ABSTRACT
Critics of science studies accuse science studies people of largely buying into the postmodernist viewpoint. Science studies people deny this and accuse the practicing scientists of merely trying to defend a version of heroic positivism that the various examinations undertaken by science studies people have rendered untenable. The “idealized science” attacked by science studies and by David Caudill and Lewis LaRue is based on the assertion that scientific practice, including the practices of all “true scientists,” realizes the ideals of the theory of scientific enquiry, and therefore generates “scientific truths.” the enterprise of science requires an explicit, formal and generally well worked out taxonomy. The characteristics include: the centrality of data, the necessity of taxonomy, the equal centrality of the imaginative generation of hypotheses and the equally important necessity of the testing of those hypotheses. Science must go beyond descriptive taxonomy of even the most quantified sort to the enterprise of hypothesis and theory creation.
