SOCIAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS OF PROFESSIONALISATION OF SCIENCE
The article deals with the problem of scientific professionalisation, where the principal question is how the process is carried out and what causative forces and relationships make it possible. The process of scientific professionalisation as initiated by scientists themselves through the establishment of regulatory rules and criteria for scientific activity is 25 called a “pure” model. The interpretation of scientific professionalisation as a result of the state socio-economic policy proceeds from the fact that scientists are necessarily included in public structures. The perspective characteristic of the social philosophy of science proceeds from the fact that scientific professionalisation is an open system of associations in which scientists have many contradictory ways of acquiring professional identity, provided that many different agents are included in any professional action. Using Bruno Latour’s works, the author shows the paradox of scientific professionalisation: it lies in the fact that the number of people involved in science is being increased - which contributes to the dissemination of scientific facts and artifacts - and reduced at the same time so that scientific statements are accepted and disseminated unchanged. To answer the question of how the scientific professionalisation is carried out, we have to recognise the distributed nature of the process, its instability which is due to the gap between the search for truth and a wide range of social and communicative forms of scientific activities.