Political Epistemology
摘要
The objective of this entry is to present Political Epistemology as a field that encompasses the works of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Even though the term Political Epistemology includes quite diverse schools of thought, such as historical-dialectic philosophy or Foucaultian archaeology and genealogy, the focus here is to discuss this singular approach and its important repercussions in the field of psychology. To this end, initially, we will see how Political Epistemology understands that the invention of modern sciences took place through a rare conjugation of certain powers or potentialities that are able to actualize it. The powers appoint an operator, which is the singular way in which human and nonhuman beings produce testimonies. This is followed by the appropriation of the meaning of this operator in a more generalized interpretation, and finally, we have the potency of this device in connecting interests. The creation of these powers also brings into being counterpart operations that try to produce scientific knowledge through a methodological recipe or an a priori concept. Without the risk of the operator, these are considered artifactual productions of science. The latter part of the entry examines how Stengers evaluates the methods of scientific operation of certain well-known psychological schools of thought, such as behaviorism, constructivism, and psychoanalysis.