Redrawing Disciplinar Boundaries – but to What Degree?

Summary

First of all, let me say that I agree with the main point of Prof. Rip's contribution, viz., the need to keep an open mind and affirm the plurality of forms of production of knowledge. Science as socially contingent but protected institutional space generates both awe and envy. Indeed, in the balance between search and authority, primacy to the serendipitous nature of the former has to be upheld in the sometimes stifling face of the latter. His demonstration of the historically situated and contingent character of the traditionally dominant image of science, the one that has tended to extrapolate and totalize a small physics-oriented segment in existing knowledge landscapes, is both perceptive and appreciated.

The dominant academic image, as he points out, was largely a projection of a very specific set of conditions and features in particular historical circumstances, reinforced in the 20^th century by the advent of logical empiricist philosophers. Later it was found that not even physics lived up to its ideals (cf. N.R. Hanson, P. Feyerabend, S. Toulmin, T. Kuhn). With the emergence of a new (cognitive) sociology of science, combined with interest in policy, attention has been drawn to many other modes of science, among them medical and agricultural, engineering and not least chemical research, where trajectories have involved constant interfoliation with practical pursuits, in so-called contexts of application.

As a counterpoint today to the mainstream image of autonomous academic science traditionally celebrated in the epistemological lens of the analytic philosophy of science, sociologists and policy analysts have come up with the notion of Mode 2 and university-industry-governmental triplehelix complexes. Likewise, interdisciplinarity is played up in retrospective contrast to so-called Mode 1 monodisciplinary academic science, which in the polemics of the situation is highly schematized, thus paradoxically lending force to the earlier particularism that is to be rejected.

Arie Rip argues that also these new images of scientific knowledge production have a social epistemology that is rather limited in scope. They are ideologically coloured totalizations of another segment of the knowledge production landscape.