Abstract
Science is not appreciated by the general public because it ventures to capture the processes in the first microsecond after the Big Bang or to identify the fundamental parts of all matter. Rather, public esteem—and public funding—is for the greater part grounded in the expectation that science-based technology development is a driving force of the economy and helps boost its competiveness. Consequently, it is not scientific understanding as such that is highly evaluated in the first place but the transdisciplinary character of science: research takes up problems posed and demands articulated from outside of science. The research agenda of science as a transdisciplinary endeavour is formed by extra-scientific influences.
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Notes
- 1.
The most spectacular cases of this sort in the past years were due to Friedhelm Herrmann and Marion Brach (Germany 1997), Jan Hendrik Schön (USA 2002), and Hwang Woo Suk (South Korea 2004).
- 2.
McMullin (1983), p. 23, Koertge (2000), p. 49, 53, Douglas (2010), p. 324. An even stronger notion of value-free science suggests that non-epistemic values neither are nor should be used in science, neither in selecting nor in judging hypotheses. This strong claim seems to be exclusively invoked today with a critical intent (Kitcher 2004, Kourany 2008).
- 3.
For a detailed analysis of the application-orientation of much of modern science and the possible consequences for the quality of knowledge-production cf. Carrier, Sect. 2.1 in this volume.
- 4.
Swiss Federal Court Judgement 2C_421/2008, 7 October 2009 (my translation) „… Art. 74 BV [Bundesverfassung] und das Umweltschutzgesetz… tragen der Rangordnung innerhalb der natürlichen Umwelt Rechnung…. Auch wenn sie [die Würde der Kreatur] nicht mit der Menschenwürde gleichgesetzt werden kann und darf, so verlangt jene doch, dass über Lebewesen der Natur, jedenfalls in gewisser Hinsicht, gleich reflektiert und gewertet wird wie über Menschen… Diese Nähe zwischen der Würde der Kreatur und der Menschenwürde zeigt sich besonders bei nicht-menschlichen Primaten….
- 5.
This paragraph draws on Pardo (2012).
- 6.
In many cases, this unsystematic form of self-organisation is named as a reason for the fact that one must transcend these arbitrary borders of disciplines in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. This can be seen, for example, in Mittelstraß (1987).
- 7.
The expression ‘interest-guided method’ combines the objectum formale quod (regard, interest in the subject) with the objectum formale quo (procedure by which this is recognised) of the scholastic philosophy of science (based on Aristotle); cf. H. Schondorf, article: ‘Gegenstand/Objekt’.—The transfer of the objectum formale quo to ‘interest’ is formulated by Kant in the term of ‘reason interest’ (e.g. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 804f B 832f), from which Husserl incorporated the connected ideas into his phenomenology (e.g. 1939 in Erfahrung und Urteil, Sect. 15–21). In Heidegger (1927), the idea is taken up in Sect. 18 of Sein und Zeit in the concept of ‘involvement’ (Bewandtnis). The relationship between ‘recognition and interest’ is a topos of the traditional philosophy of science that dates back to Aristotle. J. Habermas (cf. in the same work, Erkenntnis und Interesse, 1968) should have confronted it in the Bonn seminars of E. Rothacker on the basis of Husserl.
- 8.
The following section is an editorial review of pages 26–28.
- 9.
E.g. von Kutschera (1976) and Lenzen (1980); for criticism of the discourse action theory perspective, see Stelzner (1984).
- 10.
See the discussion in Lenzen (1980) in connection with Gettier’s objections loc. cit.
- 11.
Other examples would be proposals, predictions, conjectures, reports, findings, etc.
- 12.
Medieval Latin. *dis-currere means to pass through something step by step. Discourse here describes roughly what was called ‘dialogue’ in the Erlangen school on account of an erroneous etymology; δια λογον means by locutionem and by no means a discourse by two linguistic actors [δια ≠ δυο]). With regard to the verbal problems, see C. F. Gethmann/Th. Sander, ‘Rechtfertigungsdiskurse’ (1999). On the philosophy of language basics, see Th. Sander, Redehandlungssequenzen. Discursivity is, therefore, also no specific characterisation of ‘discourse ethics’.
- 13.
Which are thus due to purely pragmatic needs and not mysterious pythagoreanism of nature.
- 14.
See Sect. 2.3.4.
- 15.
While the unreflected on-dit science policy rhetoric assumes a classification of the entire cosmos of disciplines as a totum dividendum, their inventor, W. Dilthey, only refers to the disciplines of the Department of Philosophy at that time. Dilthey basically does not address the higher departments (with the exception of the history of law).
- 16.
It is a consequence of the fact that one frequently means all the non-natural sciences when one speaks of the ‘humanities’ or the ‘humanities and social sciences’. This assumption is also usually made by those who use ‘science’ in its English sense (in order to concede the importance of opera, ballet, Dokumenta 13 and the humanities according to the two cultures dictum in a culturally generous way).
- 17.
The medical disciplines are missing.
- 18.
The concept of a priori knowledge does not assume, as it does in Kant’s use of the term, the universality and necessity of this knowledge, but rather solely the pre-suppositional function of certain knowledge content relative to material knowledge contexts.
- 19.
The German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (Deutscher Hochschulverband) differentiates between 74 subject areas for approximately 6,000 subjects, so that the differentiation between 10 kinds of subjects is a pragmatic moderate reduction of complexity.
- 20.
‘Scientists’ in the English notion are usually conceived as representatives of the above mentioned disciplinary classes 2, 3, 4, 5 and sometimes also of class 6. However, the meaning of “scientist”, “scientific” etc. in this article is broader, encompassing all ten types of the above mentioned disciplines. The application of the term “discipline” instead of “science” might thus avoid any misconceptions here.
- 21.
A variant of the ‘scientism’, according to which solely the ‘sciences’ in the English sense of the word are to be taken seriously with respect to application.
- 22.
‘Still’, because one cannot argue with Leibniz that he was as good a lawyer as he was a mathematician.
- 23.
The distinction poietical/practical follows the Aristotelian distinction between the modes of action in producing (ποιησις) and interpersonal action (πραξις). Its philosophy of science meaning, based on the Bacon principle, is that the sciences are generally to serve humanitarian purposes such as the avoidance of natural (through poietic knowledge) and social (through practical knowledge) constraints.
- 24.
It therefore makes no critical difference whether one interprets actions as effects of electrochemical processes in the brain, as effects of genes or as an effect of the order of siblings in the family.
- 25.
An example is the epistemological differentiation between evolutionary biology on the one hand and religiously based creationism on the other. On account of the philosophy of science criteria, it can be made clear that there are not two opposing scientific paradigms here.
- 26.
Ethos as ‘ensemble of conventionalities’; cf. Marquard (1981, 1986).
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Gethmann, C.F. et al. (2015). Science in Society. In: Interdisciplinary Research and Trans-disciplinary Validity Claims. Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11400-2_2
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