When comes to the requirement to participate the scientists’ march on Washington, the only requirement on the organizing website is "Anyone who believes in empirical science". “Believing in empirical science” enables you to join this politicalized scientists’ gathering but definitely cannot guarantee that you become a scientist, based on this week’s readings. To become a scientist, you have to learn and practice socially constructed knowledge gradually through particular academic training that are divided into different stages which also serve as societal embodiments. Traweek and Good illustrate the disciplinary differences on the one hand in terms of the framing of knowledge but show the similarities between becoming a doctor and a physicist in terms of enduring or taking advantage of the political-economic relationship embodied in the field.
Good regards medicine as “a formative process” (60) “a medium of experience”(86). This “symbolic formation” (70), is gradually achieved by authorized formative activities including the medical gaze, conversation, and writing of the patient’s medical history, during which patient is both an object and a project of medical practice. I like Good’s interpretation of write up that it is a formative practice which involves with conventionality and arbitrariness and empowers students or physicians to develop conversations with patients and finally construct the patient, contracting the conversations between the doctor and the female patient in The Woman Beneath the Skin. And this formative way of write up just came out within a century in terms of the narrative and the use of phrases.
Traweek presents a descriptive piece of how to become an American particle physicist. The processes and stages in his article, however, look-alike those in other subjects even like humanities, which of course indicates that all the disciplines are regulated in a scientific way, to some extent. Two parts in Traweek’s article drew my attention, the Koza in Japan and the impact of gendered narrative within scientists.
Gusterson successfully destroys all the stereotypes about nuclear-weapons scientists in his short paper, that nuclear-weapons scientists are political conservatives, are facing the moral dilemma during work, and are working barely for economic pursuit. Interviewees in the national laboratory all appear being liberal, feeling confidence about their contribution while remaining a little bit of helpless, and loving their “vocation”. The way Gusterson frames these scientists and contextualizes their behavior in a historically way, leads to a question that what makes these scientists unique because of their expertise when compared with President Reagan?
Coming back to the notion of “empirical science”, it goes in accord with Weber’s argument that “scientific work is chained to the course of progress” and “Scientific progress is the most important fraction of the process of intellectualization”. Weber asks and answers the question of the meaning of scientific and being a scientist, by tracing back the history of science or nature to enlightenment period. He accentuates the structural differences with science itself when comes the relationship between scientific work and presuppositions, which leads to the comparison between natural science and medicine, or even biology. When he mentions the relationship between science and religion, what sprung to my mind was when the Pope recognized the evolution theory. Science seems to become a more powerful religion itself.
Finally, we reach an agreement that science is politically, socially, and culturally constructed, the question is does such agreement might cost the cultural authority of science, when people like DJT claims the climate change is a hoax and drives scientists to march in Washington?
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