The Fabrication of Facts: Toward a Microsociology of Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

The etymology of the word fact reveals it as "that which has been made," in accord with its root in the Latin facere, to make. Yet we tend to think of scientific facts as given entities, not fabrications. Nature is not to be found in the laboratory, unless it is defined as the product of scientific work. The inadequacy of those concepts associated with the descriptive interpretation of scientific inquiry is not surprising, given the framework in which they developed. The scientific product can be seen as structured in terms of several orders or levels of selectivity. This complexity of scientific constructions with regard to the selections they incorporate is interesting because it suggests that scientific products are unlikely to be reproduced in the same way under different circumstances. The scientific community lends crucial weight to the context of discovery in response to a knowledge claim.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.