Science and Social Science: Agency and Technology in Representation

We began by reviewing the wide variation in views about what counts as science and we noted the problems this caused for attempts to specify demarcation criteria ( Chapter 1 ). Common to all these versions of science, however, is the idea of representation. Despite a series of severely damaging methodological and philosophical arguments about its impossibility (the methodological horrors), the idea of representation remains the crucial mainstay of objectivism ( Chapter 2 ). The challenge to objectivism began when sociologists started to take seriously the relativity of scientific truths. The treatment of the generation of scientific knowledge as a sociological issue opened the black box; the sociology of science was transformed into a sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) ( Chapter 3 ). Attention to the nature of the connection between ‘object’ and its ‘representation’ was accompanied by critical analysis of the presumed direction of this connection: it was argued that facts and objects are constructed rather than discovered ( Chapter 4 ). But we saw how the discourse of science is organized so as to resist this kind of inversion and to uphold the idea of representation ( Chapter 5 ). Even (the less reflexive) ethnographic studies tend (unwittingly) to reaffirm the fundamental epistemological commitment to the idea of representation ( Chapter 6 ).