Knowledge, it is rightly said, does not stand outside of practical activity: it is made and sustained through situated practical activity.
Yet, despite the chorus of modern voices commending detailed study of the particularities by which knowledge is made, protected, and transmitted, advocacy largely remains at a programmatic and abstract level.
A view about knowledge and practical activity which seems to demand the historian's finest microscope is largely fobbed off with traditional philosopher's toy-examples and socail theorist's impenetrably airy generalities. This is both odd and deeply unsatisfactory.
Quotation from: A Social History of Truth: Civility & Science in Seventeenth-century England. by Steven Shapin, 1994, University of Chicago Press.
