The social dimension of scientific knowledge and its distinct echo in philosophy of science: six responses to Mirowski

摘要

Philip Mirowski's The scientific dimension of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of science' (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 35A, 2004, pp. 283-326) is a provocative paper. Whatever one may think of its rhetoric, there is no mistaking the seriousness of the charges laid down and the urgency of the matter broached. Philosophy of science has lost the plot, Mirowski claims, because it has consistently failed to pay attention to the economics of science. This is no minor oversight of a discipline that otherwise has begun to show a healthy regard for the social dimension of its subject matter: it means to miss what makes the social matter. In particular, it prevents a crucial insight into what is a profound change in the very subject matter of the philosophy of science. The consequences of the present regime change in science funding turn the traditional commons of scientific knowledge into privatized holdings for the production of information commodities, deflecting the progressive potential of science by its ever more exclusive employment for market domination. As Mirowski sees it, philosophers fiddle while science burns.