Knowledge and Human Interests: An Inquiry about the Relation between the Two Categories

This essay deals with one of the most controversial issues in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science, i.e. the relationship between ‘human interests’ and ‘knowledge,’ particularly ‘scientific knowledge’ (SK), and aims to present a tenable model of this relation. First, three different models will be discussed and criticized: the ‘transcendental’ relation between interests and knowledge (Habermas), the one-sided ‘constructive’ relation (Strong Program), and the two-sided ‘constructed’ relation (Actor-Network theory). In our view, each of them suffers from some serious shortcomings, which should be resolved in a satisfactory manner. Secondly, based on some useful achievements in contemporary philosophy of science, we will put forward a new model of the relationship between interests and SK within a general ‘decisionistic’ framework, which seems to be immune to the foregoing criticism, and explain more realistically the actual situations of scientific actions. In this theory, in a nutshell, as merely one of the key factors in a complex, contingent collection of ‘decision vectors,’ interests could contribute into the process of scientific decisions.