Posts com a Tag ‘CONDÉ Mauro L.  (Aut)’

This is a book on the historicity of science. To say that science has a history may at first glance seem like a great triviality. For the simple fact of being a human construct, science was not born yesterday and has always undergone several changes in its most varied aspects; what we understand today as “science” has resulted from a long and repeated process involving continuities and ruptures with what preceded it – we all know about that, and this is enough to admit that science has a history.

But it is by no means trivial that science has, besides an ordinary history, a certain historicity. It might well happen that to have a history was only a matter of fact about science, so that the ties with its past would be nothing more than mere contingencies. Or again, it would not be unthinkable that the reach of historical circumstances to which science is subject did not exceed the more superficial or visible level of that activity – usually the one to which the layman has access and which constitutes the public image of the scientist’s work, such as laboratory practices, technological applications, etc. – in such a way that science, let us say, in itself would be minimally unaffected by these historical vicissitudes. In that case, it would no longer be imposing to admit that science has a history. The approach proposed by Condé in “A Role for the History”: The Problem of the Historicity of Science, however, does not recommend this interpretation at all. For our author, the historicity of science is definitely not a mere contingency. On the contrary, it must be admitted as a matter of law over science, that is, a sine qua non condition for science to be what it is, from any point of view. Leia Mais