Seasick on the Third Wave? Subverting the Hegemony of Propositionalism: Response to Collins & Evans (2002)

摘要

I have argued here that science has been allowed by default to be the agent of public meaning, in the ways that dominant institutions presume public issues to be 'scientific', and often particularly reductionist versions of 'scientific' too. Of course it can be countered that, as is well attested, powerful bodies use science deliberately to advance other covert agendas. This has to be acknowledged; but it can be said to sustain a situation in which, rather eerily, public discourse with which no-one identifies is being used. An alternative is that, perhaps using science more and more in this instrumental way, we have as usual become entrapped and encultured by our own contingent constructs. This ambiguity continues. In favour of Collins and Evans it could be argued that, in practice, questions of meaning can or should be ignored because the discriminating democratization of one-dimensional propositional deliberations (if such could even be imagined as a separate sphere) would naturally be accompanied by democratization of the negotiation of public meanings. However, this would need at least to be recognized and argued through, with the benefit of empirical illustration. It would be wholly inadequate to argue that this issue of negotiation of public meanings is a separate, political matter, because those very boundaries are themselves a key issue, and because 'negotiation' of meanings and frames is usually so embedded as an oblique, tacit kind of un-negotiated 'negotiation', within those ostensibly scientific, propositional public discourses and interventions.