O problema do ethos científico no novo modo de produção da ciência contemporânea

Abstract

The major objective of this work is to demonstrate that the changes occurred in the last sixty years in the way science is organized, managed and funded, i.e., in the mode of knowledge production, have consequences both to the sociological and to the philosophical principles of science. Those changes raise the necessity to analyse sience and society relationship. Our thesis is mainly based on the work of the physicist and epistemologist John Michael Ziman F. R. S. (1925-2005), who argued that the “collectivization” of science led to a new mode of knowledge production called “post-academic” or “post industrial science”. One of its major consequences is related to the changes on the scientific ethos. In a “post academic” science a new ethos of science, based on managerial values, is deflating the mertonian ethos, which main goal would be the maintenance of principles historically and socially shared by scientists, in an ideal of academic science, such as objectivity, search for truth and autonomy (even tough as regulatory principles). Furthermore we will show that Ziman does not incorporate the traditional interpretation of the mertonian ethos, which associates it to a fundacionist epistemology. Besides that, he reinterprets it - by following the new trends in philosophy and in sociology of science – the epistemic ideals preconised by the positivists and neo-positivists, specially the notion of objectivity. In Ziman’s point of view, we can still trust science, because it has a social mechanism of knowledge production that is based on the cooperation and organized scepticism.