Science legitimacy and the postmodern condition of knowledge

Abstract

We start by showing how science is as much a personal as a social endeavour, carefully driven between convictions and scepticism, depending on strictly defined criteria that are made possible through a conjunction of social norms intimately connected to epistemological principles. If the sociological contexts play an important role, we must recognize that science compensates their influence with the experimental gathering of evidences. However knowledge always requires a link to tradition, believe and authority, i.e., tacit knowledge and a fiduciary framework. Objectivity can also be supported by science’s success to describe and transform reality, within a renewed process that continuously expands what we know and can transform. This attests the power of science that meanwhile was separated from the ethical dimension required to all kind of knowledge appliance, thus redirecting us to the sociological contexts of science. We then refer to how science’s sociological structures consequently changed when the dimension, cost and importance of science for economic progress was such that responsibility for it was taken from the hands of scientists. The age of competition for scarce resources marks the end of pure intellectual competition in which science’s progress was conditioned mainly by individual creativity. That’s why sociological factors regain nowadays a much more important role to play in science dynamics. The paper concludes by presenting how a new sociologically framework of scientific knowledge is emerging: the “fourth age of research” driven by international collaborations between elite research groups, strongly guided for markets, and once again science’s autonomy is at stake.