SCIENCE, IMAGINATION AND VALUES IN THE GERMAN ENERGY TURN: AN EXAMPLE OF NEURATH’S METHODOLOGY FOR SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY

• Autor(a) principal: Cunha, Ivan Ferreira da
• Data de Publicação: 2024
• Outros Autores: Linsbichler, Alexander
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Kriterion (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/kriterion/article/view/40941
• topic: Empirismo lógico; Economia e ecologia; Filosofia das ciências sociais; Imaginação científica; Experimentos de pensamento; Ciência, tecnologia e sociedade; Logical empiricism; Economics and ecology; Philosophy of social science; Scientific imagination; Thought experiments; Science, technology and society

Neurath’s scientific utopianism is the proposal that the socialsciences should engage in the elaboration, development, and comparison ofcounterfactual scenarios, the ‘utopias’. Such scenarios can be understood ascenterpieces of scientific thought experiments, that is, in exercises of imaginationthat not only promote conceptual revision, but also stimulate creativity to dealwith experienced problems, as utopias are efforts to imagine what the futurecould look like. Moreover, utopian thought experiments can offer scientificknowledge to inform political debates and decisions, contributing to the shapingof society. This essay reconstructs a historical event as an example of Neurath’sutopianist methodology. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a scientific andpolitical commission appointed by the Western German Parliament devised andcompared four scenarios for future energetic-economic policies. Conclusions ofthe commission informed political decisions that put Western (later reunified)Germany in a route towards becoming a green industrial power. A fundamentalpart of the commission’s work involved an appeal to imagination, allowing forthe characterization under Neurath’s methodology.