2012/01/30 by Steven Shapin · 3 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · #Culinary Culture and Tourism #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Social and Cultural Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1177/0306312711435375
openalex publication_date 2012/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In historical and ethnographic studies of the making of scientific knowledge, there has been a long-standing fascination with deflating certain stories about objectivity. Among the resources used to achieve that deflation have been the notions of subjectivity, which has been treated more as a trouble for objectivity than as a knowledge-making mode open to systematic study. I describe notions of subjectivity implicated in that inattention; I trace potentially constructive links between contemporary science studies and resources in 18th-century philosophical aesthetics; I draw notice to available engagements with the mode of subjectivity known as taste, and, especially, gustation and olfaction; and I suggest ways in which we might study the achievement of intersubjectivity in these domains.