Abstract
Steve Woolgar has urged the sociology of scientific knowledge to `interrogate representation', and he has advocated an exploration of reflexivity issues as a means toward this end. However, ten years of scholarship addressing the meaning and purpose of a subdiscipline dedicated to displaying the social constructedness of all texts (including, at least by implication, its own) have yielded little. I propose an approach to the reflexivity dilemma, and to the larger question of `representation', which differs significantly from those previously attempted. This alternative requires the genuinely radical step of considering a very different philosophy of language than the one(s) currently shared by SSK researchers and the scientists whose accounts constitute SSK's `data'. Philosophies of language which might serve as instructive examples presently exist in the thought of some indigenous peoples, particularly American Indians. I explore one such philosophy as it is articulated by a Navajo student of traditional learning. I then show how such a philosophy of language reconfigures the reflexivity problem, and also offers SSK some ideas about how it might begin to do what it cannot presently do: formulate a genuinely radical interrogation of representation.
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