Disciplinary Boundaries and the Rhetoric of the Social Sciences

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the rhetorical character of disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences provides an especially good context for examining the embodiment of knowledge as a source of worldly power, a topic typically neglected by epistemologists and philosophers of science, who still tend to think of knowledge as a politically indifferent or disembodied phenomenon. I start with what seems to be a technical problem in the philosophy of science, namely, whether it is possible to demarcate criteria for demarcating science from nonscience. Recent philosophers have despaired of finding such meta-boundaries and as a result have begun to call into question the very identity of the philosophy of science. Against this line of reasoning, I argue that the failure of the demarcation project only shows that attempts to study science scientifically, as the philosophers have wanted to do, tend to result in science deconstructing its identity. But, clearly, the epistemic authority of science has worked to block such self-deconstructive moves in the normal course of inquiry. How? I propose a strategy for addressing this question, namely, to examine how science exercises worldly power by rhetorically drawing our attention to the fact that scientific knowledge repre-