Defending the autonomy of knowledge - Fondapol
The autonomy of science consists above all in the independence of research carried out in its name with regard to injunctions coming from other fields or fields of activity: religious, political, economic powers... But it also means independence no longer by relation to external bodies but also to ideologies professed within the scientific world itself and which influence the production and transmission of knowledge by distancing them from the aim of objectivity and truth which is at the foundation of scientific activity.
This last characteristic – the aim of the activity – is no longer an imperative of independence but of specificity: it is the fact of giving oneself knowledge as an end in itself that defines the framework of the activity. scientific, unlike, for example, a goal of technical progress – which may result from the discoveries of science, but does not necessarily justify or motivate them – or a goal of moral or political improvement of society.
Taking into account the aim of scientific activity, and no longer only its effective conditions, makes it possible to highlight the dual nature of the autonomy of science. It appears in fact not only as a factual, observable reality, but also as a value to bring about: being one's own end is what defines a value1. This means that autonomy can suffer so many obstacles to its effective realization, on the level of reality (as evidenced recently by revelations on the manipulation of scientific data for the benefit of industries seeking to avoid the prohibition of their products), than challenges to its necessity, in terms of values (for example when ideological convictions or militant objectives are presented as legitimate aims for researchers).
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Finally, this autonomy does not stem from a dichotomy, of the either/or type, between a science that would be autonomous and a science that would not be, but rather a gradation on the axis of the most at least autonomy: this is therefore always relative. This is why the concept of autonomy as it has been introduced in sociology should be understood rather as a moment in a process of autonomization2: the autonomy of science, always more or less accomplished, is to be thought of as not an absolute but a relative fact, at the same time as a more or less shared value.
Independence and specificity of scientific activity, considered both as a fact and as a value, and not from a static but a dynamic perspective: this is how we can usefully define the autonomy of science.
