Date: Sun, 06 Sep 1998 14:49:48 -0600
From: Wynship Hillier <whi-AT-wenet.net>
Subject: Re: Foucauldian examinations of The Market


malgosia askanas wrote:

> Well, I think it is a rather unlikely scenario to imagine that the
> people doing "mainstream" science or technology would read these books,
> suddenly learn from them the true nature of their enterprise -- as if they
> didn't know it all along -- hang their heads in shame, and from then on
> walk in light.  But how do you know that there are not people who try
> to do science and technology differently?  Where are you looking?  Who
> are you talking to?  What are your sources of information about these things?

Well, I've worked in the industry for over a decade.  I've studied at a top school and talked with many reserach
professors in the sciences, business, and science policy, as well as scores of graduates students in engineering,
computer science, technology policy, science and technology studies...  I have friends in industry.  I have travelled
widely, attended conferences.  I've interviewed vice-presidents of fortune 100 firms.  I run a technology consultancy,
as you know. etc.

You write as if books like _Higher Superstition_ -- basically a backlash against science studies written by scientists
-- were never written, and that there is no sustained resistance to these ideas populated entirely by scientists and
engineers who see it as a threat.  This is a debate, to put it very politely, that has been going on for over half a
decade.  I think they really don't "know it all along", and they think so as well!  Logical positivism is the
epistemology of choice among scientists today and always.  Look at science studies people, and you will find historians,
philosophers, sociologists...liberal-arts types, but no scientists, no engineers.

Donna Haraway writes, in her recent book, of "armies" of engineers who are active in critical science studies, but I
find them rather elusive.  I must be totally out of it.