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Reflecting upon the issue of science's cognitive specificity in the framework of the analytical philosophy of science helps one to draw a clear demarcational line between the two traditional contexts of scrutinizing scientific research. Studies in the context of justification advocate this specificity by postulating a cognitive essence (e.g., scientific method, invariant standards for rational scientific behavior, primitive language of the "protocol-sentences", reticulated network of methodological norms and cognitive values, and the like). The postulated cognitive essence makes science a "natural kind" and thereby, "the science-nonscience distinction somehow cuts culture at a philosophically significant joint." (Rorty, 50) By contrast, historians, sociologists, psychologists, ethnomethodologists, and other practitioners of science studies in the context of discovery claim that all alleged cognitive essences distinguishing science as an intellectual enterprise are only socially produced contingent and contextual formations. As a consequence, the opinion began to gain currency that because cognitive essentialism is wrong, there is no cognitive specificity of science. The more one is engaged in investigating science by following the way from its "final products to production, from "cold" stable objects to "warmer" and unstable ones' (Latour, 21), the more one is inclined to deny that there is 'something special" about scientific Method and Rationality. According to those who reject any form of cognitive essentialism, only by treating science as a black box (i.e., by discarding the discursive-practical texture of routine scientific research) there arises the illusion of an irreducible cognitive specificity. And vice versa, the illusory epistemological uniqueness of "ready-made science" vanishes when one looks at 'science in the making", where (to make use again of a dictum raised by Latour) "context and content merge".

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0961-3_13

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