ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates the generation and consequences of the empiricist theory of the production of scientific knowledge. Ultimately, this theory comes down to a monistic view of natural science as contingent purely on natural, not social, phenomena. This is effected by (1) a reductionist theory of meaning which reduces the real content of science to atomistic facts apprehended in sense experience; and (2) a reified theory of facts which treats facts as in isomorphic correspondence with the objects referred to. Thus science, reduced to atomistic facts, comes to be treated as identical to – or in isomorphic relationship with – the objects apprehended by science in the fact-stating moment, so that the former is, as it were, assimilated into (or turned into an epiphenomenon of) the latter. In this way knowledge ceases to be viewed as properly speaking social and properly speaking produced. And the cardinal distinctions between knowledge as a social product and the object of knowledge (whether social or non-social), and between the world and the language we use to describe it, are obliterated, making it impossible to sustain the idea of change in either the world or our accounts of it.