O lugar da ciência - Um ponto de vista filosófico

Abstract

Science is critically viewed as a relatively autonomous symbolic structure belonging to the social mind "The Explanation Machine". Science's colonization of the remaining spheres of humanz knowledge (Religion Ethics, Aesthetics etc.) by reducing them to "second class subjectivity" is described. A philosophical reaction to such state of affairs is then articulated, aiming at demythifying science in its own terms. This reaction avoids the postmodernist extreme of treating science as "one discourse among others", but puts science in its proper place. As a reply to science's presumptive hegemony in its most truculent forms, the state of pathetic perplexity which has overtaken contemporary scientific theory builders is described, along with the imposture lying in the way science has been using the “statistics underlyng the principles of natural selection” , not only in Biology, but also in Physics. The ironical conclusion makes use of the new information metaphor in order to compare cosmogenesis to consulting (“measuring” ) an oracle, with the result that the sibiline reply (the “collapse of the Universe’s Wave Function” ) must necessarily remain unknown, due to the fact that it is impossible to detemine what consults what, or who consults whom, in Quantüm Cosmology.