ABSTRACT
Since Fleck’s pioneering analysis (1935) of scientific documents disclosed how far they are from unvarnished descriptions of uncontested facts, the way has been open for a radical rethinking of the nature of scientific discourse, both written and spoken. If it isn’t a catalogue of truths, what is it? Popper’s suggestion, that it is a stream of conjectures, is still framed within the old way of thinking. Factuality, both as a discipline (falsification) and as an ideal terminus (verisimilitude), still plays an essential role in his analysis. But stepping outside the discourse and its taken-forgranted rhetoric of factuality we come to another perspective altogether. (I shall use the term ‘factuality’ to refer to the idea of a known truth and ‘facticity’ to refer to whatever is presented as if it were a known truth.) We might ask what speech-acts scientific utterances and inscriptions typically are used to perform. Functionally the disinterested voice and the assertoric style seem to be aimed to get the interlocutor to see things from the point of view of the writer or speaker. Scientific discourse is marked by a peculiar rhetoric. The ostensible claim of scientific utterances is for agreement, since they are presented as knowledge. But suppose we did insert the ghostly performative operator, ‘I (we) know…’ before each such assertion: just what speech-act does it introduce? My proposal, upon which the analysis in this chapter is based, is that this operator should be read roughly as ‘Trust me (us)…’, or ‘You can take my word for it …’. But why should such a speechact be effective in generating trust? I suggest that it is because the speaker or writer is manifestly a member of an esoteric order, a
‘community of saints’ from membership in which the force of the claim descends.
