ABSTRACT
A ‘meaningful understanding’ of the social environment can be assumed in a situation where ‘politics is released from all invariable moral categories and honorable virtues and reverts completely to the grasping of possibilities’. As a reaction to ‘decision-making under ignorance’, the responsibility for decisions can be shifted from a democratic political sphere into other spheres of society, in an attempt to avoid political responsibility. It is doubtful that such de-politicization can succeed in making regulations that address issues that can be invoked as collective as such concerns can call for collectively binding decisions whose effects are always attributed to political responsibility. Concerning the multitude of less spectacular political challenges, it remains to be seen more precisely how ambiguity and contingency could be cleared up in political decision-making processes. Reflexive knowledge politics should focus on the opportunities for influencing knowledge orders discursively and thus through the communicative mechanisms of the formation of knowledge orders.
