The changing of the role accorded to the lay public in science

pp. 247-258

in: Olga Kiss (ed), Hermeneutics and science, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstract

Reflecting upon the topic indicated by the title, I was astonished to realize that although many different roles (moral, political, financial ones) are accorded to the public by thinkers of different persuasions and fields of expertise, none of the roles is, however, a truly cognitive one.¹ And that none of the strictly taken philosophers of science in the last two centuries has been concerned with systematically exploring the cognitive aspect of the relationship between science and its public. Lots of excellent papers deal with how the public can promote or hinder (by political or financial means) scientific research, but none of them with whether the public has or can have a role at all in the process of scientific cognition and how this would affect the evaluation and acceptance of knowledge claims within science itself.