Studying Absences of Knowledge: Difficult Subfield or Basic Sensibility?

Abstract

This paper comments on a special issue of Social Epistemology, vol. 28, no. 1 (2014) on absences of knowledge. The articles in this special issue make a strong case that studying absences of knowledge is important for the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). As single works and through the literature that they cite, they also illustrate how STS is increasingly framing absences of knowledge as an understudied and especially difficult topic (Rappert and Bauchspies 2014). I fully support paying more attention to absences of knowledge, and have long argued for doing so (e.g., Hilgartner 2001). However, I am unconvinced that the study of absences should be framed as a specialized “topic” or “area” or that radically new methods are needed to pursue it. Absences are too fundamental to the social aspects of knowledge to be imagined as a mere subfield. Instead, a broad sensibility attuned to the significance of absences should (and in many ways already does) inflect a wide range of STS research.