1. Science: Its own Master?
Until the relatively recent emergence of the study of science as a field of scientific research and perhaps since the triumph of the French Revolution’s rational principles, the questions of truth, knowledge and reason have been entrusted to the care of the ‘nobility of science’, the princes, duchesses and counts donned in their uniform mantles of ‘white lab coats’ and the scholastic decrees issued by these scientists have been accepted as the correct and the only plausible interpretations of the world surrounding us. With the appearance of Thomas S. Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962, a revolution of its own swept through Francis Bacon’s fort of ‘una scientia universalis’ (Bacon), fracturing it into the myriad fragments of postmodern thought and inquiry. Latour – fortress of sociology? The objectivity of science and its established principles are today in the impregnable ivory towers of the scientists themselves being continually evaporated though it is still feasible to say what Robert Merton stated in 1970, that “even now, there are scholars who would argue that science goes its own way, unaffected by changes in the environing social structure” (Merton 1973: 176).
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