A session led by Mátyás Erdélyi

The present seminar session investigates how social statistics were created, comprehended, and used for commercial and public purposes in Dualist Hungary. It explores different modes of quantification, the inter- or pre-disciplinary sights of scientific production, and power relations between competing expert and nascent professions. Central to this line of inquiry is the investigation of relations between statisticians and other notables (i.e. every person worth of attention and involved in the debate, be it a politician, businessman, any type of scholar) inclined to claim authority over the creation and political/economic use of social statistics. This session contributes to the overall discussions on the nature of interdisciplinarity by describing primeval workshops on interdisciplinarity and by showing how the search for timeless truths and objectivity can be deviated by political and economic interests amidst disciplinary competition.

Readings:

• Theodore M. Porter. ‘Life Insurance, Medical Testing, and the Management of Mortality.’ In Lorraine Daston (ed). Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, pp. 226-246.
• Alain Desrosières. La Politique des Grands Nombres: Histoire de la Raison Statistique. Paris: La Découverte, 1993.

A session led by Edita Wolf

While grand narratives constructed by the means of metaphysical philosophy legitimate the modern condition of knowledge, incredulity toward metanarratives characterizes the postmodern condition. In his seminal text, Jean-François Lyotard explores the process of de-legitimation of knowledge claims vis-à-vis the end of grand narratives and the parallel emergence of a new legitimation secured in terms of performance and efficiency in the field of knowledge production. The system of disciplines rooted in speculative discourse is thereby replaced by practice justifiable only by the principles of performance and efficiency. On the basis of Lyotard’s text a revision is needed in relation to contemporary debates on theory of interdisciplinarity, where interdisciplinarity becomes either a political exigency or a notion that should yield a deeper meaning to the present status of knowledge production. Thus interdisciplinarity seems to work as a substitute for the old philosophical notions that is detached from the actual workings of today’s science. A re-reading of The Postmodern Condition, that is of an announcement of the end of the discipline of philosophy by a philosopher, will bring us to a reflection on interdisciplinarity as a particular practice that would not necessarily entail construction of a discourse of legitimation.

Readings:

Jean-François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984 [1979].
Read the book or alternatively the introduction and pp. 31-70.