The Fabrication of Facts: Toward a Microsociology of Scientific Knowledge

Dorothy Sayers's analogy between cows and facts hides both a philosophical and a methodological point. Since both will guide us. throughout this essay, I will begin by discussing each at some length. The· philosophical point is that facts are not something we can take for granted or think of as the solid rock upon which knowledge h built. Their nature is problematic so much so that confrontation often scares them off The methodological point is that the confrontation has to be long, hard, and direct, like cows, facts have become sufficiently domesticated to deal with run-of-the-mill events. That facts are problematic has been known to philosophers for some time. The quest for the nature of facts. ....... .the core or the quest for the nature of knowledge is a major reason for the proliferation of epislemological theories. The key dispute is where to locate the problem and how to approach it. Kant, for example, saw the quest as a search for the conditions of possibility of pure science, and found his answer in the categorical make-up of the human, mind. Recent theories of knowledge have tended to transfer the problem from a knowing subject's constitution of the factual to a variety of other locations. Most influential, perhaps, is the shift toward the logic of scientific inference advocated by what some have called objectivism. l To the objecUvlst, the world is composed of facts and the goal of knowledge is to provide a literal account of what the world is like. The empirical laws and theoretical propositions of science are designed to provide those literal descriptions. Tfthe knowledge of scientific accounts is reality represented by science, an inquiry into the nature of the real becomes an investigation of