entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 74 ] The Present
clear connection between science and reality. Some of them may admit
that society and human perception can muddy the relationship at times,
but in their view science is always the best way of understanding the
world. Maybe, they argue, it is not a perfect system, but it is far superior
to any other. While definitions of science differ wildly among this group,
they all specify certain values. These metarules of science are logical
rationality, experiential objectivity, and physical materiality. Sometimes
there is also an emphasis on repeatable experimentation or regular
intervention on matter. A few philosophers, such as the purest of the
logical positivists, depend on elaborate definitions of the logically provable
or falsifiable to define science. But, by and large, it is their own
reason, their own fairness, and their own existence that most scientists
assume. This is the dominant point of view.
This privileged view of science has been challenged by the construetivists
in a number of different ways. Some have undertaken painstaking
personal studies of scientists and the construction of scientific facts in order
to show just how culturally determined and somewhat arbitrary this process
is. These studies often rely on detailed textual and discourse analysis, as well
as historical and other interpretive approaches besides the anthropological
assumptions that underlie much of this work.
Some of these researchers even go so far as to claim that science, as
practice and social object, is entirely constructed, and that there is no direct,
or even discussable, connection between science and the "real" world, a
world which might not even exist, after all. Most constructivists do not hold
such absolute views, but some do.
However, most who argue that much of science is socially defined would
never claim that all of science was socially determined. Helen Longino has
one of the best summaries of this bounded constructivism:
There is a world independent of our senses with which those senses
interact to produce our sensations and the regularities of our experience.
There is "something out there'' that imposes limits on what we can say
about it. Once we have decided on a system for measuring movement, the
speed of an object is not arbitrary. The sorts of things we measure, however,
will change as our needs, interests, and understanding change. The
processes that occur in the world will continue regardless of changes in
our descriptive systems. . . . The fact that not all changes and gradations
can be encompassed by any given system and that the changes and
gradations that are important to us change over time is one of the
phenomena driving scientific change. (1990, p. 222)
Several theoreticians have explored this zone between realists and
relativists. Sal Restivo says he would rather be considered "realistic." He