Alex WellersteinVerified account

(One can disagree with Latour and fact-constructivism, to be sure, but neither should be just dismissed. Latour has put more work into the question of 'what are facts, really?' than Kuhn ever did.)

I did find the author's eagerness to spar with Kuhn, instead of some more appropriate partners, odd.

I'll just say the piece reinforces some of my prejudices against philosophers and their approach to these issues (much less STS/HistSciMed/etc. scholarship).

I was surprised to see no reference to Shapin on truth, yeah?

The whole piece (I've gone over it more carefully) appears committed to the idea that somehow the answers to "does science get to truth?" is going to be found without looking closely at how science operates. Which gets at the core problem with it.

A charitable reading of this is as an implied disjunction & not a claim she's endorsing: [A] "If you think this is too radical, then here's a less radical alternative" and not [B] "This is too radical, here's a less radical alternative." [B] is dismissive, [A] isn't.

Historians seem to have a hard time with this piece as it ignores things like power, politics, contingency, etc. that are critical to how 'truth happens.' It seems too much to me like physicists' frictionless elephants.

I'll stick w. my def...science = "production of reliable knowledge about natural world" as each of those terms is open to inspection, has connections to the social world. But kudos to @aeonmag and @samhaselby for getting us all talking.

I tend to emphasize 'systematic' rather than 'reliable' in my definition, since I have a harder time getting past the 'reliable for what?' question (and lots of science is pretty hard to rely upon in lots of ways), but that's also my bias from focusing on theoretical science

reliable, durable, systemic...I think we're all groping toward the same thing. But the "reliable for what and who?" opens the door to all sorts of goodies.