RELATING PASTS & PRESENTS History of Science & Social Science The Workshop takes up a line of thought emerging from last year’s ‘Today’s Futures’ theme, reported on in the Autumn Bulletin; to plan intelligently for the future we need to pay attention to the past. But what happens when social scientists and historians meet and talk? Historians of knowledge at MPIWG and social scientists funded by the ISRF share a critical view of knowledge. Historians insist that what counts as knowledge and how it is produced and exercised, has been different at different times. Among social scientists, the anthropologist will remind us that this difference exists, too, in different places and cultures, while the critically-minded political scientist will point to the to the effects of power on forms of knowing. All this, as the philosopher of science will suggest, entails that it will be different again in the future. What follows for the critical social scientist, generically, is that manifestly it needs to be constantly under review in the present; reflexivity is part of social science’s methodology. Is knowledge then in a perpetual state of ‘crisis’? Here, a number of questions arise. The critical historian, the philosopher, the critical theorist, will ask, ‘what is ‘crisis’, anyway?’ The historian will challenge the univocity of the term and point to different usages informing different practices at different times, the philosopher will note the continuity in change that is the historian’s presupposition. We can pose the ‘anthropologist’s question’: if there is a present ‘crisis of knowledge’ is it a new problem, or a ‘new-old’ problem? The ISRF aims to support research which is interdisciplinary and reflexively critical, and seeks new theories and methods for understanding the conditions of life as it is lived by human beings now. With a format of short research presentations, thematic discussions, dialogues across disciplines, and participants’ creative responses, the Workshop aims at a wide-ranging exploration of how a sensibility to the history of knowledge might inspire thinking in social science and how critical approaches in social science might speak to the historian.
i
