The cause of science

Abstract

The field ofthesocial sciences stands apart from other scientific fields insofar as every specialist is competing not only with other scholars but with the lot of social agents anxious to impose their own view of society. As such it is crossed by two conflicting logics, that of the political field and that of the scientific field, which command contradictory principies of hierarchy. The author shows how a social science whose object is its own functioning can provide the principies for a scientific Realpolitik whose objective is the progress of scientific reason. These principies partake of epistemology and the sociology of fields of production, when they favor a comparison of points of view which perceive themselves as such in the awareness of the social determinants of their differences.They also concern the transformation of the social organization of scientific production and circulation on both a national and international scale, in the sense of a " working dissensus" based on the criticai recognition of explicit compatibilities and incompatibilities established not socially but scientifically.