Coordinat per Josep Simon

És la ciència local, és global, o és universal? Són contradictòries eixes qualitats o es poden conjugar? Com són diferents una història local, una història nacional, una història global i una història universal? Tenen objectes, aproximacions, fonts o tècniques diferents? Són les històries de la ciència distintes a la resta d’històries locals o globals? Aquest cicle de col·loquis presenta una reflexió situada sobre el problema de les escales en la història de la ciència que posa l’èmfasi sobre la seva definició teòrica i pràctica, així com els seus reptes metodològics, professionals i cívics.

Dimecres 11 de desembre de 2019, 16:00

Spatial Concepts in the Historiography of Science: When to Claim that Science is Local?

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (Oulun Yliopisto/University of Oulo)

It has become increasingly common in historiography of science to understand science and its products as inherently local. But is it clear what the locality of science means? How about its opposites: globality or universality? In my talk, I have two main goals. First, I will consider what these concepts mean and in what relations they stand to each other. Are ‘local’ and ‘global’ or ‘universal’ inconsistent when applied to science? Could science be simultaneously local and global – and also universal? Answers to these questions are provided in light of scholarship in the historiography of science in past forty years. Second, I will consider under what circumstances claims regarding the locality, the globality and the universality of science are warranted. In other words, when historians of science are justified to make these kinds of claims? My view is based on a pragmatist notion of knowledge, according to which a claim is knowledge when it is a licensed inference in the discursive framework of historiography. The licence of an inference hinges on both the conceptual entailments of the framework and material resources beyond it.