• Krebs, Stefan

Abstract

The categorisation of the sciences as it has developed through history can provide an insight into the formation, stabilisation and establishment of scientific systems of knowledge. As methodical access to an explanation of the genesis of technical scientific disciplines, the Dresdener Konzept retains its validity, but needs yet to be complemented by further-reaching methodical theoretical reflections. As an expansion, Mitchell G. Ash’s conceptionalisation of scientific disciplines as a resource ensemble can open up an access to the question of how individual agents can succeed in gaining a decisive influence on the changes of a discipline’s object orientation, institutionalisation and self-reproduction. Through the accumulation of material and immaterial resources, they succeed in realising their own organisational ideas and scientific programs. Pierre Bourdieu’s capital theory offers itself readily for operationalisation: the agents who contend against one another for the alteration or preservation of the structure of a scientific field can, due to their capital equipment, their respective position and their habitual disposition, adopt different strategies for the establishment of their positions. Their goal is to attain, or retain, their own dominant positions within the field. In general, the tendency to strive for the greatest attainable position inheres in the scientific field, and thus to expand the validity of the nomos of one’s own field to the utmost, whereby the value, convertibility and distribution of the various sorts of capital may change, or remain constant. Key concepts for the analysis are accordingly the struggle for power, for resources, monopolies on interpretation and the degree of autonomy. The enquiry into the genesis of ferrous metallurgy as a discipline using the example of the Technical University Aachen demonstrates that it has developed with a more or less paradigmatical correspondence to the Dresdener model of periodisation: Qualitative developments have occurred at all three levels of analysis as they are described in the Dresdener Konzept – object orientation, institutionalisation, and self-reproduction - between 1870 and 1914. From the suggested vantage point, the steps of consolidation described by the Dresdener Konzept can be understood as necessary conditions for the scientific development of ferrous metallurgy; while autonomisation must be conceived as a sufficient condition of its scientific development. This would mean that the scientific development of ferrous metallurgy could only occur under the assertion of its interpretative monopoly. The formation of the ferrous-metallurgical field’s chiastic structure was at the same time bound up with the consolidation of ferrous metallurgy and the establishment of its scientific monopoly on interpretation. This means that only with the disciplinary constitution of theory, and the coming of fundamental research, could scientific activity for its own sake occur. The new nomos thus generated the necessary illusio necessary for its permanence. For Bourdieu, autonomous fields are structured spaces of lasting relations between producers themselves, and between producers and consumers. In the scientific field, these are actually identical; i.e. the scientific field is one of restricted production; a space of knowledge production, in which the producers’ audience consists mainly of other producers, i.e. competitors. The specific characteristic of technical sciences consists, then, in that they exhibit two consumer groups: pro primo, the other technical scientists, and secundum, the representatives of technical industrial practice. However, autonomy need not be absolute, nor can it be in the case of the technical sciences. Instead, a relative autonomy must be presumed of the technical scientific fields which cancels out immediate economical necessities, guaranteeing independent scientific activity, but which never entirely overcomes the mediate dependency of technical sciences upon technical practice. Nor is the process of autonomising irreversible, but the development of the two poles of the scientific field can be greater or lesser in comparison to one another in the course of time. But the ability of scientific disciplines to repudiate external influences depends upon the character of the autonomous pole. This means that without a sufficient degree of autonomy, external influences of other fields grow, and that at the same time the nomos of science suffers under this. In conclusion, the consolidation of ferrous metallurgy can be conceived as a symbolical struggle between Fritz Wüst and the German Iron and Steel Institute (Verein Deutscher Eisenhüttenleute) which led to a construction of a system of differences in which scientists a(...)

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• theory
• laser emission spectroscopy
• steel
• iron