León Olivé

Philosophy has historically played an important role: it has provided individuals and whole societies with conceptions of the world, which have made meaningful their individual and collective lives. But in our contemporary world, that role has been minimized under the impact of science and technology, the global exchange of information, and the transformation of social structures. The possibility of progress in this respect depends on the possibility of recovering the values of respect and love for others, as well as respect for their cultural values. Finally, it depends on the possibility of turning the notion of humanity into a meaningful one for everybody—not only as a biological species—but rather as a truly global community of people, where differences will always exists and will be most welcome and common projects in the interest of everybody will be agreed upon and developed.

This paper focuses on the conceptual relationship between rationality and progress as applied to scientific development. The concept of methodology is used in the sense of a model of scientific change. It is argued, as against e.g. recent discussion by Larry Laudan, that progress implies rationality. The notion of rationality useful for this conception of scientific development includes instrumental rationality, butalso the idea of rational paradigm-shift, which is analysed in terms of changes of conceptual frameworks. The key idea is the posibility of a rational reconstruction of series of conceptual frameworks, where the shift from one framework to its successor may be reconstructed as rational in the sense of there being reasons in the successor for accepting the change, and thus the whole series being rational

León Olivé geht von einem normativen Begriff von Toleranz aus. Toleranz muss – so die zentrale These von Olivé – in ein Normen- und Institutionengefüge eingebettet sein, das auf den Prinzipien der Gleichberechtigung und sozialen Gerechtigkeit aufbaut. Toleranz im strengen Sinn des Wortes ist als »horizontale Toleranz« zu fassen, in der die Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und Gruppen ihre Konflikte auf der Basis der Gleichberechtigung und konsentierter Verfahrensregeln zu lösen versuchen. Die »vertikale Toleranz« hingegen, in der dominante Gruppen untergeordnete Gruppen »tolerieren«, dient nach Olivé bloß der Verschleierung von Machtverhältnissen. Toleranz wird daher systematisch mit der Idee sozialer Gerechtigkeit verbunden, die die Bedingungen für die Befriedigung der legitimen Grundbedürfnisse aller Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft und die Verwirklichung und Ausübung ihrer Fähigkeiten sicherstellt.

El problema epistemológico fundamental ya no es el de la adecuación de las representaciones de los sujetos epitémicos al mundo. el sujeto sólo era el ordenador del mundo objetivo sin ser posible que entre en el discurso del conocimiento científico. Su incorporación en el tratamiento de las representaciones amplía el ámbito de reflexión y lleva al planteo de nuevos interrogantes. Los artículos reunidos en este volumen presentan tensiones y debates sobre cuestiones tales como los vínculos de la representación artística y la tecnológica con lo político, la repsonsabilidad de los sujetos agentes, la diversidad y la constitución de las identidades, los elementos visuales de las representaciones, entre otras.

In this paper, some theoretical problems about a relevant conceptualization helpful to understand resistance to scientific and technological change are discussed. An interpretative perspective is developed, and some concepts are elucidated, according to which certain processes become scientific changes because, among other things, but in a fundamental way, they are constituted as changes by members of a community. Certain cognitive processes are typified as “scientific”, “technological” and “scientific-technological”, and the importance of their relationship to processes of exploitation is stressed. It is suggested that resistance to changes increases and becomes more problematic when less exploitation is involved in the changes, i.e. when the processes are closer to what here is called scientific, rather than technological or scientific-technological knowledge. Some exampIes are drawn from the history of science to illustrate these ideas