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What is the Ultimate Question? Some Remarks in Defence of the Analysis of Scientific Discourse

As Tom Gieryn' is clearly aware, there is a tendency to oversimplify intellectual boundaries in the course of lively academic debate. No doubt he is right in suggesting that commentators have previously often used the term 'Mertonian' rather carelessly in devising a background within which the originality of their own work can become evident. It seems likely that we all characterize intellectual movements to which we do not belong in ways which seem bizarre to those named as insiders. Thus one of our immediate responses to his paper is: 'No, you've divided the field in quite the wrong way. The major division is between discourse analysis and everything else. In particular, it was extremely misleading to put our recent work on scientific discourse in the same category as the "relativists" or "constructivists"'. This response may itself seem bizarre to some people. But for those of us engaged in discourse analysis, this is the way the field appears. Because Gieryn does not appreciate or take notice of analytical or methodological differences which seem crucial to us, he combines his discussion of discourse analysis with that of quite dissimilar studies. Given the way in which he has organized his text to show that 'this kind of approach' fails to deal with such 'genuinely sociological phenomena' as power, institutions, and the like, it is appropriate for him to treat all studies which avoid this conventional terminology as equivalent for purposes of his exposition. But by mixing together such disparate studies, he produces a muddled and misleading account of discourse analysis as well as a confused and confusing appraisal. This would not matter too much under normal circumstances, where most interested parties would either have already read the relevant studies or could easily do so if they wished. But this case is different. For very little analysis of scientific discourse has yet appeared in print. Gieryn's criticisms