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Short abstract:

I use the different responses of Nietzsche and Weber to the nihilistic condition to work, by analogy, to how STS frames the options students have for responding to the contestation over fact and value we see in techno-scientific controversies.

Long abstract:

What is STS? If pushed for a soundbite, our replies typically include methodological sophistication and pointers to political relevancy: ‘STS demonstrates the contingency of knowledge creation and the socio-historical grounding of authority relations’. Students often ask – after being introduced to the contingent knowledge infrastructures underlying what has come to be called fact or implicated in controversy over what we should call fact - “how can I decide in the face of controversy”? “Remain the detached analyst” is rarely satisfactory. One annoying way that students often frame their query is whether STS is philosophy or sociology. I recently decided to move past dissing philosophy and take their question seriously. This led me to nihilism. The philosopher Nietzsche and the sociologist Weber each thought the nihilistic condition – there are no foundations other than those we invent; meaning and value are constructed – demanded a response. Each agreed science is instrumentally valuable but engenders disenchantment, including irresolvable struggle over values, but charted different paths in response. Are we saying to our STS students to follow Nietzsche, to create values and revel in the blurring of authority, only we democratize the philosopher in a way Nietzsche would oppose while retaining his image of scientists as reducers of value? Or are we saying to our STS students to follow Weber, using (idealized) methodological distinctions to analyse competing value-spheres (politics/science, actor/analyst), only our modest scholar-activism breaks Weber’s academia/politics boundary while keeping his mobilizing of science to clarify means-ends and thus inform normativity?