Keeping Inversion Alive: Ethnography and Reflexivity

Thus far, much of the argument has been devoted to advancing an inversion of the objectivist commitment associated with traditional conceptions of science: we have proposed that, rather than pre-existing our efforts to ‘discover’ them, the objects of the natural world are constituted in virtue of representation. Several other inversions have also been suggested: social norms provide an evaluative resource for the characterization of behaviour, rather than governing that behaviour; logic and reason are the consequence (often, the ‘rationalization’) of action rather than its cause; rules are resources for post hoc evaluation of practice, rather than the determinants of practice; facts are the upshot of knowledge practices, rather than their antecedents; and so on. Then, in the last chapter (5), we examined how scientific discourse functions to resist these inversions. The methodological horrors are resisted by systematically setting apart scientific objects from analytic practice and by establishing a ‘moral order’ which defines the rights and obligations of persons, objects and machines and which sanctions the relationships between these entities. Given its pervasive influence, what hope is there of challenging, let alone overcoming, the hegemony of this discourse?