Raging at imaginary Don-Quixotes: a reply to Giraud and Weintraub
نویسنده
چکیده
In my article 'The impossibility of finitism: from SSK to ESK?' (Tyfield 2008), I argued that the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is an important, indeed necessary, precursor of an economics of scientific knowledge (ESK), opening the way for the empirical exploration of the impact of economic factors on the production of scientific knowledge. Without SSK's arguments for the irreducible social-situatedness of science, such an ESK would be precluded, as explaining the development of scientific knowledge would be the preserve of an 'internalist' philosophy of science. SSK is thus an invaluable and indispensable contribution to our understanding of the actual scientific process. I also argued, however, that SSK has some very serious philosophical problems. Most of the literature focuses on the problem of reflexivity. I focused, though, on a problem that I argued is more profound but that has received much less attention, namely 'meaning finitism'. This philosophical position has been increasingly emphasized by SSK, particularly of the Edinburgh School, as its primary philosophical basis. I argued that meaning finitism completely undermines the project of SSK because its explicit pronouncements contradict its necessary conditions of intelligibility, so that it is intelligible only if it is false. Finally, having repudiated both the anti-SSK 'rationalist' philosophy of science and the anti-philosophical meaning finitism of SSK, I argued that a transcendental analysis of the necessary conditions of intelligibility of meaning-making (including in the scientific process) offers a way out of this problem. Were SSK (and ESK) to embrace this transcendental philosophical analysis, however, it would be recast as an (immanently) critical endeavour, capable of the empirical examination of science (at which it is good) without constantly having to fight rearguard
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