ABSTRACT
Once upon a time life was rather simple, at least for philosophers of science. Since the Enlightenment it was generally assumed that ‘a progressive growth of scientific knowledge will uncover the natural order of things’ (Smart 1992). In this modernist philosophy the interfaces between science and nature were straightforward: scientists simply discovered the truth of nature, whereas nature was perceived as timeless and universal, as something ‘out there’. Science was granted the elite status of providing objective knowledge about nature. Since Kuhn, life has become more complicated. Philosophers and sociologists of science gradually rejected the notion that there exists an unmediated truth of nature that can be discovered by science. Instead, they introduced the idea that the naturalistic reality of phenomena as such does not exist, but is created by scientists as the object of scientific investigation (Duden 1991:22).1 This implies a totally different perspective on what scientists are doing: scientists are actively constructing reality, rather than discovering reality. This challenging idea created a problem for scholars interested in the interfaces between science and nature. How can we deal with natural facts if we abandon the idea that science reveals the truth about nature? One powerful way to go beyond this traditional image of science is to set ourselves the task of exposing the concrete, often very mundane, human activities that go into discourse-building in order to explore the processes through which scientific claims achieve the status of universal, natural facts. Such stories may reveal that scientific facts do not suddenly leap into existence as the result of observations by clever scientists, who simply read the book of nature. The myth of scientific heroes discovering the secrets of nature needs to be replaced by another image of science, one which enables us to study how scientific facts are deeply embedded in society and culture, not just in the sense that scientific facts shape society, but even to the extent that a scientific fact may only exist by virtue of its social embeddedness. In this epistemological view,
knowledge claims acquire the status of universal facts by virtue of the extent to which they become interwoven with the institutional settings and practices of scientists and their audiences. This social constructivist portrait of the interfaces between science and nature provides us with a model to explore the multiple ways in which scientists create knowledge with the status of universal and timeless truth.
