Alex WellersteinVerified account

And the idea that you can separate the "scientific method" from "human activity." Science is a form of human activity. If you study science and scientists (which Audra and I and many others do), this becomes quite obvious — and what else could it honestly be?

Yes but of course since is also a noun, not just a verb. I see separation because the scientific method is not just an activity, it's an idea. An idea can be separate from activities and intentions.

The sense in which a bridge is just a pile of concrete is meaningless. You can call it that, but you’re not talking about a bridge. It you want a bridge, you need to take the politics on board. Same for science. Ideas must be instantiated by actions or they’re meaningless too.

All along I’ve agreed that the human activities around the bridge are political but callling the bridge itself political is what’s meaningless. It’s an inanimate object.

That move is what people are calling out. If you a) cut a bridge completely out of its context, and b) reduce it to materials, you can no longer say anything meaningful about that bridge qua bridge. Those political systems are part of what we all mean when we talk about bridges.

I think you can still say something about it when it’s taken out of context. Imagine a bridge on Mars. Still has some sort of meaning although not much use.

I just want to push on one thing here: You can't really remove things from context. That's a key lesson from history. Context is the water that history swims in. It's always there, even if it changes.

"Technology" is essentially defined by having a context, is another way to think about it; it is defined by its alteration of context, a transformation. (This is essentially Heidegger's argument in "The Question Concerning Technology," which I find very useful.)

But it's the human activities around the object that result in political implications; The nuclear weapon is still just an assortment of materials. As far as an example without political implications: imagine a bomb constructed on an exoplanet by a lone individual.