#ITS NOT BROKEN BUT EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[miidnight98]

toe fucking H U R T S

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[joshpateli]

to historicize the category of the fact, objectivity, or proof is not thereby to debunk it, no more than to write the history of the special theory of relativity thereby undermines it. This is a point perhaps made more easily in ethics than in epistemology; the fact that the judicial ban on torture arose in a specific historical context carries no weight in arguments Why then do so many philosophers (as well as scientists, sociologists, and, yes, historians) nonetheless believe it follows? Why has historicism, especially in its Foucauldian form, been so consistently conflated with relativism? To do these questions justice would require another essay, yea, another book. Here I can do no more than suggest lines of inquiry. Certain epistemological categories have become so fundamental to modern ways of knowing that they have been paid the dubious philosophical compliment of being made eternal—much like the Romans used to deify their emperors— because eternity and immutability, according to an ancient Platonic prejudice, designated the ontos on, the really real. Even though many, if not most, philosophers have broken with Platonism, the characteristic practices of their own discipline instill the view that the genuinely philosophical is that which withstands the ravages of time—those passages of Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or Kant that can be understood by a sufficiently intelligent undergraduate with no further historical background. Historians of science, for their part, rarely reflect on such matters. Probably most historians of science these days, if asked about an episode like the refinement of precision measurement techniques or the formulation of statistical correlations, would answer that such scientific practices are both socially constructed and real. That is, they depend crucially on the cultural resources at hand in a given context (mid-nineteenth-century industrializing Prussia, early twentieth-century eugenics-obsessed Britain) and they capture some aspect of the world; they work. But they are neither historically inevitable nor metaphysically true. Rather, they are contingent to a certain time and place yet valid for certain purposes. As of yet, a new vision of what science is and how it works has yet to be synthesized from the rich but scattered and fragmented materials gathered by some twenty years of historicized history of science. The very practices that made that history possible militate against such a synthesis coming from the history of science itself. Science studies seems a still less likely candidate for the task. A new form of interdisciplinarity must be forged. Philosophy, anyone?

Daston, ‘Social Studies and the History of Science’, pp. 812-813

EEEEEEEEEEeeeeee look pragmatism in the wild!