Single Review on past events

On the last Jour Fixe in summer term, on 19 July, Jesus Zamora Bonilla (Dept. of Philosophy, UNED Madrid), guest professor at the Zukunftskolleg, gave a lecture on "Choosing what to know: rational deliberation and negotiation in the constitution of scientific knowledge". He analyzed scientific knowledge as a social construction and distinguished between radical and contemporizing views. According to him some supporters of the radical view are David Bloor, Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, supporters of the contemporizing way of thinking are Jan Hacking, Joseph Rouse, André Kukla and Paul Boghosian. Jesus Zamora Bonilla explained some claims of the radical view: situatedness, contingency, relativism, rhetoric, anti-realism and anachronism. From the radical point of view he argues that science indeed is a “social construction” (what else could it be?), as what is finally written in scientific journals or textbooks is the result of a process of choice and negotiation.

Jesus Zamora Bonilla defines “choice” by saying that each author might have written something different and “negotiation” by saying that different scientists might have preferred that what is finally written were different (e.g. co-authors, referees, editors, readers, critics, colleagues in general). The question for Jesus Zamora Bonilla therefore is, how these processes of choice and negotiation could run, so that their output has the highest (cognitive, practical, economic) value from our point of view. This lead him to the question, what the outcome of science should be? He is quite sure that each citizen would define it differently. But research processes are chosen basically by scientists themselves. Most likely the methods are chosen through some kind of Darwinian mechanism: methods that work better tend to be imitated more often than others (“better” in the sense of allowing scientists to be more successful in the pursuit of achieving their results). Zamora Bonilla argues that in spite of different scientists having different goals and being motivated in part by some non-cognitive goals (like recognition or profit), some institutional mechanisms have evolved that warrant that the output of scientific research tends to be of considerable epistemic value.

More information about Jesus Zamora Bonilla: http://www.uned.es/dpto_log/jpzb/index.html