tibbets

71

For this writer, the salient issue
is the extent to which realist and constructivist elements are
mutually at work and interactive in the design and utilization of
RDs in scientic contexts.

between RD and RO and the
extent to which criteria of accuracy are socially contingent.

PRAXIS!
I fully concur with Barnes’ account of symbolic representations
c 9 § (wiring diagrams, maps, etc.) as analogous to techniques rather
than as merely objects of passive contemplation. Any account
which divorces RDs from the contexts of praxis that define and
concretely situate such devices clearly ignores a salient — perhaps
the salient — inuence on the construction and utility of RDs.



Regarding such contingencies of theory, interpretation and
apparatus on what we take to constitute reality and facticity,
Knorr-Cetina (1981 :33) seriously questions whether
the problem of facticity is to be located in the correspondence
between the [cognitive] products of science and the external
world The process of scientific enquiry ignored by objectivism
(its “context of discovery”) is itself the system of reference
which makes the objectication of reality possible
Thus, the problem of facticity is as much a problem of the
constitution of the world through the logic of scientific procedure
as it is one of explanation and validation.
Consequently, Knorr-Cetina rejects any neat separation between
the context of discovery and the context of explanation.

80
 However, I do not
feel that the issue is resolved by such simplistic answers as, ‘Well,
it’s their approximation to reality that grounds their explanatory
and predictive utility!’ The problem here is the term ‘approximation.’
Once we seriously question the pictorial metaphor re.
the RD—RO relation, then have we said anything at all with such
locutions as, ‘approximation’ (correspondence) to reality?