Kristo Ivanov: Science, politics, and ethics: The case of the 'nazi-seminar'

I took the initiative to this seminar because I think that discussion of important things that affect the very basis of our work and are lively discussed in the coffee room should not be relegated to only that arena because of our shortcomings in facing such complex issues. This rather improvised seminar bearing the mark of my own shortcomings aims at presenting some theses that are relevant for research in informatics on the basis of what has been reported on the "Nazi-seminar" at Umeå university (December 5th, 1997) by mass media and other sources. (Selected material on the event including mass media reactions is on display in the department's personnel refectory.) Political, and for that matter also economic, dimensions or perspectives of a vaguely defined discipline of informatics tend to be explained away or ignored in our research. This happens disregarding whether such dimensions are understood (as in Churchman's The Design of Inquiring Systems) as apperception, representation, Weltanschauung, or sweeping-in (pp. 73-75, 141-146, 170-176, 197-198). The extreme case considered here shows that the inquiry in general and information systems in particular cannot be dissociated, at the level of theory and principles, from matters of politics that ultimately end up in ethics or religious dogmas. The price to be paid for dissociation is what is happening: the submission of knowledge and science to power, politics or "realpolitik". The strong feelings raised by the case can be interpreted as a psychological reaction to the experienced impotence of human reason in dealing with matters of ultimate importance. Neither a vaguely understood reason nor aesthetic feelings including the sublime and its counterpart of horror (Kant's third Critique) can claim to do away with the practical daily need of ethics and religion in the design of scientific work.

Välkommna!
Kenneth Nilsson