Science, ethics and the pandemics

Within the pandemic scenario the relationship between science and human life, has been often distorted and misunderstood and this has been one of the elements that has contributed to the rejection of scientific thinking. One of the reasons for this distortion is a vision of scientific knowledge as the main and absolute reference for the institutions that rule the countries since in the contemporary world, science has established itself as not merely the dominant but as the “only” legitimate form of human knowledge, claiming independence from the influence of social and historical conditions. The emergence and dissemination of a discourse which has legitimated the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing has led to a well-developed and dangerous position maintaining the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry, often combined with a form of excessive confidence in the power of science, identified as “scientism.” Nonetheless the acknowledgement of scientific fallibilism and the continuous tensions that engage scientific inquiry in order to find viable answers to the questions emerging within the social realm open up a new scenario, within which individuals and communities may come to trust science, understood as the matrix of shared processes of knowledge construction aimed at sustaining social development