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CP461


Affective Accounts of Scientific Rationality 
Convenor:
Prerna Srigyan (University of California, Irvine)
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Format:
Closed Panel
Location:
NU-4A67
Sessions:
Wednesday 17 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam

Short Abstract:

Drawing from a variety of accounts, this panel will challenge the conventional point of view that locates scientific rationality exclusively in the intellectual domain, and show how existing STS accounts can be productively supplemented with a clear attention to feeling, affect, and emotion.

Long Abstract:

Knowledge-creation is conventionally understood as an intellectual process, made possible by the capacity to reason. Is it? This commonsense view decisively excludes feeling, affect, and emotion from the knowledge-creation process. Science continues to be conceived as rational precisely because it is not emotional; it is objective because it is not subjective. This ordinary understanding of scientific rationality has precluded the feeling person—the experiencing subject of science.

STS has produced a broad array of research projects reinterpreting scientific rationality as something more than just what individual scientists do with their heads; this literature has amply documented the materiality, physicality, and sociality of knowledge-creation. However, some high-profile counterexamples (such as Evelyn Fox Keller’s A Feeling for the Organism) notwithstanding, the emotional and affective aspects of knowledge-production have remained something of an untouched third rail in STS. As the body of work that attends to the affective dimension of science grows, this panel takes stock of new developments in the field.

In this panel, we will examine the entanglement of knowledge-creation processes with the emotional and experiential dimensions of subjectivity. The pursuit of scientific rationality, in this emerging view, is driven by the development of intellectual affects. Drawing from a variety of accounts, we will challenge the conventional point of view that locates scientific rationality exclusively in the intellectual domain, and show how existing STS accounts can be productively supplemented with a clear attention to feeling, affect, and emotion.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Wednesday 17 July, 2024, -