Science as living collective memory: a Bergsonian framework for scientific rationality

Philosophy of science has often privileged logic, method, and justification while neglecting a category that visibly structures scientific life: collective memory. This article argues that scientific rationality can be understood as a practice of living collective memory, grounded in Bergson's ontology of duration and memory. Bergson shows that the past does not simply disappear but endures virtually and can be actualized in response to present demands. Scientific knowledge can therefore be understood not merely as the accumulation of discrete results, but as a temporal process in which perception, habit, recollection, and invention cooperate. Halbwachs extends this problem into the collective register by showing that memory depends on social frameworks, institutions, languages, and shared temporal references. On this basis, the article develops living collective memory as a conceptual operator for philosophy of science, organized by three operations: conservation, reconstruction, and selective forgetting. The framework is tested through the Kuhn-Popper debate. Kuhn's account of paradigms clarifies how scientific communities conserve and reconstruct a usable past through exemplars, standards, and problem-solving routines. Popper's critical rationalism clarifies the complementary operation of selective forgetting, understood not as erasure but as the partial or complete withdrawal of a theory's authority to guide inquiry, while its traces remain available for historical, heuristic, pedagogical, or future reactivation. Ricoeur's reflections on forgetting and Derrida's analysis of the archive further show that scientific memory is selective, fragile, and institutionally mediated. The article does not reconcile Kuhn and Popper. It redescribes their opposition as a tension between two necessary functions of rationality: preserving continuity and withdrawing authority from what can no longer guide inquiry. Scientific progress, from this perspective, is neither simple accumulation nor pure rupture, but the regulated reorganization of a shared past. To treat science as living collective memory is to recognize rationality as fundamentally historical, collective, and precarious.