Le champ scientifique

The scientific field. The seemingly "pure" and "disinterested" universe of science is a social field like any other, with its power relationships and monopolies, its conflicts and strategies, its interests and profits. A kind of game whose particular stakes consist in the monopoly of scientific authority (prestige, recognition, fame and so forth), the scientific field owes its main cha racteristics to the fact that the producers generally have no other possible clients than their direct competitors. For this reason, the latter are the least inclined to accord scientific value to the products offered without first subjecting them to examination. What is always at stake in scientific conflicts, in which each of the actors must engage in order to have the value of his products accepted, is the power of imposing the definition of science best conforming to his own individual interests ; for the definition of what is at stake is itself part and parcel of the stakes in such a conflict. And the form taken by this struggle over scientific legitimacy depends on the structure of the distribution of the specific capital of scientific recognition among the participants. The history of science shows that as the accumulated scientific ressources grow scientific competition tends to assume the form of constant series of minor revolutions rather than that of intermittent great revolutions, and that along with this change the difference between the conservative strategies of the dominant members of the field and the subversive strategies of those first entering it ("the challengers") seems to diminish. Accordingly, the fundamental question which arises for scientific sociology of science is that of defining the social conditions that must be fulfilled for social game to be established in which true ideas possess great force because the participants have an interest in the truth rather than as in other games in the preservation of their interests. Science has no other foundation that the collective belief in its foundations, a belief which is both the result and the presupposition of the very functioning of the scientific field. But depending on the degree of autonomy of the scientific field under consideration with respect to external determinative factors, the proportion of social arbitrariness incorporated in the particular system of presuppositions generating belief can vary widely. In the case of the social sciences progress towards the real autonomy which is the condition of self-regulating and self- sufficient scientific field comes up against obstacles unknown elsewhere.