Abstract
The study approaches the issue of democratization of science, the central question of which is to what extent, if at all, should the public be allowed to intervene in science and research policy and to participate in technical decision-making. The first part of the study is devoted to a presentation of two radically different and contradictory views on this issue, which were developed in the post-war philosophy of science in the works of Michael Polanyi and Paul Feyerabend respectively and which compete in various forms until today. These two views, which confront us with a choice between expertise at the expense of democracy (Polanyi) and democracy at the expense of expertise (Feyerabend), are then subjected to critical evaluation and in opposition to them an alternative view, developed within science studies by Harry Collins and Robert Evans, which transcends the necessity of this choice and, drawing on the sociological research of expertise, offers a way to merge together both expertise and democratic values, is presented.
Since 2019, TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE journal provides open access to its content under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Authors who publish in this journal agree that:
- Authors retain copyright and publication rights without restrictions and guarantee the journal the right of first publishing. All published articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which allows others to share this work under condition that its author and first publishing in this journal was acknowledged.
- Authors may enter into other agreements for non-exclusive dissemination of work in the version in which it was published in the journal (for example, publishing it in a book), but they have to acknowledge its first publication in this journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to make their work available online (for example, on their personal websites, social media accounts, and institutional repositories) as such a practice may lead to productive exchanges of views as well as earlier and higher citations of published work.
There are no author fees, no article processing charges, or submission charges.
The journal allows readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allows readers to use them for any other lawful purpose.
A summary of the open access policy is also available in the Sherpa Romeo database.