Abstract
This volume was born in a six-semester collective teaching effort in Norway, but its implications go far beyond the mundane expectations of a “mandatory course” on philosophy of science to any cohort of social science aspirants for Ph.D. degrees. What is at stake in our twenty-first century is the new nature of knowledge construction in the social sciences—where the input from different social power holders into the kinds of knowledge our sciences create becomes increasingly immediate. This normative control is put into practice by rapid growth of the administrative structures of universities, the role of which is to exercise control over the actions of researchers via the legitimate guarantees of the rightful expenditure of research grant funds and protection of the rights of the human research participants. Researchers themselves also contribute to this social guidance of their work—by accepting the administrative demands to publish in “Scopus-listed” journals of “high impact factor.” The main results from the volume are brought together into the proof that social sciences need philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
The invention of new administrative frameworks for the highest study level in our twenty-first-century—doctoral—“schools” is an indication of administrative takeover of control of the social construction of potential new knowledge that is happening all over the world in universities at our twenty-first century (see Valsiner, Lutsenko, & Antoniouk, 2018). The introduction of mandatory units for aspirants toward their highest degrees in university is an example of turning the realm of intellectual inquiries into that of socially enforced transfer of knowledge. Needless to add that the very first act I undertook as coordinator of the seminars in Oslo over the six semesters was to make certain that—aside from the formal “mandatory” status—the seminars were free of such administrative straightjacket.
- 2.
For Kepler any curved line was a version of the tension of two opposites—zero curve (straight line) and full curve (circle). This oppositional unity was elaborated into another kind of unity of subsuming the straight line as a part of the curvature only in the nineteenth century—in the Riemann-Lobachevsky synthesis of geometry—that the unity of linear and curvilinear forms became established by including the less general (line) in the more general (circle). That eliminated the oppositional tension that Kepler—based on alchemy’s symbolic transformations stemming from opposites—was conceptualizing. In terms of basic meta-codes, the contrast between non-oppositional (monological) and oppositional (dialogical) worldviews remains present in the Wissenschaft over the past five centuries providing rise to harmony-based in contrast to tension-based theoretical constructions.
- 3.
From their axiomatic perspective of maintaining such unity in order to make sense of human beings in general, the twentieth and beyond centuries’ practices in psychology of “measuring” gender differences would have made no sense. In their selection of meta-codes, this way the investigators four centuries ago were ahead of our contemporary psychology in their direction of where the knowledge construction should proceed. Of course they had no solutions to the question of how human beings operate.
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Valsiner, J. (2019). General Conclusion: What Can Social Science Practitioners Learn from Philosophies of Science?. In: Valsiner, J. (eds) Social Philosophy of Science for the Social Sciences. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33099-6_16
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