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SCIENCE AND OTHER COMMON NOUNS: FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF ANTI‐ESSENTIALISM
Author(s) -
Stump J. B.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
zygon®
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.222
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-9744
pISSN - 0591-2385
DOI - 10.1111/zygo.12622
Subject(s) - essentialism , epistemology , noun , sociology , term (time) , position (finance) , linguistics , philosophy , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , economics
The term “science” is a common noun that is used to designate a whole range of activities. If Reeves is right—and I think he is—that there is no essence to these activities that allows them to be objectively identified and demarcated from nonscience, then what qualifies as science is determined by communities. It becomes much more difficult on this antiessentialism position to identify and dismiss pseudo‐science. I suggest we might find a way forward, though, by engaging a philosophical tradition that has largely been neglected in English‐speaking science and religion studies, and by articulating a theory of consensus along the lines of Oreskes (2019).