must have first contradicted one
another. Truth is the daughter of debate not of sympathy.
(Bachelard, 1953)
References secured to subscribers.
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