Knowledge systems in flux: Swedish philosophy of science and humanities drift apart.: A history of the challenge of the modernist world view

• Autores: Victoria Höög
• Localización: The Circulation of Science and Technology: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science. Barcelona, 18-20 November 2010 / coord. por Antoni M. Roca Rosell, 2012, ISBN 978-84-9965-108-8, págs. 700-705
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper focuses on the concept of objectivity to illuminate the interdisciplinary negotiations between academic subjects in Sweden from the 1960s to the present. The concept of objectivity held a central theoretical space in almost all academic subjects in Sweden during the postwar period. A salient person in the discussion of the 1970s was Gunnar Myrdal who had focused on the relation between values and the social sciences since the 1930s. For Myrdal, value premises worked as a positive normative ideal. In An American Dilemma he referred to the American democratic “creed” as a substantial inspiring framework for progressive social change to solve American racism. In 1968 Gunnar Myrdal published Objectivity in Social Research. Values were presented as obstacles –yet possible to overcome if the researchers openly declared their valuations. Myrdal’s book is one of the first examples of how the concept of objectivity became an engaging topic for debate in the academic circles during the 1970s. Myrdal’s view fitted into the traditional view to represent science as a vocation –as Max Weber famously expressed it.

    A suggestion is that the concept of objectivity functioned as a “prism” that upheld a shared academic public space between philosophy, natural sciences, humanities and social sciences. Three factors –the dominance of the philosophy of science within philosophy, Gunnar Myrdal’s lifelong interest in values and the new left movement’s attack on the belief of an objective science– made the question of scientific objectivity to a public and scholarly issue for debate in Sweden and contributed to uphold a shared communicative space.

    However, during the 1980s the discussion about objectivity went out of tune. New competing knowledge systems emerged with hermeneutics, discourse theory, marxism and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory. They supplied the humanities with new theoretical tools and the vocabularies were drifting apart.

    As a result, a gap between analytic philosophy’s quest for impartial truth vs. humanities’ and social sciences’ defense for including history, values and local practices in the analysis emerged. The new generation of people in humanities founded their own philosophies, and neglected the established analytic philosophy. However, in the last decade questions about objectivity have arisen anew, in medical research and climate science. That might indicate that a renewed scholarly public conversation between different academic topics will have space for an alerted philosophy of science.