[On Georges Canguilhem's "What does a scientific ideology mean?" and on French-German contributions on science and ideology in the last forty years].
This paper is based on Canguilhem's text on the concept of scientific ideology, which he introduced in 1969. We describe Canguilhem's attempts at designing a methodological framework for the history of science including the status of kinds of knowledge related to science, like scientific ideologies preceding particular scientific domains (like ideologies about inheritance before Mendel, or Spencer's universal evolutionary laws preceding Darwin). This attempt at picturing the relationships between science and ideology is compared with Jürgen Habermas's book Technology and Science as 'Ideology' in 1968. The philosphical issue of human normativity provides the framework of this discussion.
Debru
Claude
C
Ecole normale supérieure, Paris. claude.debru@ens.fr
D005602:France; D005858:Germany; D006663:Historiography; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy / Q000266:history*; D012586:Science / Q000266:history*