Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science, with a new Preface

Jan Golinski is professor of history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire. He is the coeditor, with William Clark and Simon Schaffer, of The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© Jan Golinski 1998, 2005

Originally published by Cambridge University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-0-226-30232-4 (e-book)

ISBN: 0-226-30231-8      (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Golinski, Jan.

Making natural knowledge : constructivism and the history of science / Jan Golinski ; with a new preface.

p.   cm.

Originally published: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998, in series: Cambridge history of science.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-226-30231-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Science—History.   2. Science—Historiography   3. Constructivism (Philosophy).   I. Title.

Q125 .G63 2005

509—dc22

2005041764

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Jan Golinski

MAKING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

CONSTRUCTIVISM AND THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

with a new Preface

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO LONDON

Contents

List of Illustrations

New Preface (2005)

Preface

Introduction: Challenges to the Classical View of Science

1. An Outline of Constructivism

From Kuhn to the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge

What’s Social about Constructivism?

2. Identity and Discipline

The Making of a Social Identity

The Disciplinary Mold

3. The Place of Production

The Workshop of Nature

Beyond the Laboratory Walls

4. Speaking for Nature

The Open Hand

Stepping into the Circle

5. Interventions and Representations

Instruments and Objects

The Work of Representation

6. Culture and Construction

The Meanings of Culture

Regimes of Construction

Coda: The Obligations of Narrative

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Frontispiece from Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667)

2. Liebig’s laboratory in Giessen in the 1830s

3. Laboratory floor plans from the Liverpool University College (1880s)

4. Imperato’s cabinet of curiosities (sixteenth century)

5. The first page of Newton’s paper A New Theory about Light and Colors (1672)

6. Boyle’s air pump (1660)

7. Hooke’s Micrographia (1665)

8. A representative plate from Bernhard Albinus’s anatomical atlas (1747)

9. A representative plate from William Hunter’s anatomical atlas (1774)

10. Two of Warren De la Rue’s photographs of a total solareclipse in 1860

11. The most detailed of Martin Rudwick’s mappings of the path of the Devonian controversy

New Preface (2005)

Making Natural Knowledge was originally published in 1998. The appearance of a second edition, seven years later, offers an opportunity and also presents something of a responsibility. I am pleased to have the chance to clarify my aims in writing the book. I also feel an obligation to reconsider what it accomplished and the degree to which it is still relevant to the readers I wanted to reach.

The aim of the book was to consider how the constructivist outlook has influenced scholarship on the history of science in recent decades. I defined constructivism broadly as an approach that directed attention at the role of human beings as social actors in the making of scientific knowledge. This rather catholic definition allowed me to create a specific lineage for recent historical studies, tracing their descent from the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) which developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Constructivism was characterized in a way that permitted me a certain amount of strategic lumping. I ignored some divisions among theorists and freely corralled historians who might not have thought of themselves as constructivists at all. Of course, no such category could cover everything; this one drew attention to certain historical studies, and certain aspects of them, while overlooking others. Its justification lay in providing a framework for understanding some significant recent work by historians of science, and in connecting empirical studies with theoretical notions that came – mostly but not exclusively – from sociologists.

I was inspired to write the book by the excitement surrounding sociological studies and their implications for the history of science, which I witnessed in Britain, and particularly in Cambridge, in the late 1980s. At that point, the schools of Bath and Edinburgh had staked out their distinctive positions, and fascinating new perspectives were beginning to emerge from Paris. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, from Edinburgh, had interpreted Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm in a way that identified the social structures of the scientific community with models of scientific practice. This made it possible to understand the social dimension of science without invoking what used to be called external factors. Many people took the Edinburgh reading of Kuhn as having liberated empirical studies of the sciences from the preoccupation with epistemological issues that had previously hampered them. The point was not to judge what was or was not scientific, but to attend to actual practices as they manifested themselves in particular settings. By the mid-1980s, historians were following sociologists into the study of small groups of scientists, into examination of practices in the laboratory, and – inspired especially by the work of Harry Collins at Bath – into studies of controversies.

At the same time, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985) pointed to the new historiographical possibilities that these sociological perspectives opened up. Appreciation of this book in the discipline at large was strangely delayed, but nobody in Cambridge had any doubt about its importance. Its influence can be traced in later contributions to historical research by members of the Cambridge contingent of those years, including (among others) Adrian Johns, Alison Winter, James Secord, Myles Jackson, Iwan Morus, Andrew Warwick, and Rob Iliffe. Among the implications of Shapin and Schaffer’s work was the strengthening of an existing trend toward the genre of micro-histories of limited spatial and temporal range, a departure from the large-scale macrohistories of science that had previously been the norm. The shift was understood to raise problems when it came to accounting for the widespread dispersion of scientific knowledge in society at large, which clearly extended beyond the boundaries of small groups of practitioners in particular laboratories. Actor-network theory, introduced by Bruno Latour and his collaborators in the 1980s, offered resources for dealing with this question of de-localization, while also raising substantial theoretical issues for SSK. It was soon clear that Latour’s concepts could help historians understand how science makes its way in the world at large, beyond the walls of laboratories. But it was equally clear that his outlook was likely to encounter resistance on several points, not least in proposing to treat the agency of inanimate objects as equivalent to that of human beings.

Making Natural Knowledge was actually written at some distance from Cambridge, after I had made the move to the United States in 1990. Relocation across the Atlantic had obliged me to recognize, within the American community of historians of science, rather different conceptions of the field from those evident in Britain, some of them potentially compatible and others clearly hostile. I intended the book to demonstrate the value of constructivist perspectives to as wide a range of historians as possible. I wanted to link sociological theory not just with the established social history of scientific institutions and communities, but also with the history of technology and research on national contexts, ethnicity, and colonialism. In addition, I wanted to make connections with work in interdisciplinary science studies, such as that on gender, rhetoric, and the relations between science and literature. Hence, the book begins with an exposition of basic sociological theory and then proceeds to articulate its uses by examining a set of general themes, such as the places where science is done or how it is embodied in language. The image underpinning this structure was that of a river, which originates at a single source and then meanders and widens as it flows to fertilize a broad plain.

When the book appeared, I was pleased to hear that so many people found it useful for undergraduate and graduate education in history of science. Several reviewers mentioned that they were using it for this purpose, and I collected personal testimonials from teachers and students at many institutions in several countries (Eddy 2004). In this respect, I believe the book reached its target audience. The historians who reviewed it usually suggested ways in which the contents could have been expanded, while acknowledging that any selection of case studies would inevitably be partial. I took these suggestions as evidence that the book succeeded in its other major aim: to stimulate working historians to reflect on the state of the field and the connections between empirical and theoretical aspects of our work. Most of the favorable reviews were by historians of science, which probably indicates the primary disciplinary orientation of the book’s readership. On the other hand, I know that it was also read in departments of history, philosophy, psychology, communication, and even economics. Some reviewers seemed to have been expecting a different kind of book altogether, perhaps showing the mismatch of expectations that interdisciplinary discourse often encounters. The potential of the book for this purpose was, however, excellently brought out by Ingemar Bohlin’s extensive review in Social Studies of Science (1999), which paid it the compliment of treating it as a contribution to sociological theory. Bohlin drew out some of the ways in which historical practice might have implications for basic theoretical concepts. He showed me how some of my own formulations of conceptual issues were too loose and demanded philosophical clarification. This is not the place to give his points the attention they deserve, but I welcome his endorsement of the idea that the passage between historical practice and sociological theory should be a two-way street.

When creating a narrative of developments in these fields, I did not hesitate to concede that alternative accounts were possible. One – albeit with a slightly different focus – has now been provided by John H. Zammito in his book, A Nice Derangement of Epistemes (2003). Zammito surveys recent theoretical developments in the philosophy and sociology of science from the point of view of an intellectual historian, giving close attention to the nuances of philosophical argument. His account is fearsomely well informed and largely sympathetic, but it culminates in a somewhat farcical denouement, ending with what he clearly sees as the fiasco of the science wars and the Sokal affair in the late 1990s. Zammito periodically breaks into his careful summaries of arguments with sharply ironic comments about the philosophical errors he believes have undermined the whole tradition of science studies since Quine and Kuhn, hastening its decline into crisis and derangement. I have learned a lot from this account, but I do not see the field’s recent history in these terms. I concur with Zammito’s estimate of Kuhn’s importance, and insist that subsequent scholars have reason to be grateful for his having detached historical and sociological studies from their subordination to normative epistemology. This gesture – however unintended its consequences were on Kuhn’s behalf – was ultimately a liberating one. Although it cut the connection with the traditional concerns of the philosophy of science, it opened the door to an unprecedented range of empirical studies of all forms of natural knowledge.

I will admit to having recoiled from some of the crudeness of the science wars, which provide the climax of Zammito’s book. I decided not to address them directly in my own. I certainly do not see Alan Sokal’s hoax – the planting of his spoof postmodernist article in the journal Social Text (1996) – as having sealed the fate of the whole constructivist tradition. As the frenzied confrontations of the 1990s recede, we should be able to judge their significance more clearly and make out why passions became so aroused over questions of truth and relativism. An article by the literary critic John Guillory marks a step in this direction (2002). Guillory usefully differentiates the kind of methodological relativism deployed in science studies from the more extreme formulations that have sometimes circulated in literary and cultural studies. Another step forward was taken by Jay Labinger and Harry Collins, in their collection The One Culture? (2001). In this even-tempered debate, constructivists were exonerated of the charge of hostility to scientific knowledge. It was agreed that they use relativism as a tool rather than as the expression of a totalizing skepticism. To bracket epistemological issues in relation to one’s object of study is not to disclaim all ambitions to produce reliable knowledge by one’s own investigations. Now that the dust of the science wars has started to settle, there are decent prospects for analysis of topics like this. A welcome development in this connection is the engagement of philosophers with questions raised by constructivism. Recent work by Ian Hacking, Arthur Fine, Michael Friedman, and others, indicates the territory on which philosophers and historians of science might reestablish common interests.

My own orientation is historiographical rather than philosophical. Thus, rather than providing a theoretical justification for constructivism, I situated it in an account of recent developments in scholarship. To philosophers, I suppose, this might seem like a circular argument, since my historical narrative was obviously shaped to emphasize the significance of constructivism. One might ask, how then could it serve to justify it? My response would be that historiography seemed the appropriate mode in which to address historians and students of history. Historiographical understanding is part of the reflexive self-consciousness of all varieties of history. We try to understand the development of our own perspectives as we try to understand everything else. We don’t expect to be able to secure the foundations of what we do by stepping outside the historical context in which we are situated.

Seven years on, the context is obviously different. Readers of the book are entitled to ask whether the constructivist perspective still points the way forward. It has been suggested that the moment of constructivism is over, the links between historical inquiry and sociological theory sundered or at least weakened. Some commentators have suggested that constructivism has its limits as a toolkit for historians, as Robert Kohler did in his generally positive review of my book (1999). Without denying that this might be so, let me emphasize that in fact I argued that historical practice has extended and revised the constructivist perspective as it has put it to use. Historians are always likely to be eclectic in their choice of tools, and I acknowledged this by suggesting that constructivism be viewed as complementary to a range of other approaches. In this spirit, I discussed Foucault’s writings on discipline, notions of identity and self-fashioning, work on rhetoric and hermeneutics, and the historian’s perennial concern with narrative – none of them standard topics in SSK, but all of them relevant, I suggested, for historians working out how to make use of constructivism.

This is why I feel a new edition of the book is warranted. Constructivism may have lost some of the bloom of its early promise, but it remains indispensable amidst the diversity of current historiographical approaches. In terms of manifestos and programs, it may have become less visible, but it still informs much historical scholarship at the level of tacit assumptions, qualified though these are by the influence of other approaches. Indeed, precisely because of its diminished visibility, it seems worthwhile to re-articulate its fundamental principles and trace the lines of its influence.

Let me give two examples of areas of historical inquiry that have developed considerably in recent years, in both of which the constructivist legacy can be discerned. The first is global in its ambitions, the second deals with individuals. Both reflect a willingness among historians of science to adjust their focus to analyze phenomena at a range of different scales. The first addresses issues of large-scale social structures and patterns of domination, which were overlooked by constructivism in the era of SSK. The second focuses on the complexities of individual identities and their formation in particular historical contexts, themes that were similarly absent from older constructivist studies. In both cases, scholars have been drawing upon theoretical resources – respectively, postcolonial studies and gender studies – that have inspired them to exploit new empirical materials. For some at least, personal and political values are more explicitly invested in these kinds of inquiry than was the case in classical constructivism, which was indeed called into question in some quarters for lacking this element of critique.

To take the first area: scholars studying the role of science and technology in the era of European global dominance have made some use of Latour’s ideas of networks. But they have also modified them, as they have called into question traditional narratives of the expansion of Western influence. For example, detailed analyses have emerged of the extension of scientific and technical systems as aspects of colonization and imperialism. The role of mapmaking in the British domination of India, for example, has been charted by Matthew Edney (1997). Others have recounted the histories of tropical medicine and epidemiology, of climatology and natural history, and their roles in colonial power structures from India to Ireland. Unlike the old stories of progress and modernization, these works do not assume that scientific knowledge travels without effort or resistance across a smooth terrain. Rather, they stress the considerable labor involved in the extension of natural knowledge and its susceptibility to cultural variation. The extension of networks of knowledge and power is shown to have confronted countervailing forces of resistance. Other studies have been devoted specifically to these counterforces. Some of them stress the stubborn localism of cultural formations, even among people who have been enrolled in international research communities, such as physicists in contemporary Japan or India. Some chart appropriations of Western science and technology to indigenous uses, or the involvement of non-European peoples in the co-production of scientific knowledge. Others describe unexpected reversals of traffic from the periphery to the center of research, such as Richard Grove’s account of the forging of an environmental consciousness in the colonial outposts of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British empire (1995). The narratives of localism, appropriation, and reverse colonialism demand a place in contemporary accounts of global science and technology; they complement histories that work from the imperial center outward. The global reach of Western science comes to appear not as a result of its inherent universality, but as a patchy and insecure accomplishment, dependent on the circulation of artifacts and the reproduction of practices, challenged and resisted at many points.

The models implicit in these historical accounts have something in common with Latour’s. They stress that the de-localization of scientific knowledge requires the mobilization of artifacts through a supportive infrastructure or network. The Latourian themes of standardization and metrology are evident in much of the work on meteorology and cartography, for example; the centralization of what Latour calls immutable mobiles is commonly emphasized in histories of natural history. But, as I noted in my book, Latour’s model often appears too rigid to historians in its tendency to stress expansion of networks from a point of origin, suggesting that knowledge always diffuses from a single site. Constructivists have prioritized the laboratory, but scientific knowledge has also been found to have been made in the field and the forest, on ships at sea and on mountaintops, in the course of exploration and trade. At the same time that they have tried to embed Latour’s networks in their political and social contexts, historians have detected resistances and reversals. They talk not just of networks but also of trading zones and patterns of circulation. The constructivist understanding that de-localization is the product of labor and the result of displacing people and things remains crucial, but Latour’s social ontology has been significantly modified in the course of historians’ practice (Livingstone 2003).

The same general point can be made in relation to the second – apparently quite different – area of study. Scientific practitioners as individuals remain of interest to many historians, but the form in which that interest is expressed has been affected in many cases by the legacy of constructivist ideas. Even the greatest scientists are now viewed as embedded in a social context, which is seen as having shaped even the most intimate aspects of their characters. A focus on the self-fashioning of the scientific practitioner has taken hold in studies of both the early-modern and modern periods. The constructivist influence is felt in the insistence that character-formation is a public process, the making of what has been called a scientific persona (Daston and Sibum 2003). At certain points, this intersects with an analysis of scientific practitioners in terms of gender, though that obviously has roots quite distinct from constructivism. Historians have shown how the identity of the natural philosopher or scientist – a predominantly masculine identity through most of its history – has been formed from a variety of cultural resources, including those used to shape masculine identity in society at large. For example, early-modern natural philosophers often engaged in rigorous regimes of care of the self, hoping to regulate their passions and keep them from interfering with the workings of their minds. This was thought of – by men at least – as a specifically masculine skill, of which women were inherently less capable. The prejudice was reflected in imagery in which the passions themselves were accorded female gender, while the intellect was viewed as male. Practices of care of the self included fasting, self-medication, and sexual abstinence, employed by such individuals as Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. These techniques were both deeply intimate and socially consequential, contributing to the formation of the persona of the man of science and to the exclusion of women from scientific institutions (Golinski 2002).

The constructivist approach to the constitution of individual identity has also influenced our conception of one of the most important roles played by scientific practitioners: that of the author. Again, echoes of Latour’s claims can be heard in the suggestion that authorship is a product of distributed agency, that it is constructed by processes that extend beyond a single person. The creation of the category of author, and its use to assign texts to a particular individual, have been described as social processes. The work of scholars including Roger Chartier (1989) and Adrian Johns (1998) has demonstrated how the modern notion of the author took form during the first centuries of print culture. Authors were products of a complex of legal rights and censorship restrictions, notions of property and propriety. Printers and booksellers played significant roles in composing texts and assigning their authorship (Biagioli and Galison 2003; Frasca-Spada and Jardine 2000). And, of course, the actual printing of a book did not end the social processes by which its authorship was constituted and its meaning decided, as James Secord (2001) has demonstrated in relation to Robert Chambers’s anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Printed books seem like good candidates for Latour’s immutable mobiles, but it seems that their immutability is neither absolute nor inherent in them. Rather, they are stabilized within certain contexts of law, trade, and government. The conception of authorship that allows us to nominate a particular individual as the originator of a book and the source of its meaning is the product of this history.

For someone with experience of writing a book, the implications of this are chastening. Thinking about how these findings apply to my own work, I am forcefully reminded that its meaning is out of my hands. I have argued that the legacy of constructivism remains of key importance to the discipline of history of science in all of its current diversity. I have tried to provide a historiographical narrative that uses constructivism as its central theme, linking the past of the discipline with its present state and possible futures. But the constructivist perspective also clearly implies that the utility and meaning of my book will be determined by its readers. Its significance will emerge from the workings of a hermeneutic circle wider than I can even anticipate. The first edition generated a range of responses that have already advanced this process, and I hope for more with the second.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Jim Secord for the stimulus of his keynote address at the Fifth British-North American History of Science Conference, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 5–7 August 2004. I also appreciate the responses to a draft of this foreword by the participants at the International Summer-School in History of Science, at Bologna, 30 August–3 September 2004. And I am grateful to Rebecca Herzig, Dominique Pestre, and Mary Terrall for conversations that helped me clarify what I wanted to say.

REFERENCES

Biagioli, Mario, and Peter Galison, eds. 2003. Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science. New York: Routledge.

Bohlin, Ingemar. 1999. Making History. Social Studies of Science 29:459–80.

Chartier, Roger, ed. 1989. The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early-Modern Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Daston, Lorraine, and H. Otto Sibum. 2003. Introduction: Scientific Personae and their Histories Science in Context 16:1–8.

Eddy, M. D. 2004. Fallible or Inerrant? A Belated Review of the ‘Constructivists’ Bible’. British Journal for the History of Science 37:93–98.

Edney, Matthew H. 1997. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Frasca-Spada, Marina, and Nicholas Jardine, eds. 2000. Books and the Sciences in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Golinski, Jan. 2002. The Care of the Self and the Masculine Birth of Science. History of Science 40:125–45.

Grove, Richard. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guillory, John. 2002. The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 470–508.

Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kohler, Robert. 1999. The Constructivists’ Toolkit. Isis 90:329–31.

Labinger, Jay A., and Harry Collins, eds. 2001. The One Culture?: A Conversation about Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Livingstone, David N. 2003. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Secord, James A. 2001. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sokal, Alan. 1996. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. Social Text 46–47 (Spring–Summer 1996): 217–52.

Zammito, John H. 2003. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Preface

This is a book of uncertain genre, which seems to call for more than the usual amount of prefatory explanation. What follows is a kind of extended historiographical essay, a review of recent writing about the history of the sciences. It is not, however, a comprehensive survey; rather, it is selective and written from a clearly defined point of view. My aim is to explore the implications of what I have called a constructivist view of science for the question of how its history is to be written. By a constructivist outlook, I mean that which regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature. This view of science has attained widespread currency in recent years, although expressed in a variety of different idioms with varying degrees of explicitness. For historians, as for others, it brings in its train a series of questions: What does such an outlook imply for the history of the sciences? What issues does it open up for historical investigation? What new sources does it suggest historians might be able to use? What questions are posed to history by the constructivist perspective, and in what ways might historical research illuminate, extend, or challenge it?

In proposing answers to these questions, I shall give an avowedly partial survey of recent historical work, choosing to emphasize those studies that seem to draw strength from – or to develop implications of – constructivism. I shall argue that identification of this theme provides a way to draw together much (though not by any means all) of what historians of science have been doing in the last few years. To make the general tendency explicit helps us to make sense of what has been done and point out directions in which we might go from here. My orientation toward this program is sympathetic, but not entirely uncritical. I shall point out ways in which some of its foundational claims have been questioned, and original approaches modified, as the work has unfolded. It should nonetheless be clear that I think constructivism is worthy of serious attention from those who are interested in the history of the sciences, and that historical study has contributed, and can contribute further, to its development.

Within the limits of my project, I have tried to be flexible in my choice of historical research that can be shown to be relevant to it. Some of the authors whose work I have mentioned may not share my view of their location in the current historiographical landscape. Other mappings of the field would certainly be possible. The value of the view I offer has to be judged by its utility. I have sketched a review of recent historical research that tries to bring into focus some of the most imaginative work of the last few years and to chart a path ahead. In thinking of those who might profit from reading the pages that follow, I have aimed to make them accessible, say, to senior undergraduates who have already studied a little history of science and want to undertake more advanced work. For graduate students in the subject, I offer a guide to some important recent research and a scheme for making sense of its overall direction. It is not, of course, a substitute for study of the monographs and journal articles themselves, but it will help students locate studies that pursue certain methodological themes, and make use of them. I believe the book can serve the same purpose for academic readers in other disciplines, such as general history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and cultural studies. Readers with a limited amount of time to devote to the history of science will, I hope, be persuaded that they can learn something valuable in relation to their own concerns. Finally, for practitioners of the history of science itself, I offer an opportunity to pause for reflection, to lift our eyes from our immediate research preoccupations and think about where our subject is going. Not everyone will agree with my view about this – perhaps nobody will agree about everything – but we can benefit, I think, from some discussion of these general issues.

I have chosen to trace the roots of the constructivist outlook to the philosophical arguments of the 1960s and 1970s, surrounding Thomas Kuhn’s work and that of the succeeding Strong Programme and the sociology of scientific knowledge. As I shall explain in the Introduction and in Chapter 1, I see the significance of this work as lying in its break with the project of epistemological validation of scientific knowledge – a break that brought in its train a series of novel techniques for the study of science as an aspect of human culture. I propose, in other