Renaud Fine (Université Grenoble-Alpes)
My aim with this poster will be to explore ways to have a concrete influence on the shaping of the politicization of science and push it towards a more democratic direction, with a focus on the institutionalized modes of public participation to the definition of the research agenda.
I investigate those questions through the prism of the ‘public’ supposed to participate: how does the way it is conceived of influence the potential applicability of the normative philosophical accounts of the democratization of science? My intuition, and the thesis I want to expose and defend, is that the conception mobilized by one of the main proposals articulated this way, Philip Kitcher’s ideal of a well-ordered science (2001; 2011), is what ultimately prevents it from being ever successfully translated into facts. I will argue that it can therefore be seen as what I want to call a counter-ideal, namely: a theory which, if applied, would ineluctably backfire and lead to an aggravation of the very problems it intends to solve.
My argument builds on the classical distinction —made by sociological accounts of public engagement— between the figure of the general public and that of the stakeholder, to show that adopting one or the other has straightforward consequences on the concrete design of processes intended to implement them. The ordinary citizen, possessing neither expertise on, nor interests in the question at hand, appears to be the key element leading to the institutionalization of the classical, objectivist and discursive forms of public deliberation where participants are randomly chosen in order to best approximate this figure (Fishkin 2009).
The random selection of participants, however, is inevitably bound to leave aside people that do not constitute a significant fraction of society, but are substantially more affected by the decision to be taken. Participative politics thus conceived have indeed more to do with tools in the engineering of the public acceptance of science than with the idea of building a more active citizenship; and the institution of such processes is more than often used as a way to play against spontaneous associative mobilization. Absorbed into disciplinary regimes of power, deliberative forums become new instruments of government, that, if unchecked, can easily perpetuate the very oppression they aim at containing (Freire 1970).
The concrete application of model such as Kitcher’s would therefore very likely lead to excluding the most affected from the deliberation, reducing the participative options offered to stakeholders, and potentially aggravating the problem of unidentifiable oppression he aims at solving. I conclude by arguing that this could be addressed by implementing stake-oriented participative processes.
