Abstract
Savransky tackles the ‘crisis’ of the contemporary social sciences by attending to the ways in which ‘relevance’ is conceived. Focusing on various demands for relevance, including debates on ‘public sociology’, he argues that the way in which the concept is understood reduces it to a subjective judgement of worth and to a problem of communication. Engaging with the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers, and others, Savransky elaborates a new concept of relevance as an event of the coming to matter of things—relevance resides in the situated nature of facts. Thus, Savransky offers elements for an inventive ethics of inquiry that resists bifurcations between fact and value, nature and culture, and draws the political implications of this view for the social sciences.
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Notes
- 1.
If, following conceptual historian Reinhardt Koselleck (1988), crisis is endemic to modernity, it is not ludicrous to argue that crises are constitutive features of the history of the social sciences as well. In this sense, despite the generalised interest that Thomas Kuhn’s (2012) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions attracted amongst critical social scientists, not many social scientists seem to have taken into account the fact that Kuhn’s argument about the dynamics of crisis and change in scientific communities were, in his view, restricted to what he described as ‘paradigmatic sciences’ (e.g., physics): scientific communities that organise temporally and collectively around a guiding paradigm which eventually encounter a series of anomalies that bring about a crisis and a revolution. Insofar as the history of the social sciences is characterised by the problematic coexistence of a variety of competing ‘paradigms’ with no strict order of succession, it could be argued that a sense of ‘crisis’ is constitutive of their history, producing no final resolutions but a continuous problematisation and revisiting of their guiding principles.
- 2.
- 3.
For an exception in this regard see Wallerstein (2007).
- 4.
Another famous theory of ‘relevance’ as a basic feature of human cognition and as a pragmatic dimension of communication is that developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1995).
- 5.
This is of course not to claim the opposite, namely, that questions of public engagement are irrelevant. It is simply to suggest that perhaps it is not in the process of communication of findings that the question of ‘relevance’ is to be explored. For an interesting approach to thinking through publics see Marres (2012).
- 6.
- 7.
The notion of ‘fact’ here is used in a realist and radically empiricist sense, namely, everything that is included in experience (see James 2011).
- 8.
Adventures of Ideas was originally published in 1933.
- 9.
- 10.
Namely, ‘Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research, and the Bioeconomy’, ‘Secure, clean and efficient energy’, ‘Smart, green and integrated transport’ and ‘Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials’ (European Commission 2014).
- 11.
While Karen Barad is perhaps the most sophisticated contemporary proponent of such forms of relationalism, arguing that ‘relata do not precede the relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions’ (2007: 140. See my critique of this proposition in Savransky forthcoming), a very succinct illustration of the paradox posed by such an understanding can be found in Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010: 94. emphasis added): ‘[t]he ecological thought realizes that all beings are interconnected … the ecological thought realizes that the boundaries between, and the identities of, beings are affected by this interconnection … The ecological thought finds itself next to other beings, neither me nor not-me. These beings exist, but they don’t really exist.’ It does beg the question of what is it then, that his ‘ecological thought’ finds itself thinking next to.
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Savransky, M. (2016). The Question of Relevance. In: The Adventure of Relevance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57146-5_2
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