L’idée d’une démocratisation de la connaissance scientifique selon Karl Paul Feyerabend.

Abstract

The Feyerabendian project of the democratization on scientific knowledge is therefore a question of our work, being part of logic of discontinuity. There is a break with the foundationalists theory of science. Feyerabend noticed that the scientific city suffers a foundamental problem: that of methodological reductionism. Faced with this problem, the author of Adieu la raison proposed a solution which was considered at first sight to be an implication of disorder of thoughts. For Feyerabend, the vision of the foundationalists of science is harmful to the search for truth, for it makes science an elitic affair. In feyerabend’s term this elite is mechanistic. It is not creating and innovating. To permit scientists to realize how expensive these values are in research, the knowledge has to be democratized. By democratization we are expecting a project for the demolition of systems or graduation theories that is exceeding the body of theories from which the totality of the knowledge can be obtained in a mechanical manner. As we can see, the democratization project of knowledge is a project that seems to be liberating, refounding, and reforming. Liberating because it has to protect the researcher from rational dogmas. Refounding because it has to endow philosophy in general and science in particular from the possibilities of a multidimensional approach. Reforming because has to educate the masses and the researcher of scientific activity. Motivated by this noble desire, our author seems to be more philanthropic than scientific. But this position of Feyerabend has revealed an ambiguous situation. Without knowing it Feyerabend seems combatted for methodological nihilism. However if knowledge must be built with a fixed method, the scientific city risks plunging into a radical subjectivism. Dispite this objection, it should be noted that the problem raised by feyerabend is not new. It got all its roots form the history of science, because long before him, many scientists strove to democratize scientific knowledge from the hold of the foundationalists. The idea of democratization of scientific knowledge to which Feyerabend has strived remains a project which embodies an epistemological relevance, particularly on the cultural and philosophical level.