preview

The Is The Science Lying Behind

Better Essays

Endorsement is used everywhere from the recognition of a product to the recognition of a person. Inseparable with endorsement is the science lying behind. For decades, science has been the unbiased criteria of being. In a way, science has grown into such a fetish that we hardly remember the human’s role in creating it. However, conducted and interpreted by socially biased human beings, science, far from liberating people from dominance and hierarchy through “value-free truth,” reinforces the current power structure and legitimates domination of both nature and people. On one hand, science is used as a social control by the people in power; on the other hand, every individual is subject to the society, affected by and contributing to …show more content…

What’s more, because of the separation of nature and society by modern people (Latour), science has been used as tools of control without the general public realizing it. As Haraway puts it, “we have allowed the theory of the body politic to be split in such a way that natural knowledge is reincorporated covertly into techniques of social control instead of being transformed into sciences of liberation (Haraway).” We idealize science and the people in power can utilize it to control. Secondly, even if scientists intend to be neutral when conducting science, the society constrains science from being “value-free”. Power, as we talk about it, usually takes the form of the law through which domination is exerted by one group over another (Foucault). However, Foucault constructed an analytics of power “that no longer takes law as a model a code;” rather, power is everywhere and involves every person. As is described in his book The History of Sexuality, “the omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another (Foucault).” In this case, domination is no longer constant but a dynamic interaction between people and events. Every person possesses preexisting ideas of domination in our society, and reinforces domination through interactions. Science, consisting of

Get Access