Critique Without Foundation: Nietzsche and the Social Studies of Science.

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]