330 Thurs
in fi lms, or on the Internet. Appeal to the new technologies available in
everything from electronic devices to hair products has also become a
staple of advertising. Likewise, modern intellectuals routinely make use
of technological metaphors in analyzing the everyday, including allusions
to systems, platforms, construction, or “technologies” as general methods
of working. “Technoscience” has achieved widespread popularity among
sociologists of science to refer to the intertwined production of abstract
knowledge and material devices. We will see whether a century or two
from now, coming generations will replace reference to science entirely
with a term that strikes them as more relevant, powerful, and meaning-
ful, whether technoscience or something more fanciful and exotic such
as “techknowledgy.”
Thus, the progress of boundedness has been a mixed blessing for
science as well as scientifi c method. The same polls that have revealed
Americans’ respect for science have found that the average citizen’s grasp
of scientifi c knowledge is often fairly feeble.^83 Science possesses, accord-
ing to some observers, “awesome authority” and is respected “as a kind
of religion.”^84 And yet, a large segment of the American public appears
“merely uninterested in, or perhaps bored by” it.^85 Unable to explain simi-
larly divergent indications, zoologist and popularizer Richard Dawkins
exclaimed that it was “baffl ingly paradoxical that the United States is by
far the world’s leading scientifi c nation while simultaneously housing the
most scientifi cally illiterate populace outside the Third World.”^86 A wide
array of scientists, educators, and popularizers have explained this para-
dox in terms of the infl uence of extra- or anti- scientifi c factors, such as
religion, political extremism, or superstition; the barrier of attention spans
ruthlessly shortened by exposure to entertainment- driven mass media;
the failure of those responsible for popularizing scientifi c knowledge to
communicate the essence of “real” science; and the spread of fear or even
resentment of scientifi c power. Yet the subtle place of science in America
has even more directly followed from the ways Americans learned to talk
about it and from its fundamental and inevitable multivalence as a sig-
nifi cant cultural keyword.NOTES
- Howard D. Roelofs, “In Search of Scientifi c Method,” American Scholar (Summer
1940): 296–304. - The three databases used for the fi gures in this chapter include the catalog of