According to Aristotle, man is a "rational animal" and it is precisely the rationality of man that provokes a dynamic and speculative curiosity whose purpose is to understand everything. Explaining oneself and the world that surrounds it has become for man a basic and elemental need, today the life and survival of the human species largely depend on the set of knowledge that has been acquired since ancient times.. The accumulation of this knowledge has been given the name of "science", and this in turn has been divided into social sciences and exact sciences, both seek to explain the nature of man and his interaction with the environment, they seek to establish laws of natural and social phenomena and explain the behavior and behavior of man under certain circumstances.
To develop science you have to observe, speculate, investigate, understand, assimilate, explain, develop theories, translate them and then spread them. The researcher is the one who observes and investigates, formulates the necessary hypotheses, explains the phenomena, understands the causes and the phenomenon itself. The investigation does not conclude with the knowledge of the analyzed, after every study a very great responsibility is born in the researcher because he acquires the duty to disclose his work so that other men know it, it is useless for the researcher to be an almanac of knowledge kept under Key accessible only to the learned or chosen, on the contrary, after a research effort the curious researcher has the obligation to disclose his research to generate controversies,opposing or coinciding points of view and in this way continue to construct new explanations for the phenomena that he observes.
Why do we all have the right to know the work and results of a researcher and why is the researcher obliged to do their research? This question is important to solve and we find a simple answer, knowledge is culture and culture is the heritage of humanity, therefore, those who build culture must share it with their contemporaries and with future men. According to Thompson "the culture of a group or society is the set of beliefs, customs, ideas and values, as well as the artifacts, objects and material or intellectual instruments that individuals acquire as part of that group or that society."When saying that culture is that materially or intellectually man builds, it can be affirmed that science is part of culture, however, what was said by Thompson should be highlighted, who builds is an individual or an individual being for or benefit of an entire society, that is, from a cultural point of view, science is made by private individuals to share with the community. Science is not privatized, it does not belong to a few, because researchers know their obligation to share it.
In theory, glory, fame and prestige is the last thing a researcher looks for when sharing their knowledge. Man has always tried to understand himself and his environment, in Ancient Greece the myth was the first attempt at "investigation" and explanation of things, that supposed knowledge deified phenomena, was lacking in rationality and placed man as spectator of things. It is necessary to understand man and his context and possibilities, however, the myth towards the role of "ancient science" and what is redeemable is that this limited knowledge was disclosed, it was shared in the midst of society, the transmission of that pseudo-knowledge it was done orally.
With the arrival of Classical Greece, rationality began to invade the field of research and speculation of man, in this period things began to be demystified, it began to understand that there is something beyond the gods in each natural phenomenon and man's conduct. In Classical Greece the foundations of the great sciences are born, to give a remarkable example, we find a Hippocrates and medicine, a group of important philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; Herodotus begins to make a History built by men and not by gods. In this period, methodologies to build knowledge began to be built and science began to spread through writings and treatises, the limitation on the subject of disclosure is accessibility, knowledge is accessible to a few,In other words, for those who can read, who know about the investigated topic or who have economic and social possibilities to access knowledge, the rest do not find out or do not understand the intellectual fabric of knowledge; There were intellectual elites led mainly by philosophers, for example Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum.
During the Middle Ages knowledge continues to have a closed or privatized nature, the Church generates scientific knowledge –although many say otherwise, citing examples would take time and we would get off the subject– mainly theology is elaborated. It has already been said that during the Middle Ages knowledge was the privilege of some, but even so it was disclosed, the new means of propagation of knowledge during this period were the universities, institutions invented and promoted by the Catholic Church. What sciences were dominating during this time? In addition to Philosophy and Theology, the so-called liberal arts were taught, the Trivium –Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic– and the Cuatrivium - Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic and Music.
Pausing, we will notice two fundamental questions, the first, until this moment in history, the dissemination of science is done in closed fields or groups, there are intellectual elites that possess knowledge, knowledge lacks popular character and its dissemination is he makes by means of great treatises incomprehensible to the common people; second, the predominant sciences or knowledge are at the level of the humanities. It will be until the 18th century or the Age of Enlightenment when this panorama begins to transform and an intellectual revolution is generated within the field of knowledge and its dissemination.
For the 18th century, the exact sciences or natural sciences begin to emerge, it is intended to explain everything through reason and through a concrete methodology, this is how Descartes inaugurates Modernity with an important contribution "the scientific method" a method that basically consists of To doubt everything previously said about an object of study, this new process to acquire knowledge consists of four steps 1) Evidence, avoid any prejudice or thing that is said about what you want to know, 2) Analysis, divide the object of study in parts, 3) Synthesis, establish a new explanation and 4) Review, go through everything done up to this point in the method. Lastly, as a fifth step - this step does not enter into the Cartesian method, it is a personal deduction - would be to present or disseminate the new knowledge.With this totally rational method comes the new way of knowing about man. During this time the difference between human sciences or humanities and exact sciences was born. Disclosure is a terrain that also changed, encyclopedism laid the foundations for it, large encyclopedias began to be made where knowledge was contained, educational institutions were gradually more accessible to the people of the town, the revolutions of this period of somehow they achieved an opening in the field of science popularization.Large encyclopedias began to be made where knowledge was contained, educational institutions gradually became more accessible to the people of the town, the revolutions of this period somehow achieved an opening in the field of science dissemination.Large encyclopedias began to be made where knowledge was contained, educational institutions gradually became more accessible to the people of the town, the revolutions of this period somehow achieved an opening in the field of science dissemination.
Today, things have completely changed, most of us have access to the knowledge of researchers, the means of dissemination are many, universities, the information media, the Internet, catalogs, libraries, scientific journals, –among many others–, today researchers know their obligation to disseminate and science is within our reach, now we set the limits of access to information, research and knowledge.
Arlette Jovana Yáñez González - March 2016.
John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, Mexico, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2002, p. 194.
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