Beyond Epistemology: Relativism and Engagement in the Politics of Science

Abstract

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that work in the social studies of science and technology can be appropriated, or consciously deployed, to serve political ends. Correspondingly, pressure has risen on scholars in this field to choose sides in controversies involving science and technology. This paper argues that `co-production' — the simultaneous production of knowledge and social order — provides a more satisfying conceptual framework than `controversy' for understanding the relationship between science and society, and the scholar's rôle in that relationship. Political engagement is better achieved through reflexive, critical scholarship than through identification with apparent `winners' or `losers' in well-defined but contingent controversies. Reflexivity is especially desirable when selecting sites for research, styles of explanation, and methods of articulating normative positions.