The Need for Socially Robust Knowledge

Abstract

Abstract: The science system of the Western civilization is facing irreversible transformations. They affect the relationship between the public image of science and the actual practices within the sciences. In a situation in which scientists are increasingly asked 'what have you lately done for us' the alleged purity and objectivity of the sciences have to be reconsidered and we have to rethink the place of people in the knowledge produced by the sciences. I shall argue for the awareness of a more local, historically and socially contingent knowledge production, which – due to this local embeddedness – can lead to a socially more robust knowledge production.