Knowledge As a Fellow Traveler Jürgen Renn
Chapter 9 Survey: Knowledge as a Fellow Traveler Jürgen Renn 9.1 The Stratification of Knowledge and the Historical Superposition of Globalization Processes Usually scientific knowledge is conceived as being produced locally and valid glob- ally. The distinction between a local context of discovery and a global context of justification may be labelled as “local universalism.” It presupposes that, once global scientific knowledge is available, local conditions can only affect its applica- tion, interpretation or the choice of problems, but not modify its nature. Against this background, it is surprising that, in spite of the powerful political and eco- nomic globalization processes of the recent past and the globalization of science proceeding for centuries, today’s world of knowledge is anything but homogeneous. Underneath common standards, methodologies and widely accepted results of sci- ence, there is still a great variety of local traditions, of ways to choose problems, to interpret their solutions, to integrate scientific knowledge into belief systems and societal processes. The same holds, more generally speaking, for the ways in which knowledge shapes our identities, informs our practices and pervades our so- cial existence. It is hardly possible to understand this diversity and its relation to ongoing globalization processes without taking account of the fact that knowledge is stratified in a way similar to the stratification of geological layers, each coming with its own, often dramatic, history. The knowledge we deal with today is the result of history, of course. It is, more precisely, also the result of a historical superposition of globalization processes in which second-order knowledge, in par- ticular in the form of images of knowledge shaping its societal role, has continued to accumulate in such a way that later layers interfered with earlier ones, with- out, however, eradicating them completely.
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