entire book - Chris Hables Gray

The Uses of Science [ 75 ]
advocates a "wedding" between a constructivist view of science and a realist
view of the world (1988). In this view, science has access to the world through
some of its methods, but which parts of the world it explores and reshapes is
determined socially and personally, not "naturally."
Donna Haraway says something very similar when she criticizes both
relativism and totalizing versions of realism and logical positivism:
The alternative to relativism is not totalization and single vision, which
is always finally the unmarked category whose power depends on systematic
nan-owing and obscuring. The alternative to relativism is partial,
beatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections
called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology.
(1988, p. 584)
Longino herself has charted in detail the ways science is configured as
social knowledge. She demonstrates in several ways how contextual values
can shape practices, delimit questions, affect descriptions, mold assumptions,
and motivate acceptances in ways that determine what science comes into
being. In this view science, and all reasoning are crucial, but limited, social
practices. She remarks that "Treating reasoning as a practice reminds us that
it is not a disembodied computation but takes place in a particular context
and is evaluated with respect to particular goals." Finally, she stresses that
experience is "an interactive rather than a passive process." Experience is a
complicated product of "the interaction of our senses, our conceptual apparatus,
and 'the world out there' " (1990, pp. 214, 221).
An insight that is usually closely related to a refusal of simple realism or
simple relativism is the realization that objects, natural or artificial, are not
passive objects-of-knowledge; rather, their specificity shapes possibilities. Nor
can the scientist be just an observer; the specific approach of the scientist shapes
possibilities as well. Stephen Toulmin describes this realization as postmodern:
As we now realize, the interaction between scientists and their objects of
study is always a two-way affair. ... In quantum mechanics as much as in
psychiatry, in ecology as much as in anthropology, the scientific observer
is now—willy-nilly—also a participant. The scientists of the mid-twentieth
century, then, have entered the period of postmodern science. (1982,
p. 97; emphasis in original)
Bruno Latour (1991) has taken this idea beyond usefulness when he argues
that "nonhumans" such as machines and microbes should have rights as
humans do. 2 He does well to stress the importance of such nonhumans in
science and how crucial laboratories and relationships of power and discourse
are to the construction of science, but his conflation of human responsibility