Hi all



Several people have breached the idea of science and objectivity. A propos that:



> The days are gone, if they ever really existed, when it was possible to maintain that science progressively accumulates permanent, objective knowledge of nature, detached from social influence. Expressed in traditional terms, this debate concerns the meaning of objectivity. If scientific activity and its products are interest-driven, and entirely constructed from ever-changing social influences, its truth claims possess no special objectivity. I am going to take a different tack. Instead of approaching objectivity by discussing language, texts, translation, reference, and the like, I am going to approach it by discussing the experimental production of phenomena in the laboratory 



> What scientists actually do in the laboratory as often as not produces new worldly actions before it produces new texts, and the relation between those actions and those texts is not straightforward. Such actions, I shall argue shortly, are best understood as performances, and priority in science belongs to them as much as to the theories by which they are represented or named.5 Can we really pretend that scientific entities simply sit there in the laboratory waiting to be talked about? Where do they come from? Partly they come from previous texts, but partly they come from laboratory performances … Scientific objects need to be understood as objects in the real world of human culture, history, and experience.



from: 



 Robert P. Crease (1999) Productive Objectivity: The Hermeneutics of Performance in Experimental Inquiry, 





 







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