Unsettling the Modern Knowledge Settlement
This chapter outlines the core presuppositions that underlie and define the social sciences: that knowledge is a relation between a subject who represents and explains an object or process; that nature and the social/cultural are two different domains, authorizing the distinction between the natural and the social sciences; and that knowledge is necessarily secular. These presuppositions, novel when first advanced in early modern Europe, later hardened into unquestioned axioms and came to be seen not as the presuppositions of a particular conception and practice of knowledge, but as the premises of knowledge tout court. This chapter proceeds to show that these presumptions have been challenged and are coming undone, and does so by focusing on recent disciplinary debates in science studies, social history, and social and cultural anthropology. It concludes that taken together, these challenges indicate that modern Western knowledge, the superiority and universality of which was once taken for granted, now has to be defended.