Bibliographic Details
| Title: |
Response to Labinger. |
| Authors: |
Keith, William1 keithw@ucs.orst.edu |
| Source: |
Social Studies of Science (Sage Publications, Ltd.). May95, Vol. 25 Issue 2, p321-324. 4p. |
| Subject Terms: |
*Cultural studies, *Rhetoric, *Discourse analysis, Science & society, Philosophy of science |
| People: |
Labinger, Jay |
| Abstract: |
In the article, the author comments on the article "Science As Culture: A View From the Petri Dish," by Jay A. Labinger, published in this issue of the journal "Social Studies of Science." The author believes that focusing on one's consciousness on an activity interferes with doing it. Scientist Jay Labinger's exemplifies this point at the discursive level. Labinger points to the apparent mismatch between what he calls Social and Cultural studies of Science (SCS) and the day-to-day practice of science. The basic problem is the redescription of science in other terms seems unavoidably to destabilize science. Whether one welcomes or bemoans this outcome, the tension between the doing of science and the study of it seems always to manifest itself as attack on science. One thus need to explore how the tension arises, and why it creates such hostility. Labinger is willing to concede that social factors are important. The question that arises is why would anybody continue doing science, if its distinctiveness rests only in it being a particular social arrangement. In particular, SCS accounts are threatening to science because of rhetorical and philosophical choices that were fixed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nature and truth are not rhetorically dispensable for scientists, since these are terms by which they make sense of their own enterprise. |
| Database: |
Education Research Complete |
