ABSTRACT
Ours appears to be both a scientific and an anti-scientific age. We are surrounded by evidence of what the sociologist Bruno Latour calls “science already made”—cars, space rockets, televisions, central heating, computers, light bulbs, cancer treatments and all the expert and technological paraphernalia of the modern world. But does this mean that ours is an age that is actually “enlightened” by the natural sciences? Many people would say not. Scientists themselves apply for grants to further “public understanding” of their activities, young people blow up laboratories in protest at animal experiments, sociologists write tracts about the limits of science and the waning of the public’s faith in scientists, and the majority of the US population appear to believe that they have been abducted by flying saucers. The social sciences, in particular, have tended to take a rather vexed view of science. The trends towards relativism, anti-foundationalism and postmodernism that have characterized the social study of science in the past few decades appear to make of natural science either just another language game, or an enterprise that is more or less fraudulent in its exaggerated claims for itself. From such a perspective, the very idea of scientific enlightenment can come itself to seem a fraud, and to make little sense.
