Vol. 16 No. 32 (2025): Communities and possible worlds. Community experiences and practices of resistance in neoliberal rationality
Passim

La produzione sociale del sapere scientifico tra razionalità e questioni ultime: un’analisi del discorso applicata a testi di genetica e neuroscienze

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  • Benedetta Nicoli
Benedetta Nicoli
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche e Sociali, Università Cattolica di Milano, Italia
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-16622

Published 2025-12-30

Keywords

  • social production of scientific knowledge,
  • STS,
  • discourse analysis,
  • ultimate questions,
  • formal rationality

How to Cite

Nicoli, B. (2025). La produzione sociale del sapere scientifico tra razionalità e questioni ultime: un’analisi del discorso applicata a testi di genetica e neuroscienze. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 16(32), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.36253/smp-16622

Copyright (c) 2025 Benedetta Nicoli

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article examines whether and how scientific knowledge, in its public and reflexive moments, engages with ultimate questions understood, with Weber, as existential inquires that exceed formal rationality. The study applies a qualitative discourse analysis to a corpus of 85 monographs written by geneticists and neuroscientists for a non-specialist audience, identifying three recurring configurations: the circularity between scientific knowledge and ultimate questions; the recognition of the epistemic limits of science; and the articulation of moral implications within an «expanded view» of science. In this framework, public scientific discourse does not merely inform or persuade, but becomes a reflexive space in which science addresses ultimate questions by interweaving scientific rationality, existential perspective, normative reflection, and symbolic imagination. In doing so, it also interrogates its own epistemic status, cognitive limits, and social implications. The article concludes by discussing the implications for the sociological study of the social production of scientific knowledge, and invites reflection on the public role of science – and of sociology itself – as a form of knowledge that contributes to the collective construction of meaning in a context marked by fragmented symbolic frameworks and the centrality of formal rationality.

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