THE NOTION OF REASONABLENESS IN THE CONSTRUAL OF RATIONALITY IN SCIENCE

Abstract

The gap between the popular understanding of science and the actual picture of science seems to be widening in the 21 51 century. The highly elitist image of science is being constantly and consistently questioned with better awareness of the actual proceedings of science through the history. As one of the consequences of this questioning, the contemporary debates in Philosophy of Science don't fail to focus on the notion of rationality in science I. By the turn of the 20lh century it was taken for granted that science was the repository of rationality. However, Thomas Kuhn's stunning statement, "History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed,,2, predicted the drubbing of the received image of science and questioned the very rat.ional picture of science. More knowledge in history of science revealed that many non-rational elements too shaped the course of science. That is why Ian Hacking also suggests that there IS a crisis of rationaliti. Soon there emerged two powerful paradIgms of science, rational and nonrational, underscoring or underestimatmg the role of rationality respectively. The proponents of both these paradigms stood at the extremes and that triggered my interest to study this issue a bit closer to find out what the actual status of affair IS. Further, ratIOnal paradigm overemphasized the role of rationality to the extent of sidelining the social and human elements in science. I want to arrive at a rather integrated understanding of rationality In science, which, perhaps, would include the strengths, and avoid the weaknesses of both the models.