The social dimension of the scientific rationality: to debate
Abstract
After works such as Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “science”, understood as an objective and rigorous system, remained in doubt. The notion of paradigm substituted what up until then had been conceived like an autonomous and progressive business by a science susceptible to the contingency of human matters. Now, for their study, scientific knowledge should be historically situated and deep-rooted to a specific community whose interests, values and culture have also a decisive role. Nevertheless, this processing of “the social” has generated an extensive debate among those who consider it as a distorting element and those that defend it like a constituent aspect of the scientific rationality. My purpose here is to briefly show that discussion, which at the end is about the possibility or impossibility of establishing universal criteria of rationality, as well as to chiefly explore the conciliatory proposal of Philip Kitcher.References
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