Words have social as well as lexical meanings. This paper traces a semantic shift of the word `objective', and the issues arising from it, in the seventeenth century. A word attaching to the concept of `truth' at the beginning of the century came increasingly to give way to considerations of `disinterestedness'; the restructuring of European intellectual life associated with the Scientific Revolution thus involved the constitution of knowledge-claims from criteria of trustworthiness, rather than from purported criteria of `objective' truth. The change appears to have followed the loss of general credibility of the scholastic educational structure, which brought about the creation of new forms for making knowledge. The career of the word `objective' took a turn away from `truth', a distancing that modern usages actively preserve.
The boundaries between the history of science and science and technology studies (STS) can be misleadingly drawn, to the detriment of both fields. This essay stresses their commonalities and potential for valuable synergy. The evolution of the two fields has been characterized by lively interchange and boundary crossing, with leading scholars functioning easily on both sides of the past/present divide. Disciplines, it is argued, are best regarded as training grounds for asking particular kinds of questions, using particular clusters of methods. Viewed in this way, history of science and STS are notable for their shared approaches to disciplining. The essay concludes with a concrete example--regulatory science--showing how a topic such as this can be productively studied with methods that contradict any alleged disciplinary divide between historical and contemporary studies of science.
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