The social construction of science does not undermine scientific truths. In-
tellectual networks are part of the time-space physical world; to say that social
networks produce science is only to say that the natural world gives rise to
knowledge about the natural world. The social network of mathematicians
investigates the pure properties of human communication; human communi-
cation is part of the natural world; again a part of reality investigates and
discovers something about itself. Sociology and the other social and humanistic
research disciplines, for all the layers of reflexivity that went into constructing
their objects, nevertheless study something real precisely because their objects
are social.
Social reflexivity outrages our assumptions only when we conceptualize
Truth as existing apart from people, or as the relation between a disembodied,
featureless observing Mind and a sharply separate Reality. We have made
knowledge the equivalent of God in a transcendent religion. Durkheim puts
this into perspective: the highest sacred object, symbolized as God, is society.
For intellectuals, the society which matters above all, which gives them their
creative energy and is the fount and arena of their ideas, is their own social
network. The concept of transcendent Truth is an expression of the felt auton-
omy of the inner activities of the intellectual network.^12
The intrusion of sociological reflexivity is taken as an affront to a sacred
object of truth. This affront is felt most sharply by members of particular
intellectual communities whose work is itself not very reflexive. As the disci-
plines have differentiated, philosophy has taken as its terrain the discovery of
deep troubles, which drive them along a sequence of increasing abstraction
and reflexivity; the natural sciences have taken as their terrain the investigation
of empirical topics with conceptions on moderate levels of abstraction. Since
their level of abstraction stays fairly constant, scientists are unconcerned with
problems of reflexivity, especially the deep troubles of high degrees of self-con-
sciousness which have been reached in philosophy since 1900. Sociologists of
knowledge have been hybrids from the philosophical networks, and thus have
shared their reflexivity, since the time of Scheler, Lukács, and Mannheim in the
1920s, through the Wittgensteinian and ethnomethodological influence on
sociology of science in the 1970s and 1980s.^13 This reflexivity clashes with the
relatively more concrete conceptions of scientists. Many scientists, especially
as they display their findings to lay audiences (including politicians and indus-
tries who fund their research), speak about their theoretical objects as if they
were natural objects on the same level as the banal realities of everyday life.
Sophisticated and pragmatically adept within their own research communities,
scientists often adopt the stance of naive realism, amounting to reifying com-
plexly mediated abstractions, when they communicate with outsiders.
Some heat of the argument comes from embarrassment, above all in the878 •^ Meta-reflections