But these contextual judgements can be accepted without it following that the core activities of scientists are somehow unsuccessful in arriving at the most reliable way of analysing nature we can manage. There is something very odd indeed in the belief that in looking, say, for causal laws or a unified theory, or in asking whether atoms really do obey the laws of quantum mechanics, the activities of scientists are somehow inherently ‘bourgeois’ or ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘masculinist’, or even ‘militarist’. This is, partly at least, because the truths of science, rather than those of politics or
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