ABSTRACT
The title of this book suggests that present-day scientific research is subjugated and that the yoke under which it is placed is “value”. We believe that this circumstance constitutes a threat to science itself. The idea that subjugation is a threat to science is not surprising, as it is generally accepted and commonly codified that scientific research must be free and cannot, therefore, tolerate being deprived of, or restricted in, its freedom and autonomy. Specifically, it is understood that scientific inquiry must be defended and sustained in its task of harbouring within itself the unknowable origin from where the changing forms of knowability, to which its endeavours respond, spring; by implication, science itself must maintain an openness towards the advent of new forms of knowledge (including an entirely new and different notion of scientificity) and thus remain capable of being shaken in its foundations; in one word: it is understood that science must guard its philosophical trait, and this means: its fundamental fragility. Unless we subscribe to a position which, at any time, identifies reality with a set of extant facts, then scientific inquiry is as well-founded as it remains firmly open to transformations in the very sense and meaning of “reality” and, in this sense, fragile in its foundations.
