What makes something social
• Society is the result of people, and institutions, interacting with one another. It is a sort of epiphenomena of these individuals.
• Society in turn shapes the people and institutions that form it.
• Most people experience society as though it were an external force acting upon them.
• The “effects” of society operate through the vague mechanism of social norms. Norms “tell” us what we should and should not do, what we should and should not think. But they are not rational – or rather, their rationality is not universal.
• Norms produce the values that we use in interacting with others. They produce many of our core ideas – such as ideas of the place of class, the role gender, the meaning of race, the function of justice, the importance of objectivity, the criterion of truth, the significance of evidence, etc
Technoscience is social
•In the simplest sense, technoscience is the product of people, and people are social. But it is possible to claim something much stronger than this:
• The social norms of technoscientists affects where they will look, what they will see and what they will say about it. (Their worldview.)
• Technocientists’ norms are shaped by their discipline. (Basic scientific concepts mean different things in different fields.)
• Professional norms affect the value that technoscientists place on judgments.
• We find disagreement about what counts as science across time and from place to place.
• The development of technology is highly social, and depends on the manipulation of social norms.
What makes something political
• Politics is about control. It is the result of the distribution and utilization of power in our societies.
• Political activity functions by employing various structures, resources and discourses in order to consolidate and wield power.
• Political structures are formal and informal “rules of play.” Formal rules are things like laws and procedures, informal rules are things like social norms.
• There are many kinds of political resources: natural resources, money, military force, knowledge, access, charm, etc.
• Politics uses discourses to control what is sayable and what is not, to control the way in which something is said and the framework of what is discussed. Dominant discourses lend a kind of cultural authority. There is, obviously, no clear boundary between the social and the political.
• Society is the result of people, and institutions, interacting with one another. It is a sort of epiphenomena of these individuals.
• Society in turn shapes the people and institutions that form it.
• Most people experience society as though it were an external force acting upon them.
• The “effects” of society operate through the vague mechanism of social norms. Norms “tell” us what we should and should not do, what we should and should not think. But they are not rational – or rather, their rationality is not universal.
• Norms produce the values that we use in interacting with others. They produce many of our core ideas – such as ideas of the place of class, the role gender, the meaning of race, the function of justice, the importance of objectivity, the criterion of truth, the significance of evidence, etc
Technoscience is social
•In the simplest sense, technoscience is the product of people, and people are social. But it is possible to claim something much stronger than this:
• The social norms of technoscientists affects where they will look, what they will see and what they will say about it. (Their worldview.)
• Technocientists’ norms are shaped by their discipline. (Basic scientific concepts mean different things in different fields.)
• Professional norms affect the value that technoscientists place on judgments.
• We find disagreement about what counts as science across time and from place to place.
• The development of technology is highly social, and depends on the manipulation of social norms.
What makes something political
• Politics is about control. It is the result of the distribution and utilization of power in our societies.
• Political activity functions by employing various structures, resources and discourses in order to consolidate and wield power.
• Political structures are formal and informal “rules of play.” Formal rules are things like laws and procedures, informal rules are things like social norms.
• There are many kinds of political resources: natural resources, money, military force, knowledge, access, charm, etc.
• Politics uses discourses to control what is sayable and what is not, to control the way in which something is said and the framework of what is discussed. Dominant discourses lend a kind of cultural authority. There is, obviously, no clear boundary between the social and the political.
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