Comment penser les sciences naturalistes " à amateurs " à partir des passions cognitives

Abstract

Whether named participatory sciences, citizen sciences, or "pro-am" sciences, actions linking in a new way science and society are booming in our Western world. A seminar held in Saint-Itienne and organized by Modys has been dedicated since 2007 to tackling this new alignment between science and society. It was aptly named "cognitive passions". This paper aims to synthesize some of the discussions that took place in the seminar and proposes the self-explanatory model of "inversion" to show the processes in action when amateur and professional worlds communicate. The paper draws on phenomenological sociology, particularly adapted to studies of ordinary action and therefore of lay knowledge, and science studies, notwithstanding the epistemological divide that characterizes science. Assuming the radical shift which appears when lay practices are intertwined with scientific knowledge, the paper also states that such hybridizations happen, and that the sociological tools to help understand them by downsizing them into a succession of small differences does not account for the persistent power asymmetry between science and amateurs. The goal here is clearly to account for successful conditions of such hybridizations, while resisting what some science studies' scholars call "the realist bow toward bigness". This bow is indeed present in the refusal to consider the taming of amateur/professional relationships except in terms of incremental processes that cancel any acknowledgement of persisting power asymmetry. The model of inversion is one of the possible answers to this quandary. Ordinary as well as confined situations are the theatre of the inversions of the respective positions of knowledge and ignorance and therefore of a modification of epistemic power relations. © 2009 NSS-Dialogues EDP Sciences.