1 - Introduction

Summary

Science and man

The human sciences have, in the past decade, become the focus of radical reflection to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Methodological disagreements of the 1940s and 1950s have been replaced by profound and wide-ranging discussions of origins, aims, and ethics in science and of the role of science in a broader societal context. Practitioners of a particular discipline may have the impression that their own disciplinary turmoil is unique among the sounder, bolder, better established social sciences, but this is not the case. Current concern for reflective issues regarding the practice of human science and the need to treat these philosophically is not confined to any one science, nor is it absent from any such science.

Several issues are fundamental to these reflective concerns. Modern technological science and society raise issues of freedom and control, of individuality and humanity. Corresponding to these concerns is the recognition of political, moral, and ethical dimensions of inquiry and particularly the relationship between science and technology and the politics of control. Recognition of such issues is widespread, and solutions range from advanced cybernetics (Wiener, 1954; Beer, 1974) to anarchy (Feyerabend, 1979). Hannah Arendt (1958, 2–3) views the situation in the following terms:

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, … which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself. […]