CEFISES Seminar: Max Bautista-Perpinyà, “Towards a political imagination of science”

Livestream https://youtu.be/vwkzSdu-rTY

Series: Work-in-Progress

Speaker: Max Bautista-Perpinyà (UCLouvain)

Title: “Towards a political imagination of science.”

Abstract

In this work-in-progress talk, I’ll review two liberal progressive contributions to the literature on science and values that have been highly influential in the philosophy of science: Philip Kitcher’s Science in a Democratic Society (2011) and Matthew J. Brown’s Science and Moral Imagination (2020). I’ll contrast their idealized Deweyan notions of democracy and science with episodes in the history of ecology and environmentalism during the Spanish transition from the Francoist dictatorship towards contemporary democracy. I’ll focus on two communities of scientists working on forest and forestry issues. I will first compare their different sociotechnical imaginaries in a moment of wide historical contingency, and then I’ll narrate how their imaginaries became concrete as parliamentary democracy consolidated in the 1980s.

Brown and Kitcher’s contributions are worthwhile for different reasons. Brown situates imagination as a powerful self-transformative tool to become a better, well-rounded scientist. However, his reliance on empathy as a means to assess stakeholder legitimacy lacks teeth. Kitcher also relies excessively on affective work and the ethical norm for “mutual engagement”, but he is able to transcend individual improvement by relying on the Deweyan notion that individuals not only have the freedom to participate in collective life, but that our individual self-realisation is constituted through it.

I have two major concerns with Brown and Kitcher’s work. Brown’s proposal for a better integration of science and values is, by design, ahistorical. His recommendations could have been addressed to any scientist in the history of humankind. Kitcher’s proposal for democratic reform, by his approach to history, idealizes historical conflict and ‘resolution’. This lack of historical specificity misses some of the most crucial cruxes of science, politics, and environmentalism today: the need to recognise the centrality of capitalism (and not an amorphous Anthropocene) in breeding social and environmental havoc, the democratic threat posed by proposals for a technocratic management of nature, and the new rise of fascism and its complete denial of environmental and social injustice.

Class, against what these philosophers argue, matters. I propose to substitute Kitcher and Brown’s naïveté for a specific scientific class consciousness that contributes to ongoing (and old) discussions on the specific responsibilities and threats that scientists, as scientists, face.