The Allure of a "Truly General Theory of Knowledge and Science": A Comment on Pels

Abstract

in danger of being compromised by a series of at its theoretical core. These deficiencies he attributes to the movement's legacy in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Pels associates Wittgenstein's reflections on grammar and logic with an attitude of valuefree which integrates a strongly antiepistemological and antinormativistic temper within a radically contextualist and descriptivist methodology (p. 32). This general analytical temperament is then identified with the emphasis in recent studies upon the local constructive achievements of working scientists and the consequent foregrounding of ethnographically detailed descriptions of laboratory practice. According to Pels, although these microstudies have demonstrated time and again the intertwining of scientific with practical reasoning, the historicity of scientific experiments, and the social constitution of scientific results, they have so far failed to deliver a truly general theory of knowledge and science. Pels's new agenda aims to move studies out of the lab by integrating their (presumably micro) concerns with textuality, representation, and technical craft within a (presumably more macro) program of Mannheim-inspired, explanatory theorizing. Because so much of Pels's argument rests on the tacit claim that the development of general theory constitutes the natural telos of all sociological inquiry, and because I believe that Wittgenstein and his interpreters have laid the groundwork (several times over) for the decisive refutation of this claim, I have organized my remarks around the issue of why the quest for a truly general theory of knowledge and science persists, especially in such close quarters as Pels's serious and well-informed treatment of contemporary studies. The answer to this question is intertwined with foundational questions not only in sociology and social theory, but in philosophy, linguistics, and the cognitive, natural, and mathematical sciences as well. Indeed, if Hacking (1983) is correct, the pursuit of truth via the medium of explanatory theorizing not only forms the dominant regime of thought throughout the moder period, it also provides the prevailing historical matrix for comprehending the nature of those developments. The discourse of contemporary studies has been shaped in no small part by an interest in questioning the assumption, still present in Kuhnian historiography, that scientific developments are linked directly to developments in explanatory theory. Contrary to Pels, who attributes the turn toward ethnography in studies to the failures of radical relativism and the consequent retreat from the responsibilities of normative theorizing, I argue that the microstudies being done by sociologists and historians of are part of a broad-based, epistemological critique