Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This book has provided a critique of ideology which is at the same time a form of self-clarification, positioning, and redirection. It has programmatically gone beyond criticism of the scientific ideology of the others or of the past. This is largely a Gramscian lesson: to look at the interrelated problems of science, history, and society. In the eleventh Prison Notebooks he asserted that the Socratic maxim “know yourself” should be rephrased in historicist terms as a reflection on the roots of one’s own conceptions, beginning with the most basic elements of commonsense up to the most elaborated philosophical conceptions. The history of science studies should be similarly addressed as a form of historical self-criticism, an instrument to understand the present and look at the future. As such, historiography, including the history of science, is intrinsically political. It deconstructs and redirects science by denouncing hegemonic ideologies and occupying the cultural field of science studies with an alternative perspective, one which does not obliterate the contested dimension of its discursive practices.