WS13 – scientists and experts

In partnership with :

Research Directorate-General of the European Commission / Direction générale de la Recherche de la Commission Européenne : ec.europa.eu/dgs/research/index_en.html

Workshop presentation

In our complex societies that have been made technical, scientific and technical apparatuses play a decisive role. They are the heart of economic development as well as power strategies. Through technical innovations, they model daily life and orient the future of societies. Far from the ideal model of the scientist passionate only about knowledge, they are wholly committed, voluntarily or not, in all the dynamics of techno-science. Their influence, like the effects of scientific research itself, by turns fascinates and troubles. Experts are expected to elucidate the secrets of nature and the future of societies for us. Their inevitably complex relationship with economic and political powers is one of the major facts of our time and one of the factors of the orientation of societies. All-powerful demiurges? Independent experts? Simple instruments of economic systems that provide them their subsistence? Members of an ideal and global community of researchers in search of truth, or actors and accomplices of increasingly heightened competition among countries and regions of the world in order to impose themselves against others? No scientist or expert can avoid these disturbing questions. What do they themselves think of their responsibilities and their powers? Are they content to assert that the world will be saved by science and technique and that it’s enough to trust them, or do they ask themselves about the philosophical, economic and political reasoning into which the action falls? Will the problems created today in China and in Europe by the use of sciences and techniques be automatically resolved by the development of sciences and techniques, or must we tackle the question differently? How must knowledge be oriented or reoriented, or privatized in a strategy of economic and political competition or made available to all of society? At whose service are experts, in the end?

All these questions inevitably come up in these circles. The workshop will make it possible to understand how scientists and experts themselves from China and Europe ask themselves about their responsibilities.