Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond by Elena Aronova & Simone Turchetti

Author:Elena Aronova & Simone Turchetti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

The Bleak 1970s

After March 1968, Polish politicians (who were dominated by Communists and were against Polish intelligentsia) lost interest in promoting scientific culture (including the science of science) and became sworn enemies of the so-called socialism with a human face (developed by the advocates of non-communist socialism). 63 Since many Polish scholars proved to be opponents of communism and communist socialism, the media sketched the image of the science in the phase of a deep crisis. 64 Moreover, in the 1970s, economic depression and political upheaval was growing in Poland. And in this context, “many experts of the science of science dealt with issues of broader social activities which science is only small part of”; in effect, the majority of scholars studied the science of science only at the margin of their curricula, and thus, new work was dominated by historical and semantic approaches (that were, in principle, deprived of political cogency). 65

In December 1970, after a political crisis caused by a revolt of the workers on the Coast protesting which was brutally suppressed by the police and the army, a new communist government of Edward Gierek was established. In order to promote socio-economic development, Gierek extensively used foreign loans that produced a dramatic collapse and a huge foreign debt, accompanied by strikes and demonstrations (in June 1976). These were brutally suppressed by the police and the army and produced the creation in 1977 of an independent democratic opposition.

In 1973, the Committee for the Science of Science (chaired by Ignacy Malecki) and the Committee for the History of Science and Technology (chaired by Bogusław Leśnodorski) sought to create an Institute for the Science of Science (at the Polish Academy of Sciences) that was to link the departments of the Polish Academy of Sciences that did research on different scientific disciplines from the meta-scientific point of view (namely, by exploring connections with history of science and technology, history of arts, history of literature, philosophy, etc.). However, the initiative failed:I will not disclose a secret by saying that the 2nd Congress of Polish Science disappointed the Committee for the Science of Science and the Committee for the History of Science and Technology by not laying the foundations for the creation of the Institute for the Science of Science. 66

Perhaps this influenced the debate over the formula of the science of science that was demonstrated at the 2nd Congress of Polish Science. The dispute was the consequence of the interests of the science of science concentrated on the history of science, just as it was cultivated at the Institute of History of Natural Sciences and Technology, Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and the science of science based on Kotarbiński’s programme, hence the (despised) praxeological provenance. (What should be remembered from that period is the votum separatum of professor E. Olszewski during the formulation of the draft resolution of the Congress of Polish Science). 67

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