On Scientific Knowledge and its Circulation: Reception Aesthetics and Standpoint Theory as Resources for a Historical Epistemology

Abstract

This short essay proposes a combined framework of Reception Aesthetics and feminist Standpoint Theory as an approach to the circulation of scientific knowledge and to a Historical Epistemology. The article argues that Reception Aesthetics provides intellectual tools to examine how ideas were appropriated at each conjuncture and made productive. Standpoint Theory focuses on how local agents can be scientific and epistemically productive and relevant, and how scientific labour is divided according to cultural, economic, and geographical factors. Here it is argued that the articulation of both outlooks can be fruitful for elucidating how the production of scientific knowledge with its normative criteria are distributed, how the dynamics of contemporary circuits of scientific exchange can be conceptualized, how the possibilities and limits to making past knowledge productive can be discussed, and how a normative stance can be built from the relationship between epistemic values, non-epistemic values, and historical conditions.