Representing Science Representing Nature

This paper examines the recursive and highly productive dialectic between the constitutive effects of science as a social praxis and as the image of a very unique kind of social praxis. I argue that dominant images of modern science engender a dangerous logic of reification though their appropriation of narratives of objectivity that claim a methodological path to unmediated or "natural" knowledge. Representations of science that fail to recognise their specificity as representations by abstracting human agency from the processes of representing science and scientifically representing nature, reify unexamined ideological presumptions (about human and nonhuman nature, and about science itself) within the kinds of scientific representations of nature that these representations of science engender.