Abstract
Most of us are introduced to scientific knowledge by our schoolteachers, in classrooms and laboratories, using textbooks and lab manuals as guides. As beginners, we believe that the goal of science is “the growth of knowledge through new scientific discoveries.”1 We believe that the methods of science are the most rational that human kind has devised for investigating the world and that (practiced properly) they yield objective knowledge. It seems to us that because there is only one reality, there can be only one real truth, and that science describes those facts. Our teachers and our texts affirm this authority of scientific specialists.
Research for this paper was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the Mellon Foundation grant to the Smith College Project on Women and Social Change. I am very grateful for criticism or advice I received from Howard Becker, Donna Haraway, Arlene Daniels, Sandra Harding, Vicky Spelman, Helen Longino, Kay Warren, Noretta Koertge, Arnold Feldman, and members of two seminars I taught in the Northwestern University sociology department, Fall 1980. I have previously published work under the name Kathryn Pyne Parsons.
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Addelson, K.P. (2003). The Man of Professional Wisdom. In: Harding, S., Hintikka, M.B. (eds) Discovering Reality. Synthese Library, vol 161. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0101-4_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0101-4_10
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