In this paper I try to challenge some received views about the role and the function of the traditional academic practice of publishing papers in peer?reviewed journals. I argue that our publishing practices today are rather based on passively accepted social norms and humdrum work habits than on actual needs for communicating the advancements of our research. By analysing some examples of devices and practices that are based on tacitly accepted norms, such as the Citation Index and the new role (...) of DOI attributions in digital publishing, I advocate an epistemically vigilant stance not only towards our ways of acquiring knowledge, but also towards the implicit norms we accept when we produce research. (shrink)

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (...) (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the “underclass.” The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. (shrink)

In Science as a Profession and Vocation, Max Weber presents a clear task to scientists: he claims that they have the responsibility to present uncomfortable knowledge to politicians, students and o...

Wie Max Weber verlangt auch Marx die Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaften, hält es aber im Gegensatz zu Weber dennoch für möglich, politische Entscheidungen durch wissenschaftliche Aussagen zu begründen. Der Grund liegt in Marx' Anerkennung eines allgemein verbindlichen politischen Ziels, der Interessenharmonie, das Weber aus empirischen Gründen für ohne Einbuße an Kultur unrealisierbar hält. Dieser Grund für die unterschiedliche Auffassung der Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaften wird als der entscheidende Grund für den methodologischen Gegensatz zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Kritischem Rationalismus hervorgehoben.

The paper suggests a critique of scientism by revealing the existential genesis of knowledge-constitutive interests in scientific research. This scenario of overcoming scientism is spelled out in terms of the doctrine of cognitive existentialism. On the doctrine?s central claim, a knowledge-constitutive interest is not fixed and determined by a strongly situated epistemic position that is distinguished by invariant norms of theorizing, methodological devices, cognitive aims, goals, and values. In reflecting upon its situated transcendence, scientific research has a potentiality for discarding (...) that form of objectivist realism which is pre-supposed by the ideology of scientism. The paper develops arguments against the essentialist picture of scientific research shared by philosophers as different as Heidegger and Habermas. (shrink)

“Technology is an ambivalent process with promising as well as threatening aspects … it depends on our choices which promises and dangers will become real.” An exploration of this ambivalence is offered by Dr Paul van Dijk, who is a member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. This paper was originally delivered at the Eighth Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network, held in 1995 at the University of Twente.

This paper deals with Ágnes Heller’s suggestion, in A Theory of Modernity (1999), to ascribe to science a central role in the ongoing development of modernity. As we shall argue, this is not merely a historical issue but, rather, a historical-philosophical one that entails the problem of defining modernity, science and technology and their mutual interconnections. As for modernity, according to Heller, it is a free developmental project without any foundations other than freedom itself. In particular, the evolution of science (...) and technology is one of its main developmental tendencies. Science, she argues, has become the dominant world explanation while technological thought is the corresponding dominant (but not unique) imaginary institution. Her attempt to isolate the essential cultural features of science-technology owes much to Habermas’s analyses of the 1960s on the technocratic developments of contemporary societies legitimized through an ideological employment of science. Like Habermas, Heller embraces an instrumental and problem-solving conception of technology and ‘normal’ science which appears questionable, however, in the light of conclusions on the intrinsic creativity of the science-technology interface deriving from historical epistemology and an externalist history of science. Considerations and examples derived from the recent agenda of historical epistemology could integrate Heller’s philosophical and cultural analysis of the role of science in modernity while challenging some of her assumptions. (shrink)

In this contribution, we argue that critical theories of the public sphere (in Habermas, but also in Negt and Kluge as well as Fraser) leave out the socially central field of labour and labour-political disputes, and that a reactualization and refocusing becomes necessary: We define the dynamics of globalization, commodification and digitalization as sequences of a renewed structural transformation of both social self-understanding and gainful employment. With the help of a multi-level model of labour-political publics and counter-publics, class mobilizations can (...) be examined with a public-theoretical lens and important moments of labour-political disputes can also be reflected on their communicative conditions. This is exemplified by two vignettes. (shrink)

Ondanks het door Kroes gemelde en in de inleiding aangegeven feit dat op de Burndy Library conferentie in 1973 de meeste deelnemers het lineaire model, waarin techniek als toegepaste natuurwetenschap wordt gezien, afwezen, stelt G. de Vries in 1989 in een artikel in Kennis en Methode dat dit model nog steeds het gangbare beeld is.33 Daarin “wordt de weg van een wetenschappelijke vinding naar het uiteindelijke gebruik in een aantal stappen voorgesteld. Om te beginnen wordt in fundamenteel onderzoek de natuur (...) bestudeerd. Hier legt men de feiten bloot en onderzoekt men de mogelijkheden van ingrijpen die de natuur ons biedt. In een aantal volgende stappen worden vervolgens deze mogelijkheden op maat gesneden en omgevormd tot daadwerkelijk geproduceerde en bruikbare produkten. Elk van de stappen vindt plaats binnen een gemakkelijk te identificeren institutie [..]” . Maar hij stelt vrijwel onmiddellijk daarna de vraag of dit wel klopt en richt voor de beantwoording van deze vraag de aandacht op het verleden om te kunnen schetsen hoe een nieuwe techniek wordt geïntroduceerd. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe secret of invention or the art of inventing has recently become the object of positive or experimental research, aimed at discovering the logic of the initial mental processes that lead to “innovation.” But the problem is old and goes back to antiquity: The art of memory, rhetoric, symbolics. Does the succession of thought in invention follow a rule, such that its variations could be classified? Here I offer but a general direction: There is an analogy between the two (...) relations: invention/innovation and fecundation/maturation – namely, a male and a female principle.The Ancients thought that inventing was a divine art and that man receives the spark to then brood over its fruit in his mind. Today's still dominant materialist tendency insists on the importance of this secondary maturation and minimizes the role of the primordial spark.Thus becomes possible the ranking according to a unique order — but not without hesitations and guilt — of thinkers as far apart as Mandeville, Adam Smith, Hegel, Buffon, Rousseau, and Herder, to find the contemporary trend to which François Dagognet belongs. (shrink)

Theology and science generally conduct research independently, with no interchange. The possibility for mutual enrichment often is thwarted because people working in the two fields have very different worldviews, which are mostly held subconsciously. In this paper I will try to establish a dialogue of mutual enrichment. I have chosen artificial intelligence (AI) as an exemplary scientific discipline and the theology of Paul Tillich as a complement. I reinterpret Tillich's concept of sin to introduce a framework for a dialogue between (...) the two. This framework aims to prevent people from either camp from assuming the existence of absolute truth and thus creating a dogmatism. Paradoxically, it also prevents people from being relativistic. The aim is to overcome mutual indifference and ignorance. (shrink)

It is the purpose of this paper to represent an analysis of four variants of critical philosophy of science: the constructivistic methodology, the reflexion upon science from the viewpoint of the critical theory of society, the ‘social natural science’ as a further development of the finalization conception, and the projective philosophy of science. Special attention is paid to the comparison of these variants. Some points of convergence as well as of divergence among them are revealed. A common shortcoming is indicated.

“Technology is an ambivalent process with promising as well as threatening aspects … it depends on our choices which promises and dangers will become real.” An exploration of this ambivalence is offered by Dr Paul van Dijk, who is a member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. This paper was originally delivered at the Eighth Annual Conference of the European Business Ethics Network, held in 1995 at the University of Twente.

Jürgen Habermas’s opus magnum, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible. I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in (...) The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a Lernprozess, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind. I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West. Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the issues concerning the problematics of historical-textual relations in the wake of the linguistic turn. I begin by showing how the emphasis on the generative rather than the mimetic properties of language has led a number of critics to reject the notion of knowledge as "accurate representation", and then go on to demonstrate how this critical position has undermined the way in which literary and intellectual historians alike have traditionally understood such concepts as causality, human (...) agency and social determination. (shrink)

In this article I sketch several versions of the deliberative approach and then discuss five problems which confront a deliberative ethicist of contemporary problems of the life sciences, in particular about food, nature and agriculture. I begin by discussing problems of unequal participation in deliberations and secondly analyze cognitive and normative uncertainties that abound in the life sciences like biotechnology. Thirdly, these sciences comprise different scripts that steer the type of outcome, like products and services. Dependent on the framing, the (...) products and services look different. Fourthly, multi-level problems are addressed, in particular the relationship between local, regional, national, international opinion formation and decision making. Fifthly, I will turn the table and argue that some scientific and technological project can have a large and severe deliberative impact and others not. Discussing these challenges I will develop some tools, like mapping different arrangements of the interaction between genomics and societal developments, developing imaginary futures by aesthetic explorations and by scenarios, by different moral screenplays and dramatic rehearsals, deliberative leadership, and designing deliberation eliciting technologies. (shrink)

La actual transformación del sistema democrático y la creciente importancia económica y mediática de la industria tecnocientífica, especialmente en el dominio de la biomedicina, plantean un panorama complicado, con posibilidades y riesgos sin precedentes. El presente artículo pretender trazar un panorama general de la situación actual y analizar aspectos específicos como los riesgos de la biotecnología, las nuevas técnicas reproductivas, los transplantes y la medicina regenerativa, así como los problemas éticos asociados.The present transformation of the democratic system and the growing (...) importance of technoscience in economy and in the media, particularly in the field of bio-medicine, show a difficult context, with unprecedented risks and opportunities. The present article tries to draw a general landscape analysing some specific aspects such as the risks associated to biotechnology, including the new reproductive technologies, transplants and regenerative medicine, as well as ethical problems associated. (shrink)