crude approximations at some time in the future.^10 This historical fluidity of
the conceptual constructions of science is what we should expect from com-
petitive intellectual networks. The stability and obdurate reality of “electric-
ity,” “bacterial infection,” and other now familiar entities are guaranteed by
their embeddedness in genealogies of material practice which have spread
among non-intellectuals. The superior reality accorded to the conceptions of
rapid-discovery science comes from the way in which the dual, mutually
parasitical networks of that community, the equipment genealogies and the
human intellectuals, have spawned a third branch, equipment genealogies,
which have found a home apart from the incessantly frontier-seeking idea
contest of the intellectuals. It matters not how the esoteric intellectual frontier
at the moment interprets “electricity”; the unexamined word serves as a marker
for an obdurate reality of everyday life.
The social construction of scientific entities leads to at least quasi-realism.
Although not all scientific entities, as intellectual constructs, have the same
claim to be regarded as real, some of them are so closely entwined with
human-sized banal reality that the borderline is difficult to draw. Although
their epistemological justification is more complex than the irrefutable realities
of immediate social experience, they are at least close kin.
How is it possible that mathematics is so often found applicable to the
natural, non-human, non-symbolic world? Why has it become so useful in
science? It is not so mysterious once we see the force of the point that
mathematics arises in social networks which are part of the natural world. The
distinctiveness of the network of mathematical practitioners is that they focus
their attention on the pure, contentless forms of human communicative opera-
tions: on the gestures of marking items as equivalent and of ordering them in
series, and on the higher-order operations which reflexively investigate the
combinations of such operations. The primal operations—counting, measur-
ing—begin as gestures toward the ordinary human-sized bodily objects and
activities of time-space reality. Such activities have the same quality of reality
as anything else on the level of this ordinary banal world. The abstract
mathematics which arises reflexively on these operations remains part of the
natural world; in fact it is an empirical investigation of an aspect of that natural
world, the part which consists in the communicative activities of mathemati-
cians as they create new forms of operating on their prior operations. Mathe-
matics arises in medias res, and it maintains a smooth continuity from one
level of its own abstraction to another. There is no sharp boundary between
the objects of mathematics and the world of natural science. The scientific
applicability of mathematical procedures should not be surprising.
High consensus over the objects of science arises only in rapid-discovery
networks; and these in turn are composed of mutually parasitical relationships
Epilogue: Sociological Realism^ •^873