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In this paper I present the position of two philosophers associated with the hermeneutic tradition, Gianni Vattimo and Charles Taylor, about the status of scientific knowledge in our contemporary world. Through a brief exposition of the fundamental features of their respective ontologies and epistemologies, I seek to offer a critical comparison. In the conclusion, I defend the superiority of Taylor's formulation, inasmuch it allows to put in question the primacy of the natural science model without abandoning a realist conception of the world and of the category of truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the development of a critical thought that recognizes interculturality and social complexity, for the promotion of heterogeneity as an alternative to a homogenizing education in hegemonic capitalism. In this, the reflection on the instrumentalization of scientific knowledge for economic purposes is prioritized and the question is formulated about the opening of the school towards other knowledge, that propitiation a critical position on the prevailing model, exposing the school as the place in which the possibility of collective construction of a future society that promotes human well-being begins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I will discuss what specific traits distinguish sciences from other historical institutions. First I will review several philosophies conceiving sciences having in mind constitutive, but generic, features. This is the case when sciences are understood as explanation, as comprehension, as knowledge, as description, as representation, as construction, as cultural institution, as experimentation and elaboration of hypotheses, as theory, and as instrument of domination and intervention on reality. I put forward certain specific traits of theorems and scientific fields that allow us to distinguish sciences from other historical formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of unequal territorial integration in the Argentinean Patagonia has been widely studied. This article analyzes the interactions between national and scientific rhetorics in the understanding and design of the Patagonian territory, which allows for the interpellation of scientific technical knowledge from the perspective of its political significance. The paper seeks to broaden the academic register and further the critique of the scientific discourse that grounded the development model for the Argentinean Patagonia from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. It discusses the historiographical background that linked knowledge to utilitarian logic, based on a cross-referenced analysis of writings by naturalists and emblematic figures of planning of the appropriation and Patagonian development during the analyzed period. It shows the strong impact of scientific production on the social and moral planning of a territory that was incorporated late and unequally into the organization of the State. In Patagonia, the national rhetoric describes its progress in terms of a future promise, defining everything that exists there, persons, plants, and animals, as obstacles to the fulfillment of that promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the epistemological tensions generated due to the search for legitimization of scientific knowledge. It stems from the discussion about science seen through "nomothetic" and "ideographic" standpoints, coming to the conclusion that there is a tendency to theorize from a vision that comes from an organizational order, putting on the back burner, to a large extent, the legitimizer tension that occurs in the socialization of scientific knowledge. The paper also values possibilities to analyze social sciences from Bourdieu's scientific field concept, who breaks up certain inertias about the official positions that theorize about science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a female conception of knowledge and attempts to reveal the need to incorporate the gender perspective into the educational world with the purpose of removing the effects of inequity discrimination in the training of women. Its main focus lies in the theory of gender that has sustained extensive criticism of the Western way of thinking and of the construction style of scientific knowledge from an androcentric viewpoint. It argues that gender epistemology differs from the classical epistemology - adopted by most of the scientific and philosophical literature- which tries to negate its ideological content to project an image of scientific universality and neutrality. he paper attempts to relate the nature-culture and male-female dualism that falls within the framework of the traditional epistemological approach with gender pedagogy and the exclusion and invisibilization of women in scientific production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of this paper is to analyse the status of opinion (doxa) within Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge, taking as a starting-point the text of APo. I 33. In the course of the discussion, we show that science (episteme) and opinion can have the same object and even coincide in the selection of the same properties of the same object (both necessary and contingent), because the fundamental difference between science and opinion is not one of object. The fundamental difference between science and opinion is that science knows as a necessary truth what opinion states as a contingent fact. Incidentally, this conclusion implies that Aristotle subscribes the distinction between sentence and proposition (which is normally regarded as a discovery of the Stoics), since we can only make sense of Aristotle's theory by recognising that, for such a theory, science and opinion express different propositions even when they pronounce the same sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains that the so-called "Standard Cosmology", a means of chronicling the universe from the Big Bang until the present, is a mixture on three levels: experimental results, scientific hypotheses and the traditional narrative construction. The narrative construction is not the product of hypotheses, and certainly not of experimental results, but rather a mold that is forced upon us to deny the contingency and unify a heterogeneous series of areas of scientific knowledge and languages, which are incommensurable. The use of the cosmological narrative model is due to the belief, never clearly defined in the PSR (Principle of Scientific Reason), also known as the Strong Anthropic Principle (SAP). This old metaphysical principle is the keystone for the contemporary self-styled "scientific system" and an indispensable foundation for science to be considered an ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Funding of R&D activities has been a widely discussed issue world-wide in the last two decades due to the decline of public funding sources and the rising role of the private sector as an alternative sponsor. The discussion regarding R&D funding in public universities is particularly important because of the way in which research agendas are established, and of the conditions of access to research results which depend on where funding came from. This paper searches to introduce a critical analysis of the current tendencies of the knowledge system that was historically generated and sustained from public universities. Specifically, the analysis will be centered in the evolution of the equilibrium between the public and private sectors regarding the funding of R&D, and in the newest mechanisms of the public universities as producers of scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]