Science Is "Good to Think With"

Abstract

shows how the "order of knowledge" has also been the "order of society." When challenges to the social order have arisen, these challenges have also changed the prevailing ways that the production and legitimation of knowledge have been organized, and vice versa: the social order and the structure of a culture's sciences are generated through one and the same social transformations (see, for example, Merchant 1980; Restivo 1988; Shapin 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This is pretty close to what the antidemocratic right believes: the new science studies, feminism, "deconstructionism," and multiculturalism threaten the downfall of civilization and its standards of reason.1 The latter criticism does not contest that the order of knowledge and the social order shape and maintain each other, but only the way science studies reveals how such science-society relations have worked in the past and operate today, and the proposal in some of these science studies tendencies for more open, public discussion about the desirability of prevailing science-society relations. It is significant that the Right's objections virtually never get into the nitty-gritty of historical or ethnographic detail to contest the accuracy of social studies of science accounts. Such objections remain at the level of rhetorical flourishes and ridicule.