The Creep and Leap of Knowledge: On “source criticism” and “semilingualism” as impactful ideas of the human sciences (original) (raw)

The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies

Contemporary Sociology, 1995

A 11 right~ reser\'~d. No pan of lh!~ publication may he reproduced. ~(()red ill a rcmev~1 ,y,'1em. transmitted or uli!i7ed in any form ClT hy :my lllean~. electroni.:, mech~ni(.'al. photocopying. re.:onilng or otherwi.'c. without pcrmi"ion In writing from lhe Pubh.hcl'l'. SAGE Publicalion, Lt,1 I'i Boohi IJ Strt!el Lnnaon EC2A ~PU SAGE Publicalions Jn~ 2~)5 Tellcr Road Thousand Oah. CaMornia 9U20 SAGE Publicaliom India Pvt Lld 32. M-RlrlCk Market Greater Kailash-I New Delhi 110 048 Brili~h Librar)' Cataloguing in Puhlication \)at9 G;bboo~. Michael i'iew Pnxlucliotl of Knowk.'<lgc: : Dynamics of Scit'nce and Rc~cJrch in Contemporary Socielics l. Title .10].483 ISFlN O-R039-7793-X IS B N O-1l039-7794-8 ~ phI. \ Library or Congres.~ clltalog cllrd number \/4-C)66859 Typesel by M Rule~

SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND SOCIAL PRACTICE

In this paper I present the main policies of neoliberal capitalism concerning the production of knowledge arguing that the so-called 'cognitive capitalism' is nothing more than a characteristic feature of Late Capitalism as described by the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel. I review the currently fashionable view among radical intellectuals that science, despite being the most effective process of knowledge production, is a construction of western colonialist, masculine, racist culture deprived of any ability to give an objective account of reality. Finally, I revisit the classic Marxist theory of knowledge and attempt to articulate a theory of science as social practice incorporating Vygotsky's theory of symbolic tools and Zilsel's sociological account of the role of artisans and technicians in the birth of modern science.

Knowledge, complexity, power: social semiotics as metadiscipline

Linguistic Frontiers, 2020

This article contributes to this special journal issue by developing concepts and methods from social semiotics to analyse, interpret and comment on text and ideas from the issue plus an RFS-project on interdisciplinarity, knowledge transfer and methodology convergence within and across STEM and HASS disciplines. It follows and extends this project’s focus on three disciplines, politics, biology and linguistics, and connects them with emerging features of contemporary knowledge production, especially complex, problematic relations between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, and new forms of operations of power on knowledge. The article develops a modified Kuhnian framework to argue that this project can be understood as a significant intervention into a currently unfolding crisis and opportunity in knowledge. It diagnoses crises of knowledge that stem from inadequacies in traditional disciplinary organisations when confronted by challenges and “wicked problems” arising from th...

MODERNITY and TRANSFORMATION of KNOWLEDGE: From Virtue as Knowledge to Technological Neutralism

Knowledge, in pre-modern times was not detached from an ethical content, namely virtue. Conversely, modernity imagined a realm of knowledge and science characterized by instrumental reasoning and power. However, human experience clearly demonstrates that as human activities (economics, politics, social affairs), within the spheres of knowledge and science can not exist in a non-ethical realm. In this sense, the substantial contradiction intrinsic to the modern understanding of scientific knowledge is that despite its ethical content, its persistence of being value-free. It claims to be objective (namely, the principle of objectivity). In the late modern times, the emergence of technological determinism brings about reducing science to technology, as coined by technologism. Knowledge has always been utilized in a technologically oriented way.

Reflections on the changing profile of science and knowledge

This paper constitutes a theoretical reflection on the gradually changing profile of science and knowledge, from a reflexive sociological and epistemological standpoint. The first part draws upon some relevant debates on the university, science, knowledge, and their so-called "reflexive turn". The analytic attention here is mainly focused on the sociological and epistemological significance of "knowledge of knowledge", the "naturalization" or "socialization" of epistemology and the multiple effects of social complexity. The second part seeks to comprehensively describe and critically discuss the two central phases of the radical wave of social scientific studies of science and technology. The first "descriptivist" phase is reflexively reconstructed in terms of a social theory of knowledge (social epistemology). The second "postmodern" phase is reflexively reconstructed in terms of a new sense of "knowledge politics". This new sense eventually gives technoscience the unique historical opportunity to creatively accomplish and boost its autonomy, within an ethics of epistemological weakness.

Six critical remarks on science and the construction of the knowledge society

2007

This article will briefly present a few theses and reflections of mine on some perversions and disruptions under way in knowledge development and in science representation. Nevertheless, I will abstain from exposing thoroughly the obvious and triumphal side of the coin. Namely, I am not going to extol the amazing fortune of science and knowledge, which have become the fundamental resource for development, at economic level in first place: the real "capital".