Les enjeux socioéthiques des désaccords entre scientifiques : un aperçu de la construction discursive d’étudiants et étudiantes

Résumé

Cette recherche avait pour objectif d’explorer comment des groupes d’étudiants et étudiantes du collège appréhendent et structurent les désaccords entre scientifiques et, plus particulièrement, les enjeux socioéthiques qui les sous-tendent. En vue de simuler un contexte qui se rapproche de celui que des jeunes peuvent instaurer lorsqu’ils conversent entre eux sur le clonage, par exemple, nous avons aménagé un contexte de délibération en petit groupe de trois à quatre étudiants et étudiantes à propos d’une autre délibération, si l’on peut dire. Les étudiants et étudiantes ont ainsi été invités a se prononcer sur une conversation (écrite) d’une quinzaine de minutes entre deux scientifiques qui adoptent des positions contrastées en regard, dans un cas, de l’utilisation des travaux des médecins nazis dans la recherche sur l’hypothermie et, dans l’autre cas, de la manipulation du matériel génétique des êtres vivants, en particulier des êtres humains. Nous présentons ici un aperçu des stratégies et ressources discursives mobilisées par les étudiants et étudiantes pour exprimer et justifier leurs positionnements et repositionnements tout au long de leur propre conversation, ainsi que de l’≪ agir éthique ≫ que les uns les autres ont spontanément énacté.

Abstract

This study was designed to explore how groups of students at a CÉGEP (a type of two-year pre-university college specific to Quebec) framed not only disagreements among scientists but also, and particularly, the underlying socio-ethical stakes of these disagreements. As part of simulating a context comparable to that which might arise among young people when they discuss cloning, for example, we devised a deliberative context involving small groups of three to four students on the subject of another sort of deliberation, so to speak. Students were asked to express their point of view about an adversarial conversation (presented in written form), lasting approximately 15 minutes, between two scientists who had adopted opposing positions with respect, in the first case, to the use of hypothermia research performed by Nazi physicians and, in the second, to the manipulation of genetic material among living beings, and humans in particular.

The corpus of our materials was made up of tape-recorded conversations among eight groups of students. The average length of conversations was approximately 1½> hours. With the exception of one student who had a concentration in literature, participating students were all enrolled in science programs; most planned to continue in the same field once they reached university. The average age of the students was 18, with the exception of three students who had returned to school and whose ages varied between 23 and 31. We used a range of tools deriving from the methodology of discourse analysis and argumentation to elucidate how students give shape and meaning to the disagreements among scientists and co-construct one or more group positions. We thus investigated not only the discursive strategies and resources activated by students to justify the initial and revised positions they adopted over the course of their own conversation but also the forms of ‘ethical action-taking’ spontaneously enacted by them.

Among other findings, we were able to show that students were quite capable of tackling the ‘problematic subjects’ with which we presented them. Indeed, they demonstrated a certain agility in terms of their deliberative capacities. We were also able to show that the stability of this ‘tackling’ process could be likened to the equilibrium characterizing recursive systems. Once the debate was fully underway, tensions emerged, classifications that had previously gone unquestioned lost some of their certainty, and new options took shape.

In short, the very act of taking a position stood out as being more dynamic, more controversial—or at least less quiescent—than is the case during one-on-one interviews. On that point, we believe we have touched on a useful methodological advance, for it suggests that the rather undifferentiated epistemological portrait emerging from individual interviews perhaps represents only half the story. In that connection, group deliberation holds out much conceptual, methodological, and educational promise because it tends to foster the complexification of participants* points of view.

In addition, we have shown that whenever the discussion explicitly draws on the world of science, the discursive achievement of the participants becomes more quiescent, somewhat as though the school rhetoric of science that they brought into play constrained and indeed inhibited their deliberative activities and oriented the debate. It is also worth noting that the various groups whom we met tended to dissociate epistemology from ethics, as if the latter were not an integral part of science production but instead represented some sort of ‘supplement of soul’ that scientists may display after the fact—that is, once the production of science is over and done with.