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In the United States, as in other industrialized nations, regulatory decisions to protect the environment and public health depend heavily on scientific information. Yet the process of decision-making places unusual strains on science. Knowledge claims are deconstructed during the rule-making process, exposing areas of weakness or uncertainty and threatening the cognitive authority of science. At the same time, the legitimacy of the final regulatory decision depends upon the regulator's ability to reconstruct a plausible scientific rationale for the proposed action. The processes of deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge claims give rise to competition among scientists, public officials and political interest groups, all of whom have a stake in determining how policy-relevant science should be interpreted and by whom. All of these actors use boundary-defining language in order to distinguish between science and policy, and to allocate the right to interpret science in ways that further their own interests. This paper explores the contours of such boundary disputes in the context of controversies over carcinogen regulation. It focuses on the contested definitions and strategic implications of three groups of concepts: trans-science or science policy, risk assessment and risk management, and peer review.

This article argues that climate change produces discordances in established ways of understanding the human place in nature, and so offers unique challenges and opportunities for the interpretive social sciences. Scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped establish climate change as a global phenomenon, but in the process they detached knowledge from meaning. Climate facts arise from impersonal observation whereas meanings emerge from embedded experience. Climate science thus cuts against the grain of common sense and undermines existing social institutions and ethical commitments at four levels: communal, political, spatial and temporal. The article explores the tensions that arise when the impersonal, apolitical and universal imaginary of climate change projected by science comes into conflict with the subjective, situated and normative imaginations of human actors engaging with nature. It points to current environmental debates in which a reintegration of scientific representations of the climate with social responses to those representations is taking place. It suggests how the interpretive social sciences can foster a more complex understanding of humanity’s climate predicament. An important aim of this analysis is to offer a framework in which to think about the human and the social in a climate that seems to render obsolete important prior categories of solidarity and experience.

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