The Contested Sciences: Between Idealization and Contempt

The defense against attacks on the sciences requires not an idealized image of “Science” but a realistic understanding of scientific practices to account for their epistemic authority.

Analysing the controversy about contemporary attacks on the sciences, Frieder Vogelmann shows that the defenders of scientific practices all too often erect an ideal that immunises them against criticism, obscures their diversity and ignores firmly established knowledge about them from philosophy and sociology of science. This exaggerated defence is grist for the mill of science deniers, because no actual scientific practice could ever correspond to it.

Instead, Vogelmann proposes a realistic understanding of scientific practices that brings into view their political contestations, historical developments and social embeddedness. Vogelmann demonstrates how such a realistic picture of scientific practices defends their epistemic authority with a political epistemology, centred on a conceptualisation of truth as a comparatively weak force emerging in social practices. The resulting materialist, non-sovereign epistemology of the sciences recognizes their value as well as their plurality, historicity and contextuality.