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Traditional social studies of science suffer from an almost complete lack of scholarship considering Friedrich Nietzsche's analysis of science, truth, and knowledge. This essay considers the characteristics of, and the consequences of deploying a Nietzschean framework for the social studies of science. Nietzsche's understanding of the character of truth and knowledge provides a provocative approach to explorations of the character and the consequences of social epistemology, the limitations of realism and relativism, and the place of norms, interests, and critique within scholarship more broadly. Nietzsche gestures towards the possibility of grounding knowledge in human life. Approaches to knowledge and truth rest on historically particular values, desires, and drives - ways of being in the world. Knowledge is relative to partial perspectives and partial perspectives 'ground' truth. Nietzsche demonstrates the partial and contingent character of claims to truth not in order to render questions of epistemology relative but to render epistemology as such redundant. The ground itself is relational and in this crucial sense, what is traditionally understood as epistemology is social relations 'all the way down.' In the sense that knowledge is perspectival, knowledge is relative. The question remains: relative to what? Nietzsche answers: relative to those who know. Relative to us. If taken seriously, grounding knowledge in life transforms questions of method and measurement into questions of aesthetics and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By intertwining Marx's analysis of the historical transformation of social relations, Nietzsche's questions concerning the value and meaning of truth, and Freud's understanding of libidinal investment, this paper gestures towards the fundamentally undetermined character of consciousness. The account of consciousness I construct locates ideology within a dynamic nexus of power and desire in order to give pause to social science accounts aiming to identify or overcome ideology in any straightforward manner. Consciousness is entangled with social relations and social relations are expressions of historical needs and desires. To adequately understand the work that ideology performs requires recognition of the constellation of particular needs and desires expressed by particular social actors during particular historical moments. Apparent inversions or distortions of experience are the expressions and effects of particular sets of social relations. To contest ideologies or apparently illegitimate discourses and practices is to point towards other ways of being-in-the-world whose values in turn will remain unstable and open to negotiation. The meaning and value of human thought and action potentially exceeds constitutive material relations. Recognition of this potential excess challenges traditional explanations of ideology and suggests an epistemically fluid - and so politically risky - understanding of beliefs, values and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]