Conclusion
This chapter has noted the shift, closely associated with the influence of the French tradition of historical epistemology, and the work of Thomas Kuhn, away from the prevailing empiricist orthodoxy in the philosophy of science.
‘Post-empiricist' philosophers, historians and sociologists of science have emphasized the extent to which scientific knowledge-claims are shaped, even constituted by the moral values, prevailing interests or cultural contexts of their production. This has frequently given rise to scepticism about the special status generally claimed for scientific knowledge, and to various forms of relativism in the theory of knowledge. In the absence of any ‘direct, or unmediated, access to reality, on the basis of which to compare rival accounts of it, one set of beliefs is as good or bad as any other.But if we take as a methodological requirement that all scientific knowledge-claims are to be treated with equal scepticism, then what about the knowledge-claims made by the sociologists and historians of science themselves? This is the key question posed by Callon, Latour, Woolgar and the other advocates of the reflexive turn in science studies. But such radical scepticism is both self-contradictory and unwarranted. As our analysis of Latour's work showed, his attempt to dispense with the concepts of ‘nature' and ‘society' implicitly presupposed them, and his denunciation of reason itself employs reason (if, ultimately, less than convincing reasons!). Such radical scepticism is unwarranted since, though we may lack unmediated access to external reality, we do have mediated access to it. From our earliest attempts to survive and make sense of the world we encounter mismatches between our hopes, desires and expectations, on the one hand, and what reality (social and/or natural) actually does - the experiences of frustrated desire, disappointed expectation, failed ambition and so on repeatedly emphasize the difference between knowledge and wishful thinking. Our capacity to learn is testimony to the liability of our understanding to be questioned and revised in the face of the way the world is - social constructionists are right to emphasize that this questioning and revision take place within the sphere of human communication and discourse, but what provokes and necessitates them is our practical engagement with a world which is only partly made up of communication and discourse.
The feminist view ofscientific objectivity advanced by Keller adds force to these notions, emphasizing the encounter with the ‘otherness' of the objects of scientific knowledge as an indispensable dimension of scientific practice. The critical realist understanding of both social and natural science is also consonant with these considerations. We will return to a fuller discussion of recent arguments advanced by feminists and critical realists in Chapters 8 and 9, respectively.