Steering science in democracy. Philosophical inquiry into the democratization of research policies. ; Orienter la science en démocratie. Enquête philosophique sur la démocratisation des politiques de recherche.

The aim of this thesis is the formulation of a practical normative proposition regarding the right way of politically steering the public research effort in a democracy. Who should decide, and how, of the main orientations of scientific research in order for its course to be in line with the democratic ideals of our contemporary occidental societies? The reflections composing our tentative answer are structured in three steps.The first consists in understanding and describing the current state of the governance of science, so as to examine its democratic nature. Our diagnosis is the following: if the growing share of targeted research, alongside the proliferation of attempts to reinforce the "science-society dialogue", show a genuine political will to direct scientific inquiry towards citizens’ desires, a critical analysis of the logic underlying these evolutions as well as of their actual implementation must lead us to expose the apparent democratization of science as a distinctly economical form of rationalization of research policies, amounting to their progressive depolitization.Acknowledging the problematic nature of this situation regarding our societies’ democratic aspirations, and holding a properly political democratization of science to be desirable, the major challenge of our reflection then emerges as consisting in the elaboration of the principles needed to guide this democratization, and in the exploration of its practical realization, in light of both the epistemological constraints pointing to the legitimate sites of entry for a democratic logic within the dynamics of scientific research, and a philosophical theory able to sustain the formulation of a relevant political answer to the problem raised.The second step is then to argue in favor of an approach relocating Philip Kitcher’s epistemological arguments – claiming that democracy requires the people to be associated to the determination of which scientific truths are meaningful – within John Dewey’s political theory, so as to draw the contour ...