In some media and social networks is often the crossfire between defenders of science and people that the self-described skeptics qualify as irrational or "magufos". On one side, the warriors of science claim to defend the rationality, the truth and a clear separation between facts and values, where the former would be unquestionable and the latter, on the other hand, a matter of debate. On the other side would be supposedly irresponsible or uninformed opinions, typical of postmodern charlatans and intellectuals.

In the heat of the fight positions are missed distanced from a confrontation that has something of a family fight. And is that most of the contenders, on both sides, seem to assume things like the following:

1. there is science, in the singular.
2. there is the scientific method, also in the singular.
3. the exact and natural sciences are the most scientific.
4. The natural world and the social world are different.
5. Science and politics should not be mixed.

Often this type of assumptions are shared by scientists and "magufos", although they obviously differ in regard to the theories they consider acceptable. Some criticize the "official science" and others consider it the only possible one. However, they all embrace a similar conception of what scientific knowledge is.

It is not about defending a virtuous middle term by standing in the middle of the battlefield to convince both of them to sign an armistice. It is about reflecting on something that draws attention when fighting is contemplated at a distance, namely: the naivety with which a conception of science is taken for granted that has been problematizing for more than forty years in theory works. the science and sociology of science or in the field of science, technology and society studies (authors representative of that critical perspective are, for example, Paul Feyerabend, Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Trevor Pinch, Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, Bruno Latour, John Law or Annemarie Mol). It is a conception of science that feeds above all the ardor of the scientist, that is, of those who treat science as once was the religion: as a set of statements that offer us the security of something that is beyond our human activity.

Scientists believe in a real world or objective that can be discovered through a method that all sciences supposedly use in their disinterested search for truth. This search is usually presented in terms of a meritorious work carried out by specialists who, as such, are authorized to inform us of what the world really is like. In addition, it is often assumed that knowing what the world really is has a moral and political corollary: we have to adjust our behavior and our social organization to the information provided by the specialists. It is also common belief in the progress of humanity through technology understood as the application of scientific discoveries to the improvement of our lives. Not long ago Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias spoke on this same website of "defending rationality as a fundamental ingredient of political action, so that positions based on irrational assumptions are not supported," adding that "we must try to attract the people to the terrain of rationality and science, "because science" is a great tool to guarantee our survival as a species and the welfare of humanity. "

That conception is, at least, debatable. Not only there are different philosophies of science with their respective versions of what is the "scientific method", but some of them, as well as numerous works of history and sociology of science, directly question that there is a universal method that guarantees the objective knowledge construction. The methods of each discipline are inseparable from their contents, and have more of craftsmanship and bricolage than of application of logical rules that go step by step confirming or denying hypotheses. There is no truth discovery tool applicable to any domain of reality and capable of protecting us from the contamination of the subjective. The very contemporary proliferation of disciplines, subdisciplines, theories and specialties, including those of the social sciences, defeats the nineteenth-century pretension of a unified knowledge thanks to the methodical exercise of reason and capable of encompassing the totality of the real by providing criteria for organizing our life according to empirical evidence. Although some procedures are shared by several disciplines, each of them has its working methods (dyeing, filtering, computer simulations, excavations, etc.) and produces its own realities (brain areas, cells, forces, etc.).

On the other hand, to make certain facts visible through the mobilization of certain instruments, concepts and alliances, necessarily requires the invisibilization of other possible facts, since it presupposes choosing what is investigated and how. Science does not represent a reality outside of it; it simply produces some facts and not others. A scientific object such as that which corresponds to the modern concept of gene, for example, exists only because there is a theory of inheritance based on DNA, a network of concepts such as protein, amino acid, cell or mutation, and complex sociotechnical mediations that they include apparatus, procedures, negotiations and institutionalized forms of organization and dissemination of work in biology.

Nor can the distinction between science, technology and society be taken for granted. It is simplistic the scheme according to which there is a basic or pure research from which derive applications that result in the benefit of society. Any investigation implies socio-politically situated theoretical and methodological choices, apart from that it requires instruments, infrastructures and means of diffusion. Scientific research is part of a flow that is also part, on an equal footing, technological demands, financing systems based on political or business decisions, exploitation of material resources, human and animal, marketing, power relations, collaboration and competition between groups, etc. This complexity also calls into question the distinction between reasons and interests or facts and values. Outside of a concrete sociotecnoscientific circuit, nothing is in itself a "fact" and nothing is in itself "rational". The social and technical factors are consubstantial to the sciences. If they were eliminated we would not be left with a purer science: we would be left without science.

TECNODEDSEC

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