La rationalité scientifique comme travail de l’incertain : deuil et destins de la quête de certitude

Abstract

Context:The article explores the place and role of uncertainty in scientific rationality. If the ability to tolerate uncertainty can be understood as a condition of access to the register of knowledge, the quest for certainty is anchored in the psychic and narcissistic construction of the subject. This need for certainty, and the difficulty of psychically tolerating uncertainty, can be seen in the ordinary tendency to perceive scientific results as certain and definitive, and to refer to the ideal of scientific progress capable of achieving complete knowledge of the phenomenon. ObjectivesRecalling that scientific practice and ethics are based on an elaboration and heuristic of uncertainty then leads to a questioning of the fates of this need for certainty, insofar as its exclusion from scientific functioning cannot in itself move subjects to renounce it. We can thus question the function of the ideal of unlimited progress in the sciences, characteristic of the emergence of modern science: this ideal could be understood as a sublimatory outcome of the quest for certainty, related to this horizon of progress. The crisis into which this ideal of progress would have entered nevertheless invites us to question other ways in which the certainty excluded from scientific rationality is likely to return. MethodIdentifying the place held by uncertainty in scientific practice leads to questioning different registers of uncertainty, and to distinguishing, in particular, epistemological uncertainty from metaphysical uncertainty, inherent in the progress of scientific knowledge. This irreducible uncertainty invites us to envisage scientific rationality not so much as a successful mourning of the need for certainty, but as an unfinished uprooting. The scientistic discourses can be seen as fantasy-like constructions, in which the quest for direct access to certainty returns in the form of conviction of the nature of science (and no longer in the form of an ideal). ResultsHighlighting the fundamental role of uncertainty in scientific practice and ethics thus leads to highlighting the gap between science and the image of science forged by scientistic discourses. The latter is based on the illusion of access to certainty, completeness, and the guarantee of knowledge: an image of an all-powerful science whose value is absolute. This inversion of the relationship to certainty invites us to point out the fantasmatic nature and function of scientistic constructions. ConclusionOne consequence of the exclusion of the regime of certainty by scientificity is that science can only find outside of itself the base of founding certainties serving as the foundation of its identity as an institution and social practice. This proximity between scientific rationality and certainty therefore leads to a position of heteronomy of science vis-à-vis the discourses that could legitimize it in the social bond. While implying a clear distinction between scientific practices and the ideology that provides certainties, this heteronomy therefore also points to the limits of this distinction: dependent on these discourses which, however, must remain outside these practices, the scientific institution would carry within it the inherent risk of contamination by ideological constructions that forge an idealized and distorted image of it.