IN SCIENCE WE TRUST. REALLY?
IN SCIENCE WE TRUST. REALLY?

Summary/Abstract: The paper sketches the attitudes towards a specific cultural activity that is universal/ has trans-local features: science. This specific of science generates ambivalent feelings: there is trust, just because of its universal standards and aims, but at the same time there is disbelief and doubt because of some public effects of the instrumentalization of some scientific behaviors and researchers. The trust in science is a modern attitude and has a methodological significance, especially on the trend of secularization substituting the religious pattern of the social consciousness. However, neither people are satisfied only with science, nor the trust in science does supplant their need of human values. On the one hand, the trust in science does not supersede the trust in the social arrangement as such: there is as much trust in science – as a vector of optimism and social cohesion – as trust in the social organization and relations. Though the influence of the trust in science on the human capital still has to be studied, this human capital concerns rather different aspects. On the other hand, just because the cultural activities do not overlap perfectly (they only intertwine), one cannot reduce the need of the modern man (in any of its post-modern versions) to one activity or another. And, concretely, people need more than only science, they need social ideals. The sentiments of human communion (then of strength of man and his control over future) are provided by both universalistic and particularistic values and cultural activities, but these values and activities must not only converge but also be consistent. From this standpoint, the analysis of the behaviour of the present science is welcomed.

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