Scientific authority & twentieth-century America

the long version

In Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America Ronald G. Walters brings together a distinguished group of contributors to reflect - often critically - on scientific and medical claims to moral, social, and political authority. Writing from a variety of perspectives - intellectual history, social history, feminist theory, philosophy, medical history, political theory, and visual analysis - the authors demonstrate that science no longer belongs exclusively to its practitioners or to any particular discipline. Situating science within other communities of discourse, they show how scientific language and metaphor spread outward into new realms, including popular culture, where they came into conflict with other languages of authority. They also show how medical authority shapes social behavior, how corporate agricultural science has displaced farmers' knowledge, and how popular science enters the collective imagination. Like such theorists as Gramsci and Foucault, the authors search out the subtle workings of power - often deeply hidden in language, culture, and the minutiae of social practice - to arrive at a demystification of claims to universal truth without going to the relativistic extreme of some modern critics of science.